Not So Fantastic 4…

Directed by
Josh Trank

Writers
Jeremy Slater (screenplay)
Simon Kinberg (screenplay)
Josh Trank (screenplay)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby  (Marvel comics)

I went into this movie knowing full well that it was primarily lambasted by critics and fans. I don’t know how many times I heard the word “joyless” used to describe it, but I didn’t hate the previous version or its sequel, despite many naysayers’ opinions.

But, this gritty “reboot” of the “First Family” of modern Marvel comics is best described exactly how it has been… Joyless.

It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s as dark and as gloomy as the alternate universe they’re trying to reach with the MacGuffin device that Reed Richards and Ben Grimm create in Reed’s garage…

Short, spoiler-free version of the review: If you love the FF, skip this movie. Go watch any other version of this team – even the disposable Corman version is more enjoyable by its badness.

If that’s all you need to know, you can bow out here.  What follows are specific issues, good and bad, related to the film, and will contain some spoilers.

For those familiar with the Fantastic Four’s origin, I don’t need to reiterate much – Genius Reed Richards; his best pal, Ben Grimm; Reed’s eventual wife, Sue; and her hot-head brother, Johnny take off in Reed’s experimental rocket, get bombarded by “cosmic rays,” crash land on Earth and discover that they’ve been drastically altered. Reed is now the super stretchy, Mr. Fantastic. Johnny has become a literal hot-head, and bursts into flame as the Human Torch. Ben has transformed into a giant, orange, humanoid rock pile with the dehumanizing name, The Thing. And, Sue… well she can turn invisible, and gets to be Invisible Girl (later promoted to Invisible Woman). Sue also eventually gets to create invisible force bubbles, and do other things that are less passive than her original ability. They set about fighting crime from their headquarters in New York, The Baxter Building. And their arch-nemesis, Victor Von Doom arises frequently to cause them grief. That’s the basic set-up. Obviously the story evolved over decades of comics, and I suspect Josh Trank’s version was meant to evolve it further (and keep the FF from reverting back to Disney-Marvel).

In some ways, Trank’s film does do interesting things. ALL of the four display actual skill or talent to varying degrees. Reed (Miles Teller), now a child prodigy, designs a matter transporter as a kid, and with the mechanical help of Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) builds that device with varying degrees of success until they’re discovered by Dr. Franklin Storm (an underutilized Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter, Sue (Kate Mara), at a high school science fair and recruited into a sort of Xavier school for smart kids that also used to include reclusive Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) who gets pulled back in for one last project.  Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) is still a hot-head, but besides just racing cars recklessly, he builds them from scratch. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, he, like his father, is black…

Unlike some fans, I didn’t have a problem with Franklin and Johnny Storm not being white, or that Sue remained white. It’s the 21st century, and families look a lot different than they did in 1961 when the comic debuted. I didn’t even need an explanation for it. We never see the Storm kids’ mother(s) so any of a number of possibilities existed, and literally none of them mattered. Johnny and Sue were siblings and Franklin was their father. End of story. Instead, we get a half-assed explainer line or two about Franklin adopting Sue from Kosovo that leaves more questions than it answers, especially in an America (in my experience at least) where the likelihood of a white child being adopted by a non-white family is, and I suspect I’m being generous, slim. Now, as a viewer, I’m distracted by trying to figure out what Franklin was doing in Kosovo, how he acquired Sue, etc. instead of paying attention to the story…

And the story… Well, there’s no rocket, nor cosmic rays. Instead, the project involves opening a doorway to a different dimension that looks like either a primordial Earth, or an empty Hell. Tim Blake Nelson, also underutilized, serves as the secondary antagonist, Dr. Allen, (who apparently is Harvey Elder/Mole Man, according to some sources, though there’s literally no sign of it in the movie). His primary function seems to be to keep driving the project forward, and commandeering it for use in exploiting the new world as soon as the device is successful.

Once they learn the project will be taken away from them, Reed, Victor, and Johnny, in a drunken fit of bravado, drag Ben along into the alternate dimension in order to be the first to cross over. It all goes wrong, Victor is left for dead, the remaining three return in an explosive lab accident that alters them and Sue, who happened to be in the control room at the time. Now they have super powers, are being studied for weaponization by the government and the movie jumps ahead a year… Leaving us less than forty minutes of the run time remaining…

…to have some petty squabbles and soul-searching, followed by the horrific return (after a year in Hell) of Victor Von Doom as some sort of monster that can apparently kill with a thought, and a “He’s going to destroy the world” sequence that looks like the Black Sun finale of the Wolfenstein game wherein they realize they can only defeat Doom as a team, etc. etc.

I genuinely liked the cast, they really seem to have done what they could with the material, and Trank gets points with me for trying to make both Susan Storm and her superpowers more nuanced and fully realized. But in the end, this “gritty” reboot is like getting actual grit somewhere – unpleasant, irritating, and unenjoyable…

Rating

Not very Fantastic 4 out of 10

Trailer