In every fanfiction for the next six months, a Fox executive is just below frame
There is an interesting observation that can be made about "nerd" culture when it comes to comic-book movies. With a culture that has already torn apart, reassembled and torn apart again each film before it is even released, the idea of "popular opinion", that is, the opinion that is shared by most of the community, has distorted into "opinions that are popular to have", that is, the opinion which you feel you ought to have in order to fit into the culture. What's curious is that this is not a new phenomenon, natural product of the bar set by The Avengers and its kin, but has existed since the birth of the genre. Remember Daredevil? Until very recently, you would be shunned for aknowledging it without a sneering irony. Similarly, Joel Schumacher is still a dirty word amongst much of the community. And lest you think I'm getting on a high horse, I'm guilty of it myself: a friend once confided in me that he had actually enjoyed The Green Lantern, to which I immediately admonished, "But that movie was terrible!...wasn't it?", at which point I had to admit that I hadn't actually sat through the whole thing myself.
I have done since, by the way...and well...hate to say I told you so...
The reason I mention any of this is because Josh Trank's Fantastic Four is not great. It's not even good. But it is extremely popular to dislike. Indeed, if you have seen anything about it online before seeing it in the cinema (or merely glanced at it's dismal Rotten Tomatoes rating, currently 8%), even the most open-minded of individuals would have trouble setting their expectations any higher than say, Birdemic or, well, the last Fantastic Four movie. I was subject to the same bias, and was therefore confused when, forty-five minutes in to the film, I was finding it pretty enjoyable. Had I missed something?
The plot of the film hardly needs reiterating, as anyone who cares enough to read a review probably already knows it: Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is one of the greatest young minds of the era and has cracked interdimensional travel before an age that most of us learned what order the seasons come in. Later, in high school, he is offered a full scholarship to a prestigious institute to complete his work on a bigger scale. There he joins Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B Jordan; Kate Mara) to build a teleporter, and eventually brings childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), along for the ride. Finishing up the team is a fifth member, (whaaaat?) the totally-not-going-to-be-the-bad-guy-later Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel). A drunken dare has most of the team enter another dimension where they are all irradiated with strange cosmic power and Von Doom is lost, presumably dead. Upon return, they find that they have all developed strange powers: respectively, extreme flexibility, flight and fire powers, invisibility and forcefields and finally, the inability to ever ride in a lift again. Cut to a year later, when the heroes have more or less gotten used to their new powers, but are being manipulated by the government to use them for warfare. They decide that they need to re-enter the other universe to try and cure themselves, but instead they find a horribly transformed Von Doom, who wants to destroy the world that left him behind. They face off with him. Credits.
Now, you may already be noticing some of the problems that the film suffers from. In fact, I could hardly blame you for asking me whether or not I fell asleep during the second act, because it certainly seems like there was one missing. The first act (also the first hour) plays out like a slow release sci-fi in line with The Sphere or even a massively dumbed down Primer. If it hadn't opened with the Marvel logo, you might think you've walked into the wrong film - a good film. Make no mistake, this portion of the movie is well made, atmospheric, the acting is pretty good (Jamie Bell is criminally used in this film, given almost nothing to do, but doing what he can with what he is given), the science is intriguing. Then they get their powers and everything falls apart.
You see, there is a reason that the first in a series of superhero films always follows the same pattern: you're a normal person; you gain powers; you discover how it changes you as a person; then you learn...well, come on, if you don't know by now...
He's basically Marvel Buddha now (and as I thought of that joke, I googled it and yes, there is in fact a version of Buddha in the Marvel universe...)
Fantastic Four completely skips the central aspect of the hero's journey. After gaining their powers, we don't even get to see a training montage, we literally just screenwipe to one year later when everyone has kind of gotten used to their new abilities. Not to mention it's particularly off the mark to miss this with the Fantastic Four, whose most interesting attribute is the fact that they have no secret identities - their powers inconvenience them in their daily lives and they have to alter themselves as people accordingly after gaining them. The stupidity of missing this in a superhero movie is so staggering that I feel like I need to make the point again,
Superpower movies are only interesting because the powers reflect changes in our own lives. If you don't show a transformation process, then the audience has nothing to connect to!
Agh...OK breathe...
In fairness to director Trank, there are a lot of rumours circling about trouble behind the scenes with this movie, but the most corroborated one states that Fox Studios meddled furiously with the production of this film. This is obvious from the blatant attempts to copycat more successful franchises, the startling lack of action setpieces (of which there is one, Fox apparently demanded that three be removed from the script, though did not object to one of the annexed scenes being used in promotional material for the film) and shamefully obvious reshoots.
Note to editors: if your actress looks like a different person halfway through the film, you've done your job wrong
But however much you try to redirect blame from Trank or the actors (and in interviews since they have all done their very best to do exactly that), it doesn't change the fact that Fantastic Four is a badly scripted, badly shot, badly lit, badly edited, not brilliantly acted, and pretty damn boring film for the latter half of its runtime. It's not offensive in its ineptitude, and I think many of the derisive comments hurled at this film are as a result of it being a "popular to hate" film, but you certainly won't find many people saying that they loved it either.
In the end, it will come as a surprise to no-one that Fox, like Sony, really ought to be leaving these films for Disney to take care of. Though, now that I think of it, they did answer one question that fans have been aching to know forever: Does The Thing have a thing?
Answer: sorry, Thing's thing...
That's a wrap...
PS. If you've stuck with me this far, I'd like you to hold on a little longer because there was one thing that I wanted to comment on about Fantastic Four that did get me pretty upset. It's nothing to do with the quality of the film per se, and more to do with a general state of things in Hollywood, so I thought I'd leave it out of the main body of the review. However, it's worth mentioning I think: in case you didn't notice, Susan Storm and Johnny Storm (brother and sister for those of you who don't know - Hi Mum!) are not of the same skin colour. In the comics, both are white, as is their father, but in this film Susan is the only white member of the family. It made me very angry, then, that whoever wrote the script (or perhaps, whoever altered it after an initial draft), felt the need to include a scene where Reed asks Susan whether she was adopted, to which she replies that she was. Leaving aside the fact that a black father could biologically birth a white daughter, Susan Storm's status as an adopted child is never referenced nor made relevant in any way elsewhere in the film. The scene serves no purpose other than to explicitly make clear how these two people can be siblings to an audience that (supposedly, I guess?) cannot possibly fathom this idea. We as movie goers can buy Luke and Leia Skywalker as family, even though they were damn near in each other's pants, but if you want Kate Mara to call Micheal B. Jordan "my brother" in the script, you apparently require a scene where another character all but asks "Do you mean 'brother"? Or 'brother'? Because you can see that he's black, right?"
The sooner we grow out of this kind of thing, the better we will be as people.
No comments:
Post a Comment