So, which were the film news?
Oh, yeah… Fantastic Four bombed this weekend. And that was sad. It was sad as hell.
It’s not sad because it bombed, it’s sad because (a) we saw it coming for months; and (b) because it did not bomb because people didn’t feel compelled to watching it due to bad marketing. It bombed because it was an awful movie. It bombed because the people involved in making it did not believe in it, and it is actually quite hard to make something when you don’t really think much of it.
It’s a shame, because your work is only as good as the effort you give it. Somewhere along the line, these people, whether it was Josh Trank, the studio, or both - lost faith in what this movie could be. Personally, I watched and kept on wondering what a great film it could have been. We have comic book movies on theatres every other week these days, and most of them have been following a very steady formula that, while good, does not leave much room for innovation most of the time (I say most of the time, because who could forget films like Guardians of the Galaxy?). How awesome would it have been if we’d gotten a perfect monster-like superhero film?
My favorite part of this flawed film was watching the Fantastic Four wake up on that dark government facility and watching their bodies mutate. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. I think Josh Trank really had something to say when he made this, but his scope was all wrong.
Christopher Nolan has said, on multiple occasions, that he aimed for specific focus on each of his Batman films. Whether it’d be a Lawrence of Arabia-like soul searching film like Batman Begins or the crime thriller such as Heat that was The Dark Knight, he always gave a specific tone to the films. And, as we all know, it worked. Those were perfect films.
In that sense, I get what Trank was trying to do with this. So, what is the difference between this film and Nolan’s? The latter got what he was doing, which was a superhero movie first and a whatever genre film next. This is a superhero horror story, sure, but, a superhero movie all the same. This is not meant to be boring, it is meant to be, well, super… or something.
This would all bring our reason behind superhero movies to question, but that is really not what I am trying to do here. What I am trying to say is that I’m sad. I’m sad because I wanted this film to be good, I wanted to like it. I hadn’t realized how much the Fantastic Four meant to me until this weekend. I remember the 90’s cartoon (Don't need no more!), and I remember loving it. This is the third time I have left the movie theater sad and frustrated after watching an awful Fantastic Four movie.
Speaking of which, remember 2005? Remember that, in that time, we hardly got any good superhero movies? For every Spiderman, we got a Daredevil. The last glimpse we’d gotten of Superman on film was The Quest for Peace. The fucking Quest for Peace (side note, we were still doomed to sit through that awful and fantastically boring Superman Returns a year later). Don’t think I forgot about the Batman reboot that came out in that same year, but, as I said, we hardly got any good superhero movies.
Out of a need to watch these awesome superheroes, I went to Netflix and watched the 2005 atrocity that Fantastic Four is. I don’t think I’d ever watched it since leaving the theater back then. Ioan Gruffudd (or whatever that dude’s name is) is still awful ten years later. Jessica Alba is still boring as hell as Sue Storm (you just don’t buy it). The Thing’s makeup is still fake as hell. But there is a silver lining to all of this. See, as much as I hate this movie, I still have to give it some credit. The chemistry between these people, especially between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm, is next to perfect. They feel like a family (Marvel’s first!), and they seem like people you’d want to hang out with (except Gruffudd, cause his name sucks and, well, because, fuck Gruffudd).
For, in the 2005 Fantastic Four, for each step forward, it’s two steps back. The story really doesn’t work. The product placement is off the charts. I’ve never seen anything more fake than the stretching effects for Mr. Fantastic. This film is also sad, because it had potential, it really did. So, in a way, it is very similar to this new film. For all my hate towards it, there were some things I liked from this 2015 Fantastic Four (drafting this shit would’ve been a lot easier if the films, at least, had different titles). Miles Teller is awesome as Mr. Fantastic. That scene with the newly discovered powers is pretty good. The fact that young Reed Richards uses a Nintendo 64 controller to build a teleportation device is, well, awesome.
But as the film went on, I kind of, sort of, felt depressed. I felt depressed because watching this film was like waiting for something good when you know nothing’s going to happen. As mentioned, if the filmmakers did not believe in it, why would we?
Am I tired of waiting for my perfect Fantastic Four movie? Fuck, no. I will be waiting for an awesome Fantastic Four movie all my life if I have to. I know it’s out there, in the mind of some awesomely talented filmmaker. And I still can’t wait to see it.
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