FANTASTIC FOUR: Journey to Turdworld

Director: Josh Trank

Writers: Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg, Josh Trank
Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

Nobody wants to hang around in Turdworld. A jaunt to Turdworld might be acceptable. Even a journey through it. But when your entire film is a journey, and the sole destination is Turdworld, the audience has a right to feel both robbed and insulted.

Turdworld is both a metaphor and my personal name for the other-dimensional planet which is the setting for the significant setpieces of Fantastic Four. Ever since his boy genius youth, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been pursuing experiments involving the transmission of matter to and from somewhere else. He's had the help of his blue collar buddy Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), but it isn't until an older scientist (Reg E. Cathey) and his daughter (Kate Mara) stumble upon Richards' work that he receives the funding and support he needs to fully bring his dream to reality. The daughter, Sue Storm, helps out, as do her slacker brother, Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and the defunct former-boy-genius-attached-to-the-project, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Some of them use the machine to transmit themselves to Turdworld, and as a result they are horribly mutated. Then they try to fix their mutation? I don't know, the movie functionally stops happening at that point.

Recent years have seen the germination of a new trend in big budget blockbuster filmmaking. Instead of seeking out timeworn and proven directors to spearhead these massive productions, or journeyman directors who make a living of tackling any sort of material thrown at them, film studios have been snapping up hot young indie directors to shoot summer extravaganzas. An optimist might say we are in an age where even niche success can spread like wildfire and be noted by the higher-ups. A cynic would say that these young indie directors are being snatched by the studios for no other reason than to be easier to boss around. The studios want someone inexperienced enough to take their notes and make the sort of movie they think will be a hit, rather than one with any sort of artistic vision or auteristic cohesion. Here's a factfinding comment that illustrates this trend, courtesy of a commenter named Greg R in the Birth.Movies.Death community:

I'm not sure how to adjust the budgets for inflation but here are some numbers:

Steven Spielberg:

The Sugarland Express (1974) - $3 mill
Jaws (1975) - $9 million budget
Close Encounters (1977) - $18 mill
Raider (1981) - $18 mill
E.T. (1982) - $10.5 mill
Hook (1991) - $70 mill (first of his films to break $50 million budget)
Jurassic Park (1993) - $63 mill
A.I. (2001) - $100 mill (first of his films to break $100 million budget)

Marc Webb 

(500) Days of Summer (2009) - $7.5 mill
Amazing Spider-Man (2012) - $230 mill
Amazing Spider-Man (2014) - $255 mill
*this is the end of Webb's filmography list, but he has a lot of music video credits* 

Martin Scorsese 

Who's that Knocking At My Door? (1967) - $75 thousand
Taxi Driver (1976) - $ 1.3 mill
Raging Bull (1980) - $ 18 mill
The Color of Money (1986) - $13.8 mill
Goodfellas (1990) - $25 mill
Casino (1995) - $52 mill (first of his movies to break $50 million budget)
Gangs of New York (2002) - $97 mill
Aviator (2004) - $ 110 mill (first of his movies to break $100 million budget)
Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - $100 mill 

Colin Trevorrow 

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) - $750 thousand
Jurassic World (2015) - $150 mill
*aside from a 2002 short film with no published budget, those are his only two completed works as a director* 

Gareth Edwards
In the Shadow of the Moon (2007) - estimated $2 mill (documentary film)
Monsters (2010) - < $500 thousand
Godzilla (2014) - $160 mill
*this is all of his completed works as a director*

This experiment has led to varying degrees of success. Marc Webb made some awful movies that made adequate money but drove Spider-Man back to Disney and Marvel. Gareth Edwards made a good Godzilla movie that ended up being a modest, if polarizing, success. Colin Trevorrow made an awful movie that happened to make more $$$ than almost every other movie ever.

Our most recent victim of this experiment is none other than Josh Trank, director of Fantastic Four, whose only previous film credit is his 2012 superhero origin story, Chronicle, with a budget of $12 million. I liked that movie quite a bit. Unfortunately, unlike the group of young directors listed above, Trank's big budget graduation represents a total abject failure. Fantastic Four opened with an embarrassing $25 million box office, a nasty 8% Rotten Tomatoes score, and constant scuttlebutt regarding behind-the-scenes drama between an uncooperative Trank and his nefarious bosses at Fox. The studio system has chewed Trank up and spit him back.

The greatest loss of it all is that, despite the universal ire with which the public has blasted Fantastic Four, there is a good movie somewhere underneath that monstrosity, if only we could hew away the interference. For about half of the movie, I legitimately enjoyed myself. Trank's vision of the inception of this superpowered family is slow and deliberate. He is careful to set up the key character dynamics, especially between Reed and Ben, while also opening the door for all sorts of potential thematic goodness. My favorite subtext was the class commentary, buoyed by Jamie Bell's dignified sadsack portrayal of Ben Grimm, a friend who was abandoned for not being smart or rich enough to contribute. Reed's character, a genius who oscillates between ignoring people and bringing them together, is a good catalyst for all the necessary relationships. I even appreciated aspects of the team's first trip to Turdworld, as it hinted at a potential planet of mystery and unity--the antithesis of a family unit's familiarity and multivariance. I remained on board for the scene in which the team gains its powers--or suffers its mutations, as the movie frames it. This scene, more than any other save one, presents a clear visual language that communicates a subversive take on the source material. We see Reed wake up to discover Johnny Storm aflame and screaming, then crawl towards a big pile of rocks where he believes his whimpering friend Ben is buried, only to look behind him and realize his limbs have contorted into a useless and inhuman shape. It's shot like pure body horror, and is effective as such. It's a window into a dark gritty version of the FF that could have held some appeal.

Then the film jumps forward in time and immediately becomes a deathly parade of incompetent nonsense.

I don't know if I've ever been able to so clearly pinpoint the moment of a movie's downfall. Apparently the whole production of the film was a tug-of-war between Trank and Fox that resulted in Fox doing heavy last minute reshoots and totally altering the back end of the film. It shows.

The characters skate around mumbling tripe about mutations and cures. Doctor Doom returns for no reason with no motivation and with an evil plan that is less a scheme and more a telekinesis-fueled show of force. The dialogue takes a nose dive. The character growth and thematic set-ups all trail off as if they forgot that arcs need to have an ending. Even the action, which it took us until now to experience, is almost exclusively relegated to training scenes. Not once do the Fantastic Four use their powers to save civilians or stop crime. Indeed, this would not be possible, as the movie avoids cities altogether, instead opting to give us a grand tour of sterile grey hallways, computer workstations, and of course, the uniformly bland Turdworld. The comic book source material for the film has all sorts of colorful and, ehhhh, fantastic adventures, both in the city and across the universe. Here the characters use force fields to move crates around and fireballs to sizzle some remote control planes. Half of the Thing's combat scenes are footage on a tiny computer screen. The "action" is unthinkably alienating. There are only two moments in the entire film when a kinetic sequence shows any spark of promise: one tracking shot of doom exploding people's heads in (yet another) hallway, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it one second long clip of the Invisible Woman using her force fields to cloak the Human Torch's fireball attack. That's it.

Our climactic destination is so disappointing that you either have to go home feeling a void of nothingness. You guessed it: that destination is Turdworld, where the environment adds nothing to the fight, and the characters add even less. In the end, Doctor Doom, whose superpower is really supposed to be the fact that he is the most maniacal supergenius in the Marvel universe, gets outsmarted by the single most basic grade school battle tactic known to man: part of the team attacks from the front, while another part attacks from behind.

It is one of the most mirthless, clumsy, inadequate, pointless action sequences I have ever witnessed.

Oftentimes bad movies can have deleterious effects on our fragile mental balance, but I have no regrets about paying to see Fantastic Four. The front half felt worthwhile, and the back half struck me as a unique brand of total ineptitude--the sort that sticks with you, and makes you ask questions about the nature of storytelling and the state of art in a capitalist system. We've been spoiled in recent years by a proliferation of quality superhero movies to the point that any misstep pushes us to cast doom and gloom upon the genre as a whole. As such, Fantastic Four is an unfriendly reminder that a decade+ ago people didn't put any effort into making superhero films worthwhile, and if we're not careful that day will come again.

1 / 5  BLOBS