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.