Fantastic Four Reboot

Actually she said that she didn't watch it at all or needed to watch it with a "real audience" first or something diplomatic like that.

Here's a post-mortem with comments from one of the credited writers, Jeremy Slater... who says that only one line of dialogue he wrote was in the movie. And who says(not in the article) that he's been getting death threats because of the film.

With the sheer amount of people disavowing this thing it seems that no-one actually made this movie. It must have just somehow sort of coagulated into existence of its own accord...

Actually that would probably explain a lot...

More reason to believe everyone who took part in this production was a Skrull...

That is too bad. Poor guy.

Honestly the movie was below average to me but I didn't hate it. I went into it thinking it would be awful but it was just okay. Not too good, not too bad, just okay.

It was bad, but not So Bad, It's Good. The worst kind of bad to be.

It wasn't even entertainingly bad. It's just so damn dull and bland and tedious. There is literally no-one who actually comes out of it with any real credit at all - Trank is pretty much exiled from mainstream movies, the writers don't recognise the script, the executives are meddlesome as ever. Whilst the actors of the Four have rebounded somewhat, the film is so bad that overcoming having it on their resumes counts as success.

I would probably go as far as to call it perhaps the worst superhero film ever.

I disagree.

Fant4stic was not a fantastic four movie, but it was something okay to compelling for the first half or 2/3s of the movie. I was watching it with a friend and we were both questioning why this movie was so hated. At worst is was just an okay, middling movie.

Then we got to the third act, where the reshoots became evident. That's really where the movie goes to shit. All the interesting ideas and the character-building went out the window, and the plot (what little there was) unraveled almost immediately.

I'm interested in seeing what Trank's original vision of the film was, even though it likely wasn't very faithful to what the Fantastic Four is: a family that goes on wacky sci-fi adventures. Or maybe it was, since the characters were developing that relationship before they went into the other dimension (which is the point where the movie starts to unravel).

I couldn't even remember the first two thirds of the movie about five minutes after leaving the cinema. It was entirely forgettable and featured characters I couldn't even be bothered to actively dislike. At least the earlier F4 movies had a certain charm (cf. the Johnny/Ben shenanigans) and whilst not exactly good were watchable. This one? I wouldn't watch again if I was paid to.

I'm not saying you were wrong to find some positives in it, I am glad someone did. I just cannot for the life of me think what they are.

The first half wasn't as rough as the last, but it still had things like: 1. The Thing's catchphrase becoming his abusive brother's taunt, 2. really strawman science teacher who blindly refuses to accept their teleporter experiment for strawman reasons. 3. The line "check out Doctor Doom over here". 4. The cause of their mutation boiling down to "Drunk Science!!"

I hated the first half as much as the second half, just for entirely different reasons. The Second half was just trash. But the first half was obnoxious as f... in the way it screamed "true geniuses are poor souls which are just misunderstood by society". The wooden acting and the flat characterisations didn't help, nor did the boring the set most of the movie was set in.

And then the plot contrivances and phony arguments....hey, jack-asses, everyone who is halfway educated knows who was the brain behind the rocket ship program of the US. It was Werner van Brown. Which you should know too. You are supposed to be scientists, right?

edited 6th Oct '16 10:56:17 AM by Swanpride

And most astronauts aren't really all that well remembered by the masses either.

Certainly not as well remembered as, for example, Einstein. Scientists who make truly groundbreaking discoveries tend to get a lot of attention.

This post

Woah, woah. I don't like Fant4stic. I don't even remember most of the movie. I'm just saying it definitely had potential had they stuck to Trank's vision. The worst parts of the movie are the parts where it's evident the reshoots took place.

Those are the worst part in the sense that they stuck out the most, but the parts which annoyed me the most where the one from the original bulk of the movie. The stupid teacher for starters, the awkward flirting, the idiotic reasoning to get all in the transporter (minus Sue, natural)...that one was on Josh Trank.

Except, like Trank said, we'll never see where he was taking all the characters. The movie sucks because nothing being built up to in the first parts mesh with what the reshoots did.

Except even without knowing where the scenes were building up, we can still hate some of those scenes. For example: turning Ben Grimm's fun catchphrase "It's clobbering time!" into something his abusive older brother said as he beat him is taking Darker and Edgier and turning it up to eleven.

If Trank had changed all the names to be completely separate from Fantastic Four, then it might have worked. But never as a FF movie.

Honestly I am more interested in Jeremy Slater's vision than Trank's. From what little I read he wanted the team's powers to come from Galactus, have Mole Man and the moloids as villains and give us Dr. Doom as a Latverian dictator.

Man, clearly the film's main problem is the contradictory idea for portraying the team; and Fox made the wrong move in not going with this guy's take on the team. Seriously, it follow the same structure as the actual movie but gives us reasonable characterization, world building as it introduce Galactus and the Negative Zone, light hearted tone with its share of dark moments and give us that B-movie level action as the team fights a giant moloid in that version of the team.

Yep, could of been the best version of Fantastic Four on screen. Instead we got this

You can hate those scenes, yes, but that's like seeing the Mona Lisa's arm and then saying "You know what, the rest of this painting couldn't possibly be good because I don't like this arm."

We lost a lot of context for the scenes in the movie. We don't even know if what we saw in the first part of the story was meant to be in that part of the story or in that order because we know the movie got cut up and re-put together by Fox, in addition to the reshoots near the end.

I'm interested to see Trank's Fant4stic, and even though the one FOX gave us was awful, there's still something in that incoherent Frankenstein's Monster of a movie.

I don't care what it was supposed to built up to because in the one hour which is the first act, it doesn't built up to anything. The characterizations of the characters is still pretty much non-existent when the movie gets off the rails (and that is something you can do in one single scene if you know how), and nothing about the story up to there makes any sense. The teacher who keeps discouraging Reed makes no sense, that some guy would spend his time on a high school science fair and just happens to stumble on someone who has solved what he has been working on for ages and then invites only one of the two guys who worked on the project doesn't make sense, that a government organization would rehire a guy who sabotaged the project in the past is nonsense and don't get me started on Ben just being able to walk into a secret project.

So you're judging the potential of the story... based on a small snippet of it. Okay.

Hey, if it was good enough for Roger Ebert...

Best case scenario, I could at most see Fant4stic being a reasonable film that still is In Name Only of its source material. But even if we can't see the original cut as Trank intended it, we can still get a good idea of what two thirds of it was like. And nearly all of it is poor ideas for a Fantastic Four tale, such as Sue not being a part of the family as they gain their powers or the faux-profoundness of "we'll be forgotten by history" that is their motive for throwing all caution to the wind. Not to mention his frequent disdain for the source material in interviews.

There's potential for a Cronenberg Body Horror take on superheroes, but it was a bad idea to try to push that into a brand name film, since it will be nitpicked to death by both alienated fans and panicking studio heads. An original property or Spiritual Successor to Chronicle might've meant a smaller budget, but it has greater potential for one's creative freedom.

edited 8th Oct '16 11:45:25 PM by Tuckerscreator

The small snippet is the majority of the movie. The whole sequence until they finally get their powers is a slog and it doesn't even do the most important thing it should do, creating some sort of relationship between the characters or making them in any way likable. That's what makes the movie so aggravating. When they finally have their power you think "thank good this is over, we can finally get to the good stuff" and then you get five minutes of "good stuff" when you have the body horror scenes (good stuff in a sense that this might be somewhat interesting, not in the sense that what is on screen has anything to do with the F4) only to then land in an entirely different B-movie. But you know what, even that would be a better watch if they had done anything to make me care about the characters beforehand.

If they wanted to make a Cronenberg super hero film then they should of done Doom Patrol.

Or would be a David Lynch super hero film given the weirdness of those comics.

Hopefully someone in Hollywood make this important note: only devote the first two to five minutes of the film recreating the origin (Body Horror is optional). The rest of the movie is the team going on adventures and interacting towards the situation and each other.

edited 9th Oct '16 12:24:21 AM by BigK1337

Considering Trank had a breakdown while filming I don't think even his vision would have been much good.