Fant4stic (2015)

Fant4stic (2015)

Release Date: August 7, 2015

I’ve alluded to this one a few times here, but now it’s finally time for me to take a look at it. Fant4stic was one of the biggest casualties of last year’s summer blockbuster season, with a disastrous production period and negative audience anticipation leading to terrible reviews, a single digit score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a box office bomb. The result killed the career of director Josh Trank outright, and damaged those of stars Miles Teller and Toby Kebbell (Michael B Jordan and Kate Mara were very lucky, as they bounced back a few months later with Creed and The Martian respectively.) Amidst the backlash, did the film itself get a fair shake? Do we have a misunderstood diamond in the rough on our hands?

Sorry, couldn’t do that with a straight face. Get your popcorn ready folks, this is gonna be a slaughter.

Young Reed Richards gets an F on his science homework for writing about teleporters, which his teacher is convinced aren’t real. To prove the teacher wrong, Reed builds one and breaks into the local junkyard to get the parts, while narrowly avoiding getting assaulted with a baseball bat by his classmate Ben Grimm. Their teleporter works, albeit with the side effect of causing a citywide blackout. The second attempt at a school science fair years later limits the destruction to a basketball hoop, but at least the teacher is pleased as the destruction gets them disqualified and he achieves what Frank Grimes couldn’t: humiliating grown men by entering them into a contest for children and laughing as they lose. However, one person is impressed – Franklin Storm, who recruits Reed to his teleporter project. (Big Hero 6, is that you?) This leads me to a thought I had while watching: Does Franklin regularly go to science fairs to recruit children for his experiments, or does he just really like baking soda volcanoes?

Reed is set to work alongside Franklin’s daughter Susan (prompting the most “Because the source material says so” romance since The Last Airbender), his son Johnny, who isn’t a scientist and is only here as punishment for crashing his car during a street race (I can only assume Michael B Jordan was trying to reach 88MPH so that he could skip this film and go straight to Creed), arrogant creep Victor Von Doom and a lot of 8-year-olds with baking soda volcanoes. Doom convinces Reed and Johnny to get wasted with him and for the three of them to test the teleporter because he wants them to have the credit for their work instead of a third party astronaut. Reed invites Ben to join them while Doom distracts Susan by telling her to go to the kitchen and make him a sandwich (He’s a misogynist, so he’s okay with not letting Susan join them despite his rousing speech earlier.) The four go into the teleporter, but as they leave a fly buzzes in with them and they all degenerate into Jeff Goldblum fly hybrids!

Oops, I started thinking of a better film there, the fly thing doesn’t happen. What does happen is that the four find themselves on a desolate alien planet (Thor: The Dark World says hi) covered in green goo, which Reed surmises is an energy source. Doom’s astronaut training was limited to watching Prometheus while drunk, so he gets the brilliant idea of tasting the goo while Reed puts up a flag, but the flag being planted in the ground causes the planet to go haywire and start erupting green goo everywhere. The goo is acid now and Doom is seemingly killed by it (he's lucky this happened before the goo he ate did a number on his insides) and the other three escape, but the teleporter malfunctions and each of them has a terrible misfortune befall them between dimensions. Same goes for Susan even though she wasn’t there. The teleporter felt bad for her so she got to have powers too. This wouldn’t have happened if they’d worn their safety glasses! And not watched Prometheus while drunk, that film could be named How Not to Astronaut: The Movie and nobody would complain.

Before we move on, allow us to spare a thought for Doom’s sandwich, which Susan made for him, but he never came back to eat. In the ensuing chaos, it’s likely the sandwich was forgotten and lay uneaten until it went stale and was thrown away

Everyone has powers now, but they’ve been captured by the military and are being made to do secret black ops missions (Captain America: Winter Soldier, check.) Reed is able to use his stretchy powers to escape, but the other three are left behind for a year while Reed fixes cash registers and lives in a log cabin. That is until Ben comes to get Reed for one of his missions and captures him with an apathetic looking headbutt. (Friends become enemies, Spider-Man 3!) During Reed’s absence, the military have repaired the teleporter and want him to go back to the planet to find a cure/get more goo. He doesn’t do either of those things, but he does find Doom, having somehow survived the acid eating away at his insides. Doom comes back to Earth, but it’s all part of his plan to take over/ destroy the world, I’m not sure which as I’d fallen asleep 30 minutes ago by this point. Then he goes all Scanners on the military people, which is the only bit that’s kinda good because it nails Doctor Doom’s attitude – so full of himself that he pays no attention to all the insignificant people around him that he kills. It’s still better in Scanners though, because the people here whose heads explode are all wearing helmets.

Not like this poor sod.

Doom then kills Franklin, but not by making his head asplode, that doesn’t work on named characters. With his dying breath, Coulson, I mean Franklin implores the team to set aside their differences and come together (just like in The Avengers) which they do while Doom escapes and starts terraforming Earth to make it like his planet (Would Man of Steel please stand up?) The Four go to the planet once again (Final battle, different dimension? Someone’s been watching Ant Man) and use teamwork to defeat Doom (X-Men 3, here we go). Doom was a load bearing boss and the planet is destroyed following his death, but the four are able to escape just in time and get a sweet base out of the deal where a smoking crater used to be (Avengers: Age of Ultron, BINGO!)

As for what happened to the teacher, he gets to rub shoulders with Bruce Campbell’s theatre usher from Spider-Man 2 as a member of an elite group of superhero movie antagonists who defeated the heroes and never got their comeuppance.

What can be said about Fant4stic that hasn’t already been said? Not much, as it turns out. Ironically, despite the film’s desire pre-release to distance itself from the previous Fantastic Four films, it’s content to copy all of the plot points beat for beat. The previous film covered empowering the team in about 30 minutes, with the remaining hour going over how the four became a team. In an inversion of what you’d expect, this one takes twice as long just to give everyone their powers, then spins its wheels with angst for a bit before quickly bringing the team together in the final 15 minutes. This isn’t satisfying because even with the increased time, there’s very little interaction between the team members, and certainly nothing that makes you care for them. Ben barely even speaks to Susan or Johnny and falls out with Reed, so there’s no reason for him to be there. Likewise with Johnny, who falls out with Susan and doesn’t interact with the other two. Franklin dying near the end is a cheap trick to bring the four together which really shouldn’t work since they barely know each other, and those who argue don’t reconcile. It doesn’t help that the film abuses time skips to avoid any chances at character development, preferring to tell as opposed to showing. Then again, this may be for the best, as some of the dialogue is atrocious. (Army Man: “What if we say no?” Reed: “Say yes.” This scene could be dubbed over with the “I implore you to reconsider” scene from Kung Pow and it would be an improvement.)

The race change for Johnny Storm, Susan being an adopted sibling, and the response towards these changes was much publicised prior to the film’s release. Personally, I didn’t oppose it, as the sense of what a family is has changed in the 50 years since the characters were first introduced, and such a change provided a chance for the film to do something new, both in terms of modernising the story and as a way of placing greater emphasis on the idea that family is not restricted to blood relations. Disappointingly, the film wastes this opportunity. Susan says to Reed in passing that she is adopted, and nothing more comes of this. The adoption angle could have provided character development for Susan, to explore her feelings of loneliness at leaving her native Kosovo and living with a father and brother who aren’t biologically related to her, before growing as a person when she settles with her new family. This could have even made her invisibility powers thematically appropriate. While Johnny being black is progressive in some ways, the film negates this by having Johnny not be a scientist like the others and by having him be on the project against his will when he would rather be racing, with the presumably unintended implication of the black team member being less capable and willing than the three white members. Unfortunately, this summer’s Ghostbusters remake/reboot/re-whatever looks to be making the same mistake.

Another key selling point for the film was that it would be a darker and edgier re-imagining of the Fantastic Four, with the big question here being what if the team didn’t want their powers and viewed them as a curse? This doesn’t amount to much either, as the only scene where there’s any implication of this plot point is when the team first use their powers after being captured. The rest of the film is your typical superhero movie. Never mind that plenty of other superhero films, such as X-Men, Spider-Man, Man of Steel and even the previous Fantastic Four films have done it before as well, so it’s hardly unique. You can see how not unique this film is from how I started playing bingo whenever I spotted something that had been done before. The one thing that is somewhat unique is how the four get their powers. Unlike most other superheroes, who are empowered at birth, suffer a freak accident or choose to be a superhero for the sake of themselves or others, this incarnation of the Fantastic Four get their powers because of Drunk Science, which effectively means their powers are the ultimate hangover. “Did we do drunk science again? This has to stop!” Technically, there was a freak accident, but it was caused entirely through their own stupidity and irresponsibility. Once again, I must name and shame Ben, as he wasn’t drunk at the time and was invited after the boozing, so he should have been responsible enough to talk the others out of their adventure, or at least make them wait until they’ve sobered up.

I wish we’d gotten this film instead.

I dearly wish I could give this film an ironic score, a Fantastic 4/10 if you will. But alas, even that would be giving it far too much credit. It’s easy to draw comparisons to Hulk, but that film was at least an ambitious failure, whereas this one doesn’t even have that going for it. When riffing on a film isn’t even enough to keep you awake, let alone entertained, you know it’s a disaster. Fant4stic is a misguided, cynical mess of a film with no redeeming qualities. See you in 7 years for the next reboot, I guess.

1/10

Enough negativity, let’s talk about something positive. The other week, I saw a picture of shirtless Zac Efron and he is ripped! This was illustrating a newspaper article on an increase in eating disorders in men, but I wasn’t really paying attention to that because I was too busy being gay for Zac Efron. It’s like as soon as High School Musical 3 finished filming, he went to the gym and never came out. This is a man who definitely even lifts, bro. I bet he could snap Leonardo Dicaprio in half like a twig if he wanted to.

Pictured: Zac Efron at the gym, where he even lifts, bro.

Pictured: Zac Efron snapping Leonardo Dicaprio in half like a twig.

Zac Efron: "This is for not giving up your Oscar for Michael B Jordan or Idris Elba!"

It's probably too late to do an #OscarsSoWhite joke now, but I don't care. I just watched Fant4stic, let me have this!