Fantastic Four is a complete anomaly among comic-book blockbusters: the first superhero tentpole to be designed, from the ground up, to be hated. Surely, 20th Century Fox didn’t pay for that kind of movie, but that’s the one Josh Trank made. This is an origin story that ignores or corrupts the aspects of the origins it tries to highlight; it’s a call for unity with characters that it never remotely seeks to reconcile; and it’s an extended study of superpowers that it never ceases to portray as absolute horrors.
For a time, the film’s bleak revisionism offers a corrective to the glibness of the Marvel movies that this desperately withheld property cannot join. Reed Richards (Miles Teller) knows from pre-pubescence that he wants to be a scientist who changes the world, but his passion and off-the-charts intelligence is met with derision and condescension from pencil-pushing teachers who would rather mold him into standardized mediocrity than admit he is smarter than they could ever dream of being. Later, when Reed and co-horts teleport into another dimension and return with strange powers, they are instantly quarantined, examined and weaponized, and their research is taken by money-grubbing investors eager to reap whatever financial rewards may be had in developing transport to a doomed planet. This arc evokes first the banal reality of a system that favors monetary success over ideological and intellectual pursuit, then the culmination of this value system in the exploitation of young, idealistic labor for the gain of talentless businessmen who could never spearhead innovation, only market it.
In short order, however, this antagonistic view starts to feel like the viewpoint of Trank, having been presumably recruited to save Fox from having to give the Fantastic Four film rights back to Marvel by delivering a hit movie. He’s a supposed wunderkind made into the pawn of a corporation that will take any credit if the movie’s a success and place any blame on his shoulders if it flops. The flaw in that theory is that Trank’s only achievement heretofore is Chronicle, which shares with its big-budgeted brethren an intriguing high-concept premise that soon gives way to plodding drama that insists on psychological complexity it does not once provide.
This film takes place almost entirely in science labs, with the characters either conducting experiments or being experimented upon. Most of the dialogue consists of moody, terse exchanges that boil each hero down to a clichéd essence. Michael B. Jordan has to play Johnny Storm (a.k.a. the Human Torch) as a child who grew up around the most advanced science on Earth but still acts like a Fast and the Furious third-stringer randomly recruited into the fold of the Fantastic Four’s headquarters, the Baxter building. Sadder still is Jamie Bell, who cannot possibly have more than 25 lines as Ben Grimm/The Thing but had to show up to set every day in a motion-capture suit so animators could render, in the most realistic detail possible, a character who just sits around glumly. Nothing, however, can beat the tag-team of anti-chemistry that Teller shares with Kate Mara, who plays Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman. They seem to be locked into a variant of the penis game, in which each dares the other to make their contempt for the project more and more visible without getting a talking-to from a producer.
Despite massive re-editing and reshoots, the film only has enough action to fill the final 15 minutes or so of the film, leaving these aggressively dull character interactions to push things haltingly forward. This setup is so tedious that the only relief comes not from any displays of superhuman ability but in the small and great ways that the film tramples on the foundation of the Fantastic Four mythology, from its reduction of Victor Von Doom’s (Tony Kebbell) Latverian origins to a bio tidbit on a dossier to The Invisible Woman being entirely left out of a boys’ trip to the other dimension, her powers the result of secondhand infection when they return. Elsewhere, Trank’s admirable attempts to maximize the inherent body horror of the material collide harshly with the pandering inclusions of comic book grandeur and optimism, the latter coming entirely from the Storm patriarch, Franklin (Reg E. Cathey), a man so solemn he cannot even excuse himself to use the restroom without making a speech on the importance of family. Likewise, this revisionist, anti-heroic hero film climaxes with the standard (obligatory, really) Earth-destroying chaos and mass death, all filtered through dim cinematography that attempts to mask the cost-cutting, low-grade CGI. For a movie that rails against the conventions of comic-book movies to the point of smug self-righteousness, this ending, with its un-ironically triumphant music played over the aftermath of large-scale destruction, isn’t merely a gross and cynical cliché. It’s pure hypocrisy.