Lo! There Shall Come A Slating!

Where, oh where, is one to start when it comes to Josh Trank’s new adaptation of Marvel’s venerable Fantastic Four? The first and perhaps most obvious thing to say is that this movie is currently experiencing the doomsday scenario when it comes to media coverage; the story is not the fact that the film has been made, the story is the fact that the film has been made and is a creative disaster. There is a definite note of gleefulness in the recounting of the various travails of the production, now it is officially awful, and critics of all stripes seem to be competing to put the boot into it in the most extravagant way possible.

As ever, when this happens, you might be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that this is a film without any redeeming features whatsoever. Of course, that isn’t the case, but it would be a real stretch (no pun intended) to describe this film as being actually entertaining to watch.

The comic origins of the Four date back to 1961 and are so tied up with then-contemporary concerns like the Cold War and the Space Race that they are virtually impossible to plausibly update (as the makers of the 2005 film discovered), and so the new film draws more on the retooled story from Marvel’s Ultimate imprint. So we get to meet brilliant but dweeby science prodigy Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his rough-diamond best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), who together manage to invent a dimensional teleporter for their school science project.

This gets them into the Baxter Institute, a hothouse for young genii, where Reed is put to work on a full-size version of the same device, working alongside fellow young scientist Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and her brother Johnny (Michael B Jordan) – somewhat to the chagrin of the project’s initiator, older student Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell).

Needless to say they all get the thing built, and needless to say their first trip in it does not go according to plan – their visit to ‘Planet Zero’, as the place in the other dimension is christened, sees them bombarded with strange energies. Doom gets left behind and the others return to Earth mutated in a variety of horrible ways. Luckily the caring folks of the US Army are there to look after them, weaponise them, and restart work on the dimensional travel project, because there’s no possible way Doom could have survived and been transformed into a genocidal supervillain…

The new Fantastic Four movie does one absolutely astonishing thing, something I would’ve said was virtually impossible – it manages to make the 2005 and 2007 films about the quartet look like masterpieces of authenticity and faithfulness when it comes to this particular comic. There is a case to be made that Fantastic Four #1 marks the point at which modern superhero comic-books came into existence, its success paving the way for all Stan Lee’s subsequent riffs on the idea of troubled superhumans: the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, the X-Men, Daredevil, all of them followed the Fantastic Four.

And yet the book has been singularly ill-served in its cinematic adaptations – there was the 1994 version, produced as the movie equivalent of an ashcan copy and never intended for release, and the 2005 and 2007 films, which were hamstrung by a number of problems, not least a fatal uncertainty of tone. I have a feeling that following this latest fantastic farrago, it will be declared that the Fantastic Four is inherently unadaptable for the big screen. Personally I don’t think so – ten years ago you could have said the same thing about Captain America, considering the lousy films based on that character up to that point – but, for good or ill, I don’t run a major studio.

Unfortunately, in this case the tail seems to be wagging the dog as there is a suggestion that the troubles of the film may be partly responsible for the FF’s comic being cancelled earlier this year. Putting it very simply, this is again to do with the complicated legal status of many of Marvel’s best-known characters when it comes to screen adaptations: Marvel Studios has the film rights to the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man and so on, but the rights to the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and a few others were sold off long ago, which is why these movies don’t cross over with the others (and why there was great excitement in fannish circles when it was announced that Sony were effectively leasing Spider-Man back to Marvel Studios, following the underperformance of Amazing Spider-Man 2).

There was a suggestion that Marvel actually wanted Fantastic Four to fail, in order to leverage their buying back the rights here as well, and that the comic’s cancellation was part of this. Personally I doubt this was the only cause, as – for whatever reason – the book was selling very low numbers anyway. But, if Marvel wanted a failure, they certainly seem to have got one, as this movie is apparently bombing.

This is not really surprising, given that – in an impressive display of the belt-and-braces principle in action – Fantastic Four manages to be terrible in two completely different ways. First of all, the movie is sub-competent in terms of its basic film-making and story-telling: it’s poorly scripted, sluggishly paced, with some extremely variable special effects work. There seem to be three or four different stories fighting for supremacy, resulting in a distinctly odd narrative structure and some weird shifts in tone across the movie. It starts off, for instance, looking like the friendship between Reed and Ben is going to be one of the key elements of the story – but then Jamie Bell vanishes out of the film for quite a long time, and while later scenes make reference to the guys’ relationship, you never really feel it.

But what really kills the film is the seemingly-deliberate way it sets out to actively avoid providing anything you might expect from a Fantastic Four movie. The comic, at its best, is bright and funny and wildly imaginative – Stan Lee’s gift for knowing comedy and Jack Kirby’s penchant for cosmic grandeur never found a better outlet, but on the other hand ‘cool’, ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’ are never words you could use to describe it. Trying to make it any of those things is doomed from the start. (A friend of mine casually said that he never cared for the Fantastic Four, but he was excited about the profane, cynical, and graphically-violent adaptation of Deadpool coming next year.)

And yet we end up with a film with a predominantly grey and metallic colour palette, and a mid-section which treats the Four’s powers as the stuff of Cronenbergian body-horror rather than superhero fantasy. Any sense of joy and fun is ruthlessly hunted down and crushed, and there’s barely any sense of the characters even liking each other, let alone being a team, or a family. And some of the creative decisions are virtually incomprehensible: the character set out on the journey that will give them their super powers for reasons which are entirely self-centred and rather petty (not to mention that they’re drunk at the time). The Invisible Woman doesn’t even get invited along for the trip. (It’s hard to think of a moment when Sue and Ben even talk to one another, to be honest.) Most jaw-dropping is the choice to reveal that Ben’s catch-phrase (‘It’s clobbering time!’) is what his abusive elder brother used to say before beating him as a small child.

And, of course, the film gets Dr Doom as spectacularly wrong as the previous version, once again crowbarring him into the team’s origin story and completely reinventing the character. (He’s only referred to as Dr Doom once, and that’s meant to be ironic.) I suppose that Dr Doom represents everything that makes the Fantastic Four ‘difficult’ to adapt for the cinema. Quite apart from the fact that he was the proto-Darth Vader, he’s an operatic, grandiose, OTT villain of the purest kind, perfectly at home in an operatic, grandiose, OTT book. Just as this film bears no meaningful connection to the book, so its version of Doom bears no meaningful resemblance to one of comics’ greatest bad guys.

You can kind of see why the studio wanted Josh Trank, director of the really-quite-good Chronicle, in charge of this project, but looking back on it now it’s easy to pick out the signs of things going horribly amiss: Trank telling the cast not to bother reading any of the comics, as this had nothing in common with them, being the one that immediately leaps to mind. As if his career wasn’t in enough trouble right now, Trank has probably not won many friends by taking to Twitter and blaming the studio for ruining his film. This does look like a film which has been badly messed about, but there’s very little evidence that there was ever much to get excited about going on here.

Never mind audiences, the source material deserved better. As it is, I suspect the only chance for the Four now is for the crashing flop of this movie to persuade Fox to cut their losses and sell the rights back to Marvel – and even then I suspect the toxic aura of the last three movies may dissuade even them from making another attempt for the foreseeable future. Looking at the big-screen versions of this comic, I’m reminded of what Gandhi said when asked what he thought of Western civilisation: he said it would be a good idea. What do I think of the film adaptation of Fantastic Four? I think it would be terrific if somebody actually had a go at it, because this film doesn’t even make the attempt.

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Board Silly

Step back in time with me, back, back, beyond the borders of the familiar world we know and understand, back to a strange new realm of different priorities and peculiar truths. Let the comforting certainties of the 2010s tumble away as we are whisked back to a place and a time undreamed of. I cannot guarantee your safety, but the wonders you will see will be their own reward.

Well, probably not, as we’re only going back to 2007, the year which gave the world the third Pirates of the Caribbean film (gee, thanks) and the first Transformers (you know, you really honestly shouldn’t have bothered). So far, so exactly the same, you may be thinking – and up to a point you may be right. Nevertheless, as inhabitants of a world which has grown accustomed to Marvel superhero movies crossing over with each other and making $1.2 billion in record time, this is in some ways an odd year for us.

Marvel Studios is, as yet, still only an untried name without a single blockbuster hit to its credit. Marvel comics characters are still being leased out to other studios, such as the makers of the X-Men and Spider-Man series. Both of these have had critical wobbles recently. This is as nothing, however, to the mauling doled out to Tim Story’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a further movie based on the seminal comic, starring… hang on, isn’t that the guy out of The Avengers?

Yes, it’s time for another round of Is It Really As Bad As All That? Let us examine the case for the prosecution: a quick sampling of internet opinion reveals Rise of the Silver Surfer to be ‘an awful, tedious drudge’, a ‘tedious, incoherent bore’, ‘relentlessly dull’, ‘existentially and aesthetically unnecessary’, a ‘plotless, brainless, witless bore’, and ‘drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun’. Yowser. (Even so, many people, even while sticking it to this movie, cheerfully acknowledged it was much better than the original film).

Hmmm. As the movie opens, our elementally-powered quartet (Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis) are getting on with their lives as celebrity superheroes. Top of the current agenda is Reed and Sue’s impeding wedding, plans for which keep getting disrupted by international crises, invasions from the Negative Zone, paparazzi, etc, etc. However, an equally serious problem appears with the arrival on Earth of a mysterious blob of space energy, which criss-crosses the globe causing all sorts of strange CGI effects shots. The space energy also wakes up the dormant Doctor Doom (Julian McMahon) in his Latverian castle, no doubt causing a ripple of apprehension on the audience’s part: not because he’s a terrifying villain, but because the handling of the character was so fundamentally botched in the first movie.

The US Army insists that Mr Fantastic do his bit in tracking the intruder from space, though juggling this with the wedding arrangements is a challenge even for a man with rubber fingers. Nevertheless, both projects proceed apace and come to fruition at the same moment. It’s just the rottenest of luck that the space blob objects to being tracked and crashes the wedding to fry Reed’s  gear, transforming into a silver dude on a surfboard in the process (the reasons for this are never really dwelt upon, but as Jack Kirby’s reasoning behind the character’s look basically boiled down to ‘I’m bored of drawing spaceships’, you can kind of understand why).

It eventually transpires that the Silver Surfer (Doug Jones and Laurence Fishburne) is the advance scout for a world-devouring alien superbeing, Galactus, who is already en route to Earth. The Four have to persuade the Surfer to help them repel this threat, always assuming they can put to one side Reed and Sue’s romantic issues. And a problem the Torch has picked up where he keeps swapping powers with the others. Oh, and Doctor Doom quite fancies getting his gauntleted hands on the Surfer’s power, too…

Now, I quite liked the 2005 movie about these characters. While it made a right royal mess of one of comics’ greatest heavies by completely reimagining Doom’s background and powers, it was pacy, looked good, and got at least half of the feel of the Fantastic Four comics pretty much bang-on. By this I mean that the book itself gains much of its flavour and entertainment value from the sparks generated when a tongue-in-cheek family sitcom rubs up against grandiose cosmic spectacle and psychedelic weirdness. The first film got the sitcom right but fluffed the spectacle.

If there’s a real problem with Rise of the Silver Surfer, it’s that this time the situation is reversed. In this film the globe-trotting adventure is well-mounted, with some really effective sequences – the Torch’s aerial pursuit of the Surfer through New York City being just about precisely what you’d want to see in a Fantastic Four movie – but the character interaction and comedy is, for the most part, completely inert when it isn’t actually slightly painful to watch. An authentic Fantastic Four movie would be much sharper, more intelligent, and – crucially – much funnier than this one ever manages to be. Family-friendly it may be, but it’s the enemy of your grey cells.

That said, it’s not actually as boring as its critics seem to think – the story rattles along pacily enough courtesy of the multi-stranded plot and does its best to tick as many demographic boxes as it can – knockabout action for the kids, so-so jokes for the adults, comics in-jokes for the fanboys and some tasteful T&A from Jessica Alba for the benefit of internet film bloggers. It just never quite convinces as a serious movie, mainly because of the jokey tone of the opening. At one point there’s a sequence about the US Army torturing the captive Surfer for information, which in a darker film might have been quite effective – but here, it just seems incongruous and a real misjudgement.

I suppose Julian McMahon was already under contract as Doom, so they had to put him in the movie, and you can see the logic behind having a go at adapting the classic story from issues #57-60 where Doom usurps the Surfer’s Power Cosmic, but once again the good Doctor is one of the weak points of the film. Neither script nor performance ever really come close to doing Doctor Doom justice, although – once again – the final tussle between him and a rather Super-Skrull-esque Human Torch ticks all the right boxes in terms of property damage and digital virtuosity.

But then that really feels like this movie all over – the production values are excellent, the story (just about) hangs together, and the actors playing the title roles have nothing to be ashamed of. (Nevertheless, the toxic wake of this film seems to have effectively destroyed Ioan Gruffudd’s career as a leading man in major movies.) It’s just that the characters seem to have no depth and interact with each other in the most mechanical way, which is bad news for drama, but absolutely grim tidings for anything with ambitions to be light and/or amusing. The main problem with Rise of the Silver Surfer is not that it doesn’t work as a superhero movie, but that it fails as a comedy and a drama.

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Half of Four is…

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published August 4th 2005:

It’s getting so that summer at the movies isn’t summer at the movies without a movie with Stan Lee’s name on it having a massive day-and-date release. With the exception of 2001, every year so far this century has seen Stan The Man and his numerous fictitious progeny enjoying extended stays near the top of the cinema charts. We’ve had the X-Men, the Hulk, and Spider-Man (plus considerably less successful out-of-season appearances by Daredevil, Elektra, and the Punisher), but now Lee’s first and arguably most important creations get their moment in the spotlight – yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Fantastic Four, in a film by Tim Storey.

The film opens with the world’s most brilliant scientist Reed Richards (Yowain Griffiths¹) and his sidekick Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) trying to get funding for his latest space mission. As NASA are understandably preoccupied with another attempt at inventing a double-sided sticky tape that works on thermal tiles, they are forced to seek help from billionaire tycoon Victor von Doom (Julian McMahon). Yes, Reed may be a scientific genius but he still can’t recognise someone who might as well have ‘destined to become a supervillain’ stencilled across his forehead. Anyway, Reed, Ben and Doom pop up to the latter’s private space station in the company of Reed’s ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) and her slightly annoying younger brother Johnny (Chris Evans – no, not that one, another one).

Before you can say ‘this is one superhero origin story that hasn’t aged especially well’ the station gets hit by a cloud of cosmic energy and all the inhabitants duly find themselves Fantasticised on their return to Earth. Ben is permanently transformed into a colossally strong being of living rock! Johnny can set fire to himself (this is more use than it sounds)! Sue can turn invisible and project invisible energy fields! And Reed can go a bit stretchy. Three out of four ain’t bad, I suppose. Of course, Doom also finds himself a changed man, although unfortunately the evil megalomaniac component of his personality is wholly unaltered…

A film of the FF has been a long time coming for the simple reason that until quite recently it would have impossibly expensive to do – back in the 60s, even a cartoon of the Four needed the Human Torch removing in order for it not to be impossible expensive to do! Now, of course, technology has caught up, and CGI is able to bring Mr Fantastic’s elasticated limbs and the Torch’s fiery sheath to the screen in fine style. Interestingly, the film opts not to create the Thing digitally, but rather through the old-fashioned method of putting Michael Chiklis inside what must have been a gruelling prosthetic make-up job. The result is not entirely authentic – Chiklis just isn’t big or rocky enough to pass for the classic comics Thing – but it does allow Chiklis to give a genuine, and actually rather affecting performance. Just as well, because this is a film built around performances rather than big set pieces.

What may surprise people used to the rather dour tone most comic book adaptations have adopted since Tim Burton’s first Batman is how light and breezy most of this movie is. With the exception of Ben, whose life is understandably messed up by his new circumstances, the Four have a rather jolly time, not bothering with tedious things like secret identities and spending most of their time in their spacious skyscraper HQ amiably squabbling. The film’s faithfulness to the source material is, up to a point, impressive and successful. This is a genuinely funny character-based film that touches most of the bases Lee and Jack Kirby covered in the comic – the characterisations of the Four are pretty much spot on, even down to Reed and Sue’s romance being a bit passionless and unconvincing.

However, the greatness of the classic Fantastic Four books came from the way they mixed wise-cracking sitcom characterisations (Lee’s forte, one suspects) with mind-boggling kitsch cosmic grandeur (Kirby’s stock in trade). Storey’s film has the former in spades but virtually none of the latter (it’ll be interesting to see how the planned sequel handles Galactus’ assault on Earth). This really leads to the film’s only weak link, namely its presentation of Doctor Doom. Bereft of his original origin (oh, good grief), powers, background, and (for most of the film) appearance, this is a very poor showing for a character who deserved much better (the comics Doom was a horribly maimed scientist-sorcerer, traumatised by the death of his mother, who chose to encase himself in armour and embark on a ruthless quest for power – it’s a miracle George Lucas didn’t get sued by Marvel). As it is Doom comes across as a poor amalgam of Magneto and the Green Goblin, who appears to go bad simply so the Fantastic Four can fight someone in the last reel.

But anyway, this is very solid stuff, at least as good as the first X-Men movie. Thoroughly enjoyable and a nice change of pace from most of the summer’s other movies, this isn’t quite the absolute delight it could have been, but it’s still well worth a look for comics fans and normal people alike.

(Another one for the ‘over-generously reviewed’  file, no doubt…)

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