With the recent box office success of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, it seems that Marvel’s first family may have finally broken its cinematic curse. Despite being one of the medium’s most beloved stories and a crucial part of Marvel Comics history, the adventures of Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben have been painfully misrepresented on the big screen. The buried Roger Corman production was the stuff of pop culture lore for decades before anyone saw it. Tim Story’s two titles from the 2000s were critical disappointments and poor representations of some of the comics’ most iconic arcs (but did give us pre-Captain America Chris Evans on fire, so there’s that). The nadir for the characters came a decade ago when a rising director assembled a strong cast with a massive budget and promised to reveal a dark side to these beloved creations. It resulted in one of the most lambasted superhero movies ever made.
Fantastic Four, stylized and often mocked as FANT4STIC thanks to the poster design, started out as yet another way for pre-Disney acquisition era Fox to retain the rights to the characters. After the success of his debut Chronicle, Josh Trank was brought on board as the director and newbie Jeremy Slater was attached to write the script. From the offset, Trank and Slater clashed over the film's tone. Trank didn't seem to care about the characters or the superhero genre, while Slater wanted something more faithful to the comics. According to Slater, Trank left him out of studio chats and withheld script notes.
For Trank, Fant4stic was a chance to make something that would feel like a "cross between Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton," with a dose of David Cronenberg. Production only got messier from there, as Fox disliked Trank's original cut and demanded changes against his will. Editor Stephen E. Rivkin was hired to do a new cut. Reshoots were ordered. Nobody seemed to know what the ending was supposed to be. Eventually, Trank took to Twitter to distance himself from the released cut.
You can’t blame Trank for wanting to distance himself from the film because it truly is as bad as everyone said it was. Fant4stic is a baffling and dour catastrophe that feels maddeningly unfinished but, at 100 minutes, still feels too long. The harried reshoots are hilariously obvious thanks to Kate Mara's wig changes and Miles Teller's disappearing facial hair. Toby Kebbell's take on Victor Von Doom is particularly ill-fitting, although it's also clearly a leftover from Trank's grittier version. The main four — Teller, Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell — are all too young and miscast, making the movie feel more like a Chronicle spinoff than a Fantastic Four movie. The reshoot-mandated jokes and comic-accurate moments feel painfully out of place amid this muddle. It's no wonder the ending, offering a shoehorned-in origin to the team getting its fantastic name, became a meme.
A dark and somber Fantastic Four isn’t a terrible idea. The idea of going into space and being transformed against your will into a rubber man or rock formation is the stuff of cosmic horror. Bleaker re-imaginings of the wide-eyed optimists in capes was par for the course in the 2000s and early 2010s, between Christopher Nolan’s realist take on Batman to Zack Snyder’s ensuing redefining of the DC cinematic universe. Some scenes do elicit the responses that Trank desired, particularly when the quartet are confronted with their bodies’ changes. Reed becoming elastic plays like a weird spin on The Fly.
In practice, however, Fant4stic felt so hopelessly cynical and oddly cruel. It’s ugly to look at, a slog to watch, and ends up feeling like a mockery of its source material. Sitting through this endless cycle of grey, you can’t help but wonder what was so bad about the idea of a faithful adaptation full of people who smile and inhabit a world of color. Some characters can withstand a subversive retelling. You can take Superman’s optimism and contrast it with a highly politicized world where his kindness would be viewed with sinister skepticism. You can have Wolverine take off the yellow spandex and confront his own mortality as his powers begin to fail him. But you really can’t take the Fantastic Four and make “it’s clobbering time” fit into a bleak drama with the same tone as a Shakespearean tragedy.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps benefits from being a retro-futurist romp with a willingness to embrace a kitsch aesthetic and the undoubtedly silly grandeur of a universe full of human torches, silver surfers, and planet eaters. Frankly, we’re overdue a firm re-embracing of the intrinsic daftness of comic book lore by Hollywood. It’s good to take material this frequently dismissed as seriously as its lore deserves but, as Fant4stic showed, you can take it too far.
