Film Review: "Fantastic Four" (2015).

"Change is coming". This tagline brings a whole new breathe of life to Fantastic Four. This superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name. It is the third theatrical Fantastic Four film to be distributed by 20th Century Fox, and a reboot of the Fantastic Four film franchise. Directed by Josh Trank, with a screenplay by Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg and Trank. The film follows four young outsiders that teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe which alters their physical form in shocking ways. The four must learn to harness their new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.

In August 2009, development of the film was announced. In July 2012, Trank was hired to direct and Slater to write the screenplay. In October 2013, Kinberg was hired as a co-writer. By January 2014, Kinberg finished rewriting the script and casting began. Principal photography commenced in May 2014 and concluded in August the same year. The film was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. During Production, rumours began to circulate that Trank displayed "erratic" and "very isolated" behavior on set. In addition, Trank had several small dogs, who were left in a rented house in New Orleans while the film was shooting there. The dogs caused as much as $100,000 in damages to the property. However, Kinberg confirmed this by saying "It's upsetting, and it's the first time I've been part of a story that isn't true..." Unfortunately, that wasn't all, after Trank finalized his version of the film in 2014, the studio, seemingly dissatisfied with the director's work, demanded re-shoots, which were done in early 2015. Also Marvel wasn't fond of the direction the film was going. After the disappointing reviews director Josh Trank went on to tweet that "A year ago he had a fantastic version of this. And it would've received great reviews. You'll probably never see it. That's reality though." He went further to say that "He'll never be working on a comic book movie again". However the tweet was quickly deleted.

The film stars Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, and Tim Blake Nelson. The performances in this film were simply fantastic. For the first time, a director managed to nail the characterisation for Marvel's first superhero team. The casting of Teller, Jordan, Mara and Bell were perfect. As well as Kebell and Cathey. However, it did not come without its one noticeable flaw, which was that both the characters of Sue Storm and Victor Von Doom were terribly misused and under-utilised.

Wildly imaginative and profoundly different to other Marvel movies, Josh Trank's Fantastic Four is a movie that seeps in the superhero/comic-book loving zeitgeist and leaves you intrigued as to what went wrong with this misunderstood creation. What's good about the film are the strong performances and the ingenious, mostly humanly real first two acts of the script. What's ugly, of course, is how that potential disappointingly vanished with the final act. And what's bad is the movie's inability to reconcile its good and ugly aspects among both critics and audiences.

Simon says Fantastic Four receives:

Also, see my review of Chronicle.