Fantastic Four
Prior to seeing this vaguely awaited film my principal contact with the Fantastic Four was when, in the very excellent The Ice Storm, Tobey Maguire's character draws a comparison between his own family and the superhero quartet (the same point is levelled in Rick Moody's equally excellent book, for the more literarily inclined). His point, in my understanding, was very simple: as the Fantastic Four are superheroes, they have superhero-sized problems, but underneath it all they are just another dysfunctional family.
Therein lies the problem in bringing any Fantastic Four movie to the screen. The characters are superheroes, ergo the film simply must be of blockbuster-sized proportions, with enough blockbuster style special effects and set pieces to keep Billybob Redneck, Little Johnny and Captain Three-Pints-Before-The-Film munching happily on their popcorn.
However, you've also got to respect the source material and ensure that the elements which made the Fantastic Four great on the page also make it to the screen. This means you've still got to have the dysfunctional family.
So, to sum up, what we need is lots of explosions, riveting action, a great script (well, duh) but all in the company of people you'd as like run a mile from if you encountered them in real life. That's a real challenge. Luckily there was one company willing to take it on. That's right - Pixar!
Yes, The Incredibles did a brilliant job of bringing the Fantastic Four to the screen and how they didn't get sued by Marvel is a miracle in itself.
Of course, Fox must have been dismayed realising that in no way could their impending Fantastic Four movie in any way equal The Incredibles. To add to their dilemma was the fact that to move significantly away from the template set up by Pixar's film would result in a significant deviation from what constitutes the Fantastic Four - you have to have a monstrously strong man, a girl who turns invisible, a character who can stretch body parts to unnatural proportions and, even, a hot-headed youth who revels in his abilities. You have to have the bitter opponent who is obsessed by the fact that he is not as powerful as his nemeses, and you also have to throw in all the business with this family basically not getting on 100 percent all of the time.
Hmmm.
So, taking all that on board, what do you get when you sit down to watch Fantastic Four? Well, it's not as bad as the advance word would have you believe, but neither is it anywhere near as good as it ought to be.
The problem is amply illustrated right in the very first scene. Reed Richards and Ben Grimm (at this point very much human) gaze upwards at a vastly oversized statue of soon-to-be nemesis Victor Von Doom, which itself is overshadowed by a gargantuan monolith of an office block. The intent is to imbue a sense of scale and awe in the audience. The actual effect is one of the most underwhelmingly limp opening scenes of any movie in recent memory (Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 excepted). If the aforementioned intent had been otherwise then it could have been passed off as 'understated', but this is a blockbuster and if you want your opening scene to look like a TV show then you're sitting behind the wrong camera.
A sense of scale is really what's lacking throughout the movie. In the early scenes there's a background shot of a pretty state-of-the-art looking shuttle launch pad - it's there, we've seen it, now we want to see what it does. But no, we cut straight to the shuttle flying in space (incidentally this would have been a great opening scene). Does any remember that old stage advice that says if you show a gun in the first act you damn well better make sure you've used it by the third?
In the film's defence the first few pages of script do a very deft job of establishing the relationship between all the characters. This is likely credited to Michael France whose original script, so the word on the virtual street goes, was right on the money. In fact there are several genuinely excellent scenes and witticisms (such as when a foreboding Johnny Storm greets Ben Grimm after their return from space) scattered throughout.
The real problem is with the director. You have to ask yourself why would Fox choose a totally unproven, wet-behind-the-ears director like Tim Story to helm a major picture like this, when Sony hired a genius veteran like Sam Raimi for Spider-Man. I think the answer is something like this: Sony wanted someone they could trust to take Spider-Man and make it great, whereas Fox wanted someone who would jump to the line and say "Yessir!" when summoned. Sam Raimi doesn't do that - any director who has proved he knows what he's doing behind the camera wouldn't do that - but Tim Story just might.
The signs are all there in the final script as well. There are moments of genius intermingled with moments of predictable, by-the-numbers film-making. When you get someone who knows how to run a business to design a website the results are often crap because the ability to turn over a few thousand in a year does not mean that you know what looks good on a page (in fact it probably means you're the sort of person who wouldn't have a clue). Equally, people who know how to run film studios do not know how to make great films, and great films are what people want to see. And yet people who run film studios, especially Fox it would seem, continue to think they know how to make films.
With Fantastic Four you get a film that deserves to be good, that at some point may well have been great, but which has clearly been meddled with to the point of mediocrity. These people just shoot themselves in the foot time and time again, and never learn.
Even Fox, it seems, didn't have the courage of its own convictions. There is clearly a sense of budget-wrangling at play with Fantastic Four. The film, despite the $100 million or so spent on it, looks cheap. The effects are largely confined to two set pieces (incidentally, I think that Mr Fantastic will always look crap on screen unless they find some way of reimagining his abilities - an arm stretching like elastic will always, always look like one of those cheap, popular Photoshop plug-ins no matter how much you spend on it), there is no sense of scale, and even the plot suffers from similar economics.
Having Dr Doom afflicted by the same cosmic storm that gives the Fantastic Four their powers is an economical way of introducing the villain of the piece to the audience at the same time as the heroes, but it's unimaginative and the character suffers from massive underdevelopment during the central portion of the movie (in the third act he pretty much goes from being a little bit pissed off and looking a little bit off-colour, to being totally deranged and wearing some incongruous Dr Doom outfit he's cobbled together from a handy, previously unseen wardrobe).
There's still scope for a good Fantastic Four movie. Both Chris Evans (as the Human Torch) and Michael Chiklis (as The Thing) were excellent (in fact I'd go so far as to say that the pair carried the movie). Ioan Gruffud was likeable, though a little young, even Jessica Alba, though bland, put in a decent enough performance, and I'd be more than happy to see Julian McMahon (Dr Doom) again with some better lines to tuck into. Without the need for a genesis story there's plenty of room for some real drama in the sequel.
You executives just run along and find the money, that's all you're there for, and leave it up to the filmmakers to do their job next time, eh? Maybe even Tim Story will have cut his teeth by then.
