HEADING TO THE cinema this weekend? This might give you a bit of food for thought.
The new Fantastic Four movie was released yesterday – it stars Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B Jordan and Jamie Bell as four scientists who, after a nuclear explosion of some sort, find themselves blessed/cursed with superpowers.
And it’s been getting SLATED.
The film currently has a 10% ‘rotten’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes – here are a few choice quotes from the critics.
Charlie Jane Anders from iO9 called it “the most self-loathing superhero movie” she’d ever seen:
Fantastic Four seems horrified to exist. The movie’s central storyline is less a plot, and more a shame spiral.
From Forbes:
The movie as a whole is a mess, with the halfway decent first 45 minutes or so giving way to a stupefyingly generic and wrongheaded superhero origin story…
And Donald Clarke at the Irish Times:
Employing some of the ugliest special effects we’ve seen since Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who, the filmmakers seem swept up in a panic to get the ghastly final conflagration over as quickly as possible and return home to feed their money.
Strangely, the director agrees with all of them. Josh Trank, who previously directed the well-received superhero film Chronicle, tweeted and quickly deleted this last night:
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Trank’s tweet implies that the final version of the movie was not in tune with his vision:
A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.
Jeremy Slater, one of the screenwriters, also claims that most of his contributions were cut:
Rumours say that 20th Century Fox rushed the reboot to keep the Fantastic Four rights from being returned to Marvel Studios, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, Trank was “erratic” and “very isolated” on set.
With all this knowledge, will you be going to see it?
