Fantastic Four is a terrible movie. Utterly terrible. On a pure filmmaking level it's sloppily produced, with a lazy approach to every post-production element, from CGI to sound mixing. Its script is scattershot and nonsensical, while the story pacing is so off that it's barely even got a coherent narrative. There hasn't been a superhero movie this awful since, well, the last attempt at the Fantastic Four. It's so bad, in fact, that, even though it's only been on general release for one day, its director has stepped forward to apologise. In a Tweet he has since deleted, Josh Trank said "A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would have received great reviews. You'll probably never see it. That's reality." We always knew there'd been some behind-the-scenes issues with the film - there were extensive reshoots and Fox ran a heavily muted advertising campaign - but this reveals even more, with Trank suggesting his vision of the movie was heavily compromised by the studio's demands. The question is, of course, how much of this is honest truth and how much is Trank reacting to the overwhelmingly negative press about him before and after release. There's been reports from various sources about the director's behaviour on set (their viability and truthfulness is, of course, not 100% confirmed, but still), which suggest at the very least this Tweet is coming from one side of a hard fought conflict. As the internet does a post-mortem on Fantastic Four in the coming weeks, no doubt more clues as to what really went wrong will surface. The speed in which this unsanctioned apology has been released is shocking, showing Fant4stic is already an irredeemable mess. It ties into the thinking that Fox have always known they had an awe-inspiring dud on their hands, but had to soldier on any way. That they tried to slip something this terrible out and hope that the general enthusiasm around superheroes it would carry it to at least mediocre reviews is pretty brazen. It's almost as if, you know, nobody actually wanted to make another Fantastic Four. What do you make of Josh Trank's statement? Does it justify how bad Fantastic Four is? Or is it an attempt to slow down the critical massacre? Share your thoughts down in the comments.
