The Fantastic Four were birthed in an unfolding of creative energy deserving canonization in the progression of 20th-century art. Without these characters, the modern comic book movie wouldn’t even exist. But maybe the more appropriate metaphor for The Fantastic Four is the matriculated senior still hanging around the high-school parking lot in his letter jacket long after the fading of his relevancy. A crowded genre approaching audience weariness now presents audiences with yet another super team-and all evidence seems to suggest this to be a hobbling property, always second-rate, mascara forever smeared while the popular kids ride limo donuts on their lawn. Meanwhile, in an act of premeditated malice, Marvel recently removed the monthly Fantastic Four comic from circulation for the first time in 50 years. Even Trank claims that his version will owe as little as possible to the source material.
“No one should care about this thing getting made,” Film School Rejects’ Andrew Doscas crowed recently at the prospect of Trank’s reboot, presenting decades of supposedly mediocre storytelling as evidence of the property’s deep-rooted inferiority. “Is this the road company?” Roger Ebert asked in 2005, bewildered by the childish antics of Tim Story’s absurd film adaptation. But the Fantastic Four have arrived in the age of the superhero event film as battered also-rans. Thousands of years of narrative osmosis have lain the fable of Icarus at our feet as an urtext of Western literature, among the first stories of innovation gone wrong. Unlike Icarus, they return, though Trank claims that his take plays up the horror implicit in finding one’s body suddenly imbued with godlike powers. The Fantastic Four venture too close to the sun as well, originally rocket-bound and exposed to “cosmic rays,” now in Josh Trank’s reboot (here to be referred to, as dictated by its marketing, as Fant4stic) having pierced the barriers of interdimensional space. In the ancient version, a young man gifted with wings bound in wax ignores his father’s warnings about straying too close to the sun and plummets into the sea in a rain of melted wax. The story of the Fantastic Four is essentially the story of Icarus.
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