Director Whose Most Notable Movie is ‘Fantastic Four’ Says Film Criticism Leads to Fascism

Out of all the super-hero movies being cranked out by studios over the past two decades since the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and there were a lot, the worst of the lot is clearly 2015’s Fantastic Four. It’s actually one of the worst comic book movies ever, easily beating stinkers like Batman vs Superman or Halle Berry’s Catwoman.

Even the unreleased Roger Corman directed Fantastic Four made with no budget as a ploy to get something into production in order to keep the license on the property from expiring was better. I have seen that movie, it is terrible and still it is only the second-worst Fantastic Four movie I’ve had the displeasure of sitting through. At least it had the decency to keep it to 90 minutes, the 2015 Fantastic Four weighed in at… 100 minutes? How is that even possible? I was sure it was at least two and a half hours. It was so bad that time actually slowed down because that movie felt like it took forever, just an endless epoch of the worst studio storytelling anyone has ever s**t out. Before my dad died, we used to watch comic book movies together, it was one of the few things we had in common, and when I see a particularly good one, sometimes it makes me miss him and wish we could have watched it together; after seeing Fantastic Four my first thought was “at least Dad didn’t have to go through that ordeal.”

Josh Trank, the writer and director of this cinematic abortion and basically nothing else of note hopped on Twitter over the long weekend to explain how he believes modern film criticism, particularly listicles ranking sunsets of films from best to worst, turn people who read them into fascists.

“Ranked” lists on movie websites continue to seed young film fans with fascist energy, making them grow up to ridicule art, have unintentionally arbitrary taste patterns and closed minds, while feeding an algorithm that closes doors to anything different or challenging.

I mean, if I had made the movies Josh Trank has made I’d probably tell people that browsing Rotten Tomatoes gives you AIDS. Trank does make challenging films, though; watching one of them challenged me to go an hour and forty minutes without slitting my wrists open in the bathtub like Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II just to make it stop.

I feel like Trank wouldn’t have such an issue with ranked lists of films if he wasn’t at the bottom of so many of them.

And maybe you’re thinking it’s not his fault, that the Fantastic Four is just a bad property; after all, the 2005 movie wasn’t exactly a cinematic masterpiece either. You would be very wrong because Fantastic Four was one of Marvel’s biggest titles for decades, bigger than The Avengers or The Incredible Hulk, only rivaled by Spider-Man and not eclipsed until Christmas Claremont and John Byrne took over The Uncanny X-Men in the late 70s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby split up the work on a lot of books, working with other writers and artists like Steve Ditko, Stan’s brother Larry and Jim Steranko, but Fantastic Four was the longest collaboration between Kirby and Lee, lasting 102 issues until Kirby left to work at the Distinguished Competition. The title remained popular, eventually being taken over by John Byrne, who left X-Men, by the Marvel’s highest-profile title, because Fantastic Four was still the closest thing Marvel had to a flagship title.

Fox and Sony basically plundered Marvel for the movie rights to all their best properties while the comic publisher was trying to pull itself out of bankruptcy, and the fact that they took Fantastic Four should tell you it was a marketable property. The failure to turn out a watchable film falls on the writer and director of this one. And spinning gold into unwatchable s**t like a reverse Rumpelstiltskin is probably doing more damage to the art of film-making than listicles.