It sounded like a great idea: The up-and-coming director of the smart found-footage superhero movie Chronicle taking on the Fantastic Four in a totally reimagined version of the classic Marvel team.

Then the movie came out.

By any conceivable measure, 2015’s Fantastic Four was a disaster. It got a 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It grossed $167 worldwide. There were reports of all kinds of trouble behind the scenes. And it stopped the career of director Josh Trank dead in its tracks. Four years later, he’s yet to direct another project. (According to IMDb, Trank does have a new film in post-production.)

But now, Trank has done something interesting. He signed up for the movie reviewing and cataloguing site Letterboxd — and reviewed his own movie after watching it for the first time since 2015. And while he wasn’t quite as harsh as many viewers (he calls it “ALRIGHT”), he gave his own movie two out of five stars — a mixed but negative review.

You can read the entire thing at Letterboxd, but here’s an interesting excerpt:

Everyone in the film is a great actor, and overall there is a movie in there, somewhere. And that cast deserves to be in THAT movie. Everyone who worked on Fant4stic clearly wanted to be making THAT movie. But.... ultimately... It wasn’t.

Did I make that movie they deserved to be in?

To be honest?

I can’t tell.

What I can tell: is there are TWO different movies in one movie competing to be that movie.

Is there a #releasethetrankcut?

Doesn’t matter.

I’m not Zack Snyder.

Trank says he does not “regret any of it” even if the movie that was released in theaters was clearly not the one he wanted to make. (I once interviewed Fantastic Four screenwriter Jeremy Slater, who had some interesting comments about what he wrote and what they originally intended.) I like Fantastic Four even less than Trank does, but I give him credit for looking at his work and speaking honestly about it and the experience of making it. I would be curious to see his next movie — provided it is not a sequel to Fantastic Four.

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