Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre into the realms of excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
The Fantastic Four Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars
Rise of the Silver Surfer Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars
In the early 00’s The X-Men and Spider Man jump started superhero movies on the big screen (after 1997’s Batman and Robin nearly derailed the genre, more about that at this link) and suddenly Hollywood was all gung-ho once again to crank out films populated with comic book characters in tights. And one high-profile franchise that had never successfully made the jump to celluloid (we’ll ignore the Roger Corman cheepy from the 90’s) was the Fantastic Four. Now, with the advances in special effects that had occurred by the 21st century, this group could be brought to life on the big screen and two movies followed, one in 2005 and the second in 2007. The first gave us the origin story of the Fantastic Four, or at least its interpretation which directly involved Dr. Doom with the creation of the super-team and drastically changed the backstory of both Doom and the FF. Then the second movie introduced both the Silver Surfer and Galactus yet once again made major changes to the story and the characters (in fact, the latter only showed up as an amorphous cloud entity).
I am an old-time Fantastic Four fan who knows the comic book best from its original incarnation by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee which I read as a kid. (Hey, I read the 70’s reprints. I’m not that old!). I also followed many of their adventures after Kirby and Lee departed from the strip, but I still consider their original 100+ episodes the penultimate FF tales. So as a fan of the earlier appearances of the group, I found it rather disheartening that the movies took so many liberties with the source material. Superhero movies have regularly tinkered with the story and mythos of the characters to fit them into the big screen format, and that’s understandable. They have to cater to an audience that may not be as familiar with the characters and their backstory, and they may want to condense a fair amount of exposition to fit within the film’s running time. But the more successful superhero movies such as the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan Batman films as well as the first X-Men and Spider-Man films at least respected their source material, even if they did take some artistic license. The Fantastic Four films crossed the line, though, and ended up changing the backstory to the point that it disrespected its origins and ultimately degraded the quality of the films.
The origin story for this super-team is simple and well known among comic book aficionados. Four people with diverse and discordant personalities launch Reed Richards’ test rocket into space (originally to beat the Russians in the space race) and find themselves subjected to cosmic rays that give them super powers. They then decide to use their abilities to help people and they become the Fantastic Four. The first movie retains the germ of this idea, but pads on too many additional plot points and also turns the conception of their powers into an sfx-gasm scene. That’s all fine and well and could have worked okay, but the movie had too many additional diversions that ultimately derailed it. For me, and I’m sure for many FF fans, the biggest was tying Doctor Doom’s origin to that of the Fantastic Four. I understand where they wanted to do that to condense the storyline and expedite the justification for Doom’s enmity toward the FF, but that character had such a rich history from the comics that they just threw out the window. He’s actually one of the most iconic villains in all of comics, and yet they completely truncated his backstory and turned him into little more than an evil corporate villain. Then on top of that, he did not remain in his armor, but would pop in and out of it. I understand where the actor did not want to conceal his appearance, but that’s what this character is, the Darth Vader of comics. Changing that, more than anything else really killed this version of the character. All of this might have been acceptable if the movie itself rose above its dissing of its source material and actually gave us a good story. But it even failed at that, with the script doing little more than acting as a justification to string together multiple CGI-overload scenes.
I actually enjoyed the second FF movie more, but it still suffered from many of the same flaws as the first. I have always been a huge fan of the Silver Surfer character, and his first appearance in the Fantastic Four mythos (along with that of Galactus), makes for a great movie plot. And I actually thought they did a good job of bringing the SS character to life, though many others knocked the movie for this. But then they glossed over the tragic nature of the character, giving us almost none of Norrin Radd’s backstory, and really lost the emotional impact of the tale (I know, it was just a comic book to begin with, but what a story it delivered). I understand that writers always want to add their own twists, but they just went too far with this one. The original three-issue story arc that introduced the Silver Surfer and Galactus was an excellent (and classic) tale and it could have translated quite well to the big screen with minimal modifications. But instead we got a much watered down yarn designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and to justify the CGI-overkill it delivered. And then there’s the issue of how they handled the appearance of the Galactus character. I understand that the comic book version as Jack Kirby envisioned him would not have translated that well to the big screen. But a truly visionary director could have found a way to make this work and stay true to the spirit of the character without just copping out and delivering an amorphous smoke creature (that may or may not have actually been John Locke). So once again, the movie as a whole failed to overcome the various misfires it contained and ultimately fell short of delivering a satisfying cinematic experience.
As far as the casting of the superhero team, I thought they got this right on three out of four. Reed Richards is the most boring of the group and they got that mostly right. Johnny Storm is the hot head and we see that here, though with his arrogance played up even more. Michael Chiklis was the perfect Ben Grimm and actually deserved a spin-off film of his own. But I’m sorry, I could just never see Jessica Alba as Sue Storm. No knock against the actress herself, she was just not the right fit for the character (and she even later made the comment that playing in those films made her want to stop acting). And this was yet another example of where the film-makers were just not in tune with the source material that they drew from. Which ultimately resulted in them delivering two films that wowed the audiences with their dazzling CGI pyrotechnics, but never quite satisfied because they lacked substance and completely failed at brining one of the most celebrated superhero teams from comics to the big screen. And even though these movies did decently well at the Box Office, Marvel decided to cut bait after the second film, and gave up on the idea of a Silver Surfer spin-off, and they are now looking at completely rebooting the franchise; a testament in itself to the cinematic misfire that these two films represented.
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