Pop Culture Media Post V
June 17th, 2007So last night Bernt and our respective wives saw Fantastic Four II: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Spoilers may or may not follow.
I’m pretty sure I’m one of like 4 people in America who liked the first FF movie, so I was actually looking forward to this one. It seems that the take in the intarwebs (well, at least on the nerdy sites i frequent) is that the FF movies are an abomination…but I enjoyed this one as well. My initial take is I feel like the first one was more ‘fun’ but I’m not quite sure what that comes from. Once again, the Thing/Human Torch dynamic was well done, a good capturing of their relationship. Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman have much better control of their powers and that’s fun. One of the things that struck me the most, oddly, enough, was Jessica Alba’s seemingly giant blue eyes…I don’t remember being taken out of the action in the first movie quite like this one, and I’m well aware that Ms. Alba normally doesn’t have blue eyes, but these just looked ridiculous. I tried to find some comparative shots between movies online but searching ‘Jessica Alba’ on Google Images seemed to turn up more trouble than was worth.
Back to the movie…So in the movie Galactus is either a cloud, or just offscreen the whole time. Depending on how you look at it. I really didn’t have a problem with that…Galactus is a great villian, but I can imagine him being shown in the movie the way he actually is in the comic books, and come on, the guy has a purple outfit with some kind of skirt and a goofy helmet. I fear if he was shown in the movie the same way it was have an unintentional Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man effect. Cute and amusing but not really ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ scary. So I’m just fine with the angle they went with Galactus.
Overall, it’s a good movie. FF has never inspired the same kind of passion with me that the whole Spider-man mythos has, but in this movie the Silver Surfer is entertaining [aside: if they make a Silver Surfer movie, will he just fly around and wax philosophic about earth and life and such? 'Cause that's pretty much what all I remember from the few SS books I ever read.], the FF acts like a family like they do in the books, and I felt like I got $8 worth of entertainment.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:39 am
interesting stuff….as always, i’ll have to wait til it comes out on video.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Right on with your review. I’d like to add the “orangeness” of Jessica’s skin. Either she had a fake tan or too much vitamin C. I’ll let the viewer decide.