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by R.J. Carter Published: September 30, 2007
The trick to enjoying "Rise of the Silver Surfer" is to realize that it's not an action movie -- it's an action/comedy. It's intended to be full of moments that are either over the top or just plain silly, from seeing Reed Richards stretch his limits on the dance floor to Johnny asking the Thing about how he and his girlfriend consummate their relationship. The film opens with Reed (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue (Jessica Alba) planning their wedding -- for the fourth time. It seems every chance they've had to tie the knot has been postponed due to some life-threatening emergency. This time, Reed vows that nothing is going to distract him from going through with the ceremony.
The show crosses the lines from comedy into farce on a number of occassions, almost always during times of forced product placement. Johnny enters the room with a Dodge logo emblazoned across his torso, and when Reed later unveils the new Fantasticar he designed and built, it too bears the Ram emblem (and Reed confirms to Johnny that it does, indeed, have a Hemi.) Julian McMahon returns as Victor Von Doom, continuing to portray the Marvel arch-villain in the same vein as Kevin Spacey did Lex Luthor in "Superman Returns" -- which is to say, not all that convincingly. He's just wrong for this part. However, if I'm comparing this film to "Superman Returns," I may as well state that "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer" beats it, hands down, mishandlings and all. Probably the biggest fault of the film is that -- like the comic book -- it tries to blend comedic moments with scenes of high adventure. Unlike the comic book, it doesn't make those transitions believably, partly because director Tim Story lets each member of the foursome be a comedian, which runs contrary to their established characteristics. For decades of comics, Ben Grimm (the only truly perfect casting in this film, played by Michael Chiklis) and Johnny Storm have been the long-established cut-ups, while Sue's sense of humor is more subdued and Reed's is nearly non-existent, making it all the more humanizing of him when he does show a rare glimpse of it. There is a nice throwaway reference to the fans in the audience however, as we are introduced to Frankie Raye (played by Beau Garrett) whom Surfer fans will recall later becomes a herald of Galactus herself. Vanessa Minillo also returns to the franchise in a bit part as Johnny's date at the wedding of Sue and Reed, which finally is allowed to happen. The first disc of this two-disc edition is double-sided, featuring both widescreen and full-screen versions of the feature presentation. Both contain two optional commentary tracks, one with Story, the other with producer Avi Arad, writer Don Payne, and editors Peter S. Elliot and William Hoy. The second disc of the set contains a number of bonus featurettes, starting with nearly ten minutes of raw footage of extended and deleted scenes (with optional commentary by Tim Story.) This is worth watching just to see Johnny and Ben help Reed out by running errands to prepare for the wedding.
The "Interactive Fantasticar" is a bit of a letdown. It's twelve pieces of concept artwork, and the interactive bit is that you can pick which of the twelve you want to look at from a horizontal scrollbar. The Fantasticar is then featured in another mini-documentary, the ten minute "The Fantasticar: State of the Art" where Gruffudd, concept artist Tim Flattery, and Charlie Zurian and Mark Demlin from TransFX show how the car was designed. Marvel in awe of the impressive Gantt charts. "The Power Cosmic" is a fifteen minute feature hosted by John Kilkenny, Senior VP of VFX at 20th Century Fox. Kilkenny talks of starting with several of the iconic poses of the Surfer as drawn by Jack Kirby, then working with the folks at WETA and Doug Jones to do all the motion-capture, as well as toning down exactly how mirrored the Surfer's surface was, for aesthetic reasons. The big kahuna of all the featurettes is the forty minute "Sentinel of the Spaceways: Comic Book Origins of the Silver Surfer." Here, Stan Lee talks about working with Jack Kirby on the Fantastic Four comic book as they came up with the story of Galactus. According to Lee, when he got the pages back from Kirby, Kirby had come up with and added in the character of the Silver Surfer all on his lonesome -- and people say Lee's a credit hog! Other Silver Surfer writers from years past are also interviewed, including Jim Starlin, Ron Marz, Steve Englehart, and J.M. DeMatteis, as they discuss using the character of the Surfer to address social issues, turning him into a sort of "Christ on a surfboard" before finally taking him back into space to encounter other alien creations of the Marvel universe. "Character Design with Spectral Motion" is a twelve minute look at the creation of The Thing, and how the FX department enhanced his look from the original film. A good deal of this is narrated by Michael Chiklis while he's having the face and torso applied. He does some "Thinglander" fashion poses for us, and demonstrates that the voice of his character isn't electronically modified at all, but one of his own natural voices. Wrapping up the documentaries is a four minute segment with composer John Ottman and conductor Damon Intrabartolo, in "Scoring the Fantastic." The last bonus feature is a set of still galleries, containing twenty-five "Behind the Scenes" shots, forty-five "Character" shots, and thirty pieces of "Concept Art." Audio for the feature presentation can be set to English 5.1 Dolby Digital, French Dolby Surround, or Spanish Dolby Surround, with optional subtitling in English or Spanish. Previews on this disc include "The Simpsons Movie" and "Live Free or Die Hard." |
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