Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – movie review
This is the second installment in what is looking to be a Silver Surfer franchise. What I am trying to decide, with all of this is whether or not it is a good thing. You see, there are very few times in my life where I am confused by the choices that people make. I rarely agree with them, I frequently disagree with corporate America or the movie conglomerates; but that doesn't mean that I can't see the numbers that are reported and see why the sequel is made.
Yet, when you create a sequel, and you hire the original writers to create that sequel, and you have them build upon the premise and mythology of the first movie; well, the thought, in my head, is that maybe you are abso-freakin-stupid to have parked your car in the same spot that it got hit by a series of golf balls. In this case, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a case in bad decision followed by bad decision followed by bad decision. It's classic.
Several years ago the Radio Shack corporation decided to expand its operation and opened up a series of big box electronics stores. This was, in the vein of the Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs and Costco's. In theory, people were trying to consolidate their spending and the locations of where they bought things; and as a result, the idea of what Radio Shack was trying to do made some sense. It was an almost immediate blunder that the company has tried to recover from. I guarantee you the CEO of the company and the brains behind that idea were canned pretty quickly.
In recent years, with the success of movies like The X-Men trilogy, Marvel Entertainment (previously Marvel Comics) has been shopping and making superhero movies. Sure, Superman and the ancillary movies, is more popular and better known for a lot longer with a host of TV shows, but in the case of the super-team dramas, Marvel has a better handle on the genre. Marvel Entertainment, seeing advances in technology, filming techniques, and special effects has come to a point where their properties, the comic book characters, come to life. This is a good thing; but in situations like The Fantastic Four I don't believe that Marvel Entertainment is doing the property justice.
There are some reasons for this.
But first, the movie. In the first movie you have to slog through how the team gets their super-powers. You have to realize that Reid Richards, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, Sue Storm, are in love and have tried to get married - however, Reid Richards is a genius, he is obsessed with his experiments and can't set aside work long enough to actually follow through on getting married to Sue Storm. As a result of this, he drives Sue Storm away. Then they go in to outer space with a friend/rival of Reid Richards - Victor Von Doom - the ruler of a fictional country and a very wealthy man.
In this movie the bad guy is really Galactus, the eater of worlds. He sends his forerunner to Earth to prepare the world to be consumer. This is the Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer made an agreement with Galactus to save his planet and the woman he loves. As a result of that, he goes from world to world eight days prior to Galactus and then the world is destroyed.
This becomes your "A" story. The "A" story is the main plot line of a movie or book that you follow. The "B" story is the story that runs parallel to the "A" story and compliments what is happening with it. There can be multiple "B" stories, but there is only, ever, one "A" story. For the Fantastic Four movies, the produces and writers want you to believe that between the first and second movies, the "A" story remains that Reid Richards and Sue Storm are trying to get married and that this is the main reason they are having problems. And yet, that's not the "A" story - it is, at best, a "B" story that should've stayed in the background, not be the primary source of conflict between the characters. And yet, you watch two hours (give or take) of a movie and deal with a wedding that, you JUST know, is only going to happen in the last scene of the movie.
It was painful.
The thing that makes a team movie a good movie is that you focus on one person. Sure, there is a team and you have to deal with the origin of the team, and in many cases the origin story of individual members of the team. Take X-Men as a good example of what I am talking about. When you start the movie you have two characters you are going to follow: one, Rogue, she discovers her powers and she becomes a focal character for the movie; but not the character we are going to follow - Rogue leads us to Canada where we are introduced to Wolverine. Over the course of all three movies, we slowly discover the origins of Wolverine's powers and what makes him the bad-a that he is.
The X-Men movies focus on one character even though you get to see in to the lives and, in a smaller way, their heads. But, you always follow one central character. It is a team movie that allows Wolverine to be the center of attention. This is important when you deal with a story. You can have a million-and-one characters in the story, but you have to follow the story from a central perspective. In the case of The X-Men that perspective is how Wolverine views a) the world he is entering; and b) the team environment as a long-time loner. You, as a member of the audience, get to explore that with him.
Fantastic Four doesn't do this. You, as a member of the movie franchises audience don't get to view this new world through the eyes of a central character. You don't identify with Sue Storm, Reid Richards, or anyone else. You don't get to experience the change in life that has taken place as a result of this fantastic change and the adaptation of powers. The problem you as the audience feels is that you don't really relate to Mr. Fantastic, you can't get inside of his head, and you don't care on wit what the man does because the mythos of the movie doesn't allow you to relate to someone who is, inherently, smarter and more of a genius than you and as a result, outside of your realm of understand/experience.
Instead of focusing attention, clearly, in one area where you get to watch everything unfold, and discover new things, from a central perspective you are bounced from one character to another as things happen/change. Where Reid Richards is asked by the Army to help them discover what is causing a lot of changes in the world and the potentiality of an alien being; at the same time you watch as Sue Storm prepares for her wedding and has massive jitters about having and raising a family when the eyes of New York City and the world are on your family.
Really, from a storytelling perspective, this was probably the worst choice in storytelling. People have fears about having children and raising a family without having to deal with super-powers. They get scared; they wonder whether or not they even should in a world that is in a greater degree of turmoil today than it was back when. This is scary. Add to that mix the idea of super powers, and the outcome is a slightly larger pile of doggie-doo-doo than is believable in this story.
And then you have the Silver Surfer.
Correct me here, please, but when you place in the title of a movie the name of the obstacle, it doesn't make sense to make that obstacle a "B" story in the movie. Really, with all of the time and effort spent on the wedding everything else was relegated to the land of "B" story. The Silver Surfer is launched in to the realm of the "B" story.
In order for the audience to get to the wedding, though, they have to wade through the world of the Silver Surfer and his coming to terms with what it is - exactly - that he does for Galactus. He has to see Sue Storm and interact with her. He has to realize that she reminds him of the woman he loves and left behind. He has to see the world through the eyes of the people he is trying to destroy and have his power taken away by - - dum dum dum - - Victor Von Doom, and in the end, he has to agree to confront this world eating bad guy who looks like a giant cloud that is about to surround the Earth. And yet, all of this is subservient to the "A" story of Sue and Reid getting married and their primary "B" story of what to do about children, when they are married, in a dangerous world made more dangerous with the addition of super-powers and super-responsibilities.
What you end up seeing is a movie that follows a movie about two people getting married. You see a movie that doesn't follow a believable central character. You see a movie that follows all four characters. You see a movie that doesn't focus on building to a climax. In the end, The Fantastic Four movies almost totally miss the point of story telling and story theory. Granted, you can break convention and be successful at it; but before you can do that you have to recognize that there are conventions that are being broken. What the writers, producers, and director of the movie don't grasp is that they are not allowing the audience to be a part of the movie. They make the audience apart from the movie.
In my estimation, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is not worth watching. The movie is something that breaks so many conventions that it is very painful to watch. It was not worth the $8.50 per ticket it cost plus popcorn and drinks. Really, going to a movie like this is all the harder when you realize you're being taken every which way to Sunday and back again so that a studio and a theatre can continue to report record ticket sales.
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