Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
is another entertaining romp for the Marvel-superhero franchise. Reed
Richards, Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), is treading on thin ice when
his fiancée, Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba), thinks he's
more interested in a series of cosmic phenomena occurring around the
earth than in the preparations for their upcoming wedding. Sorry,
ladies, but Reed is right. The disturbances are caused by a surge of
cosmic power from a mysterious being called the Silver Surfer (an
all-CGI creation, modeled by Doug Jones and voiced by Laurence Fishburne),
who not only zooms around the skies on his board, but also has enough
power to fight the FF, sometimes by turning their own power against
them, not only mixing up Sue and Reed, but also Johnny Storm, the Human
Torch (Chris Evans), and Ben Grimm, the Thing (Michael Chiklis). But
that's not the worst of it. The Surfer is only an opening act, a herald
looking for planets! that his master, Galactus, can consume for his
sustenance.
With its initial installment, Fantastic Four established
itself as the superhero franchise that didn't take itself too seriously,
and that continues here. There are numerous moments of laugh-out-loud
humor, and the most angst they suffer is whether Sue and Reed will ever
be able to live a normal family life. (That, and whether they'll ever
really get married, of course.) If Fantastic Four were a normal
superhero franchise, the ending would be a knock-down drag-out war with
Galactus, featuring the FF in a colossal battle for the planet Earth and
the lives of everyone on it. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver
Surfer just doesn't do that, and we don't quite get the payoff we
expected. Effects are dazzling, but the Surfer looks too metallic, more
like a skyriding T-1000 robot. --David Horiuchi
