random incoherence and infantile meanderings

We watched Fantastic Four and the follow up Rise of the Silver Surfer today.  I was pleasantly surprised by the first.  I had been expecting a steaming pile and didn’t get it.  On the other hand, I was disappointed by Rise of the Silver Surfer.  The significant difference between the two movies was that the first had a story with the traditional beginning, middle, and end; while the second did not.

My impression of the actors stayed the same throughout both films.  The dude playing Mr. Fantastic was fine.  He was playing a boring, unemotional nerd and was really very boring.  (Kind of like Cyclops actually.)  Jessica Alba couldn’t act her way out of bag.  And in Silver Surfer, they did something to her hair and eyes to make her look more like Sue, and well… she looks fake/bad.  Chris Evans, the Human Torch, was really quite believable as the hotheaded party dude.  Quite charismatic.  Michael Chiklis was absolutely wasted as the Thing, but then again… There were moments where I was reading emotions off of the Thing, despite only being able to see his eyes.  I guess not every actor could pull that off.  And I’m a fan of the guy, McMahon maybe, who played Dr. Doom.  He was such a good bad guy in Charmed.

Crap, I wasn’t supposed to admit that.

Anyhow, FF is okay.  The story is a basic retelling of the FF creation myth.  I am somewhat unfamiliar with the details of Stan Lee’s origin tale, so I don’t know if Doom was supposed to be involved.  Doesn’t really matter to me.  We were introduced to the characters, the big thing went bad turning them into powers, they fought each other and the bad guy, they came back together and won the day.  Nothing special or anything, but it worked well enough.

FF: RotSS on the other hand… basically a menacing figure appears, coincidentally re-awakens Doom, fights with Torch turning him into a power swapping machine, gets captured by Mr. Fantastic because the Surfer is distracted by Invisible Girl.  Then Doom takes the surf board, the Four release the Surfer, Torch takes everyone’s powers and beats Doom, and returns the board to Surfer.  Oh, forgot to mention that Sue gets deaded with a cosmic spike.  Then the whiny Surfer decides to actually fight against Galactus (who appears as a swirling cloud) and they both disappear in a big poof.

I just can’t seem to see the point of the story.  It almost appears that it should be about Sue convincing Surfer to stand up to Galactus.  But it’s not.  Which means there was no real point to any of it.  Blah.  Booo!

On the good side, Stan Lee actually played himself in the second one.  Heh.