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Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: June 18, 2007              

Ignoring, if we may, superficialities such as talent, Jessica Alba would seem to be an infallible asset for any movie. She is a natural beauty, slender and shapely, with perfect skin, dark eyes, and a smile that somehow blissfully sanctions both innocence and corruption, no doubt by mischievous and highly intelligent design, as if she had been forged of sunlight and magma by some two-diety tandem, in answer to all of man’s misguided prayers, and consigned here among us to keep a new generation sadly shuffling their chosen beat between the heavens and the netherworld. A filmmaker need only hand her a phone book to read, or maybe a thesaurus, and roll the camera. Entertainment will ensue.

And so, firmly committed to lousing up their movie, the makers of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer hired Jessica Alba for their film, and then dyed her hair an unconvincing blonde, and screwed blue contact lenses into her corneas, and encased her face in pale chalky makeup, completely cleansing her beauty of all reality. “Good job!” they told themselves. “She looks nothing like herself!” And having scaled this Mt. Everest of idiocy, they then coasted down the other side on easy-to-execute foolishness like bad screenwriting and second-rate special effects.

Meanwhile, re-designing Jessica Alba is the one nervy thing they did. Every other mis-step by these clowns was fairly gingerly taken. All the conflicts in the film are manufactured, all the resolutions are mundane, and the four heroes themselves are completely un-fantastic. For instance, these characters lean way too heavily on the belief that the essence of comedy is to speak blasé high school slang in the face of apocalyptic catastrophe. This approach to dialogue may have felt fresh back in the eighties when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit the scene. But the tactic is merely lazy anymore, and since no one in the audience is laughing, all it really does for a film is undermine any attempt at drama. After all, the sky is falling in this movie. And the characters, with their “My bad” mea culpas, and so forth, might as well be saying: “These CGI effects are bogus. We’re not really in danger.”

Yes, as promised in the title, The Silver Surfer does make an appearance in this movie. I admit, I never bought into “The Surfer” when I was a kid, but I understand he is a cult favorite among the comic book crowd. Well, this movie isn’t likely to earn him any new fans. This so-called superhero is essentially the T2 robot, only with less personality, and flying around on a magic surfboard, summoning a galactic destroyer of planets, until Jessica Alba changes his mind just by gazing at him with her weird blue contact lenses, and telling him: “We all have a choice.” I don’t know whether this makes him a hero, or just a horny silver bastard with no genitals, but I’ll tell you what, folks: I see what people mean when they insist, “Ghost Rider wasn’t that bad.”

Aside from Ms. Alba, the primary attraction of this flick is likely to be the visual effects. It’s true that two or three shots have some scope and pizzazz, but these “money shots” seem to have absorbed most of the film’s budget, because the rest of the movie (the stuff you don’t see in the trailer) looks cheap. In particular, the poor elastic fellow is consistently horribly rendered. And The Thing, as embodied by Michael Chiklis, looks a lot like an Emmy Award winning actor wearing a bright orange rubber Halloween costume. The Human Torch appears to be on fire, but—and I don’t mean this as a pun—he doesn’t seem to generate any heat. And the invisible girl, well, bravo… they got that effect right.

Meanwhile, I’m still hung up on the writing. How does a screenplay this atrocious make it into production? There must be countless writers in Hollywood who would gladly take a stab at this script. So what is going on out there, under the rainless skies? This is America, people. Competition breeds excellence. Make the most of it, Hollywood, and use the rolodex next time.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld