Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Written at the time of the film's release. A not-great review for a not-great movie, although rather prophetic at the end there. 

  Galactus Intolerant

Well, first, a confession: I'm not a huge fan of Jack Kirby, the artist who collaborated with Stan Lee to produce the Fantastic Four comic, the self-described "World's Greatest Comic Magazine!!" In some circles, this is considered blasphemy. I find Kirby's work great in the macro—he knew how to design a page to draw the eye—but cringe-inducing in the micro—he had very "creative" ways to convey human anatomy, for which he is given a pass from the folks who usually complain about those things.* He would occasionally hit on a good idea, but usually the stuff he created was really "out there," if not downright juvenile. For every "Silver Surfer," (which is a pretty silly concept, let's face it, though it "worked."), there was his Apokolips Figure of Death, "The Black Racer," who was an armored black guy...on skis. The guy flew through the air...on skis...with poles...and would appear right before you died. If I was dying, I could buy my life passing before my eyes, or a winged angel, or Neil Gaiman's little Goth-girl. But, a flying guy on skis? Pretty stupid. At least I'd get a good laugh before I kicked the bucket.

But I was a big fan of the old Hanna-Barbera "Fantastic Four" cartoon in the 60's, so I've always been a little nostalgic (which means, I look at it with blinders on) for the FF, no matter how wide Kirby drew their fore-heads. I didn't see the first FF movie because the trailer looked atrociously cheesy. I just didn't bother. I figured I'd catch up with it on video (which I never did). But I did want to see The Rise of the Silver Surfer, because if its one thing those early Fantastic Four stories did well, they produced a truly imaginative cosmic scope. I wanted to see how it re-produced on the Big Screen.

The answer: not bad. When FF2:TROTSS (what an unfortunate acronym!) concentrates on the heinous exploits of The Silver Surfer--the name says all you need to know, and as you might guess, he talks profoundly as if he was preaching Shakespeare--and the approach of its Master, the planet-consuming Galactus, it does a fine job, recreating that iconic Marvel sense of "I don't know what it IS, but it sure is BIG!" In fact, the climactic battle for this film is more focused and a considerably better set-piece than the Big Events of the latest Superman, Batman, X-men and Spider-man films, which all tended to over-complicate things and fall apart at the end. There are shots that stay with you, like the one where The Surfer parts trees in a forest, and, suddenly appears, incongruously non-organic in the natural setting. Or the Galactus-like shadow passing over and disrupting the rings of Saturn.

Where the thing (not "The Thing") falls flat is in the other 90% of the movie, and a lot of it is just inexplicable. The acting is...troubling. Andre Braugher's in this, and he commands the screen by holding back, while everybody else is busy flailing. Michael Chiklis' "Thing"/Ben Grimm is terrific, but the considerable make-up work doesn't suggest rock so much as the cracked surface of a chocolate cookie. I expected to hate Chris Evan's Johnny Storm, aka "The Human Torch," but I found the actor's take on the character fun and his portrayal of it very assured (and Johnny has the dramatic character arc in this one). But who told Julian McMahon that arch-villain Dr. Doom should be portrayed like an ineffectual Euro-trash fashion designer? And with all the blonde actresses in the world, whose bright idea was it to cast Jessica Alba who 1) can't act--her best scenes in this are when she's...unconscious--and 2) isn't remotely someone who could pass for a) blonde, or b) Johnny Storm's sister. And Ioan Gruffud just doesn't have the gravitas needed to pull off the role of uber-genius Reed Richards (he has hair problems, too--the grey at his temples comes and goes) and, if anything, he suggests the bland heroes that inhabited the Gerry Anderson puppet shows.

Director Tim Story keeps everything brightly lit, and it hums along editorially, but there are lots of things that just make ya wince--the usual Soap Opera, Marvel-style, here represented by Reed and Sue's difficulties dealing with fame and a celebrity wedding, an inexplicable and underdeveloped "Wedding Bells are Breakin' Up that Old Gang o' Mine" dead-end that makes a Big Unintended Statement against Diversity before it's abandoned, and another dance routine with Mr. Fantastic dancing his own version of the Funky Chicken, or is that the Rubber Chicken (Story does give him a wierdly apt Gene Kelly "Gotta Dance!" moment, though).

And, again, too much with the Stan Lee cameo! For any future Marvel movie, can we just give him a sign to hang around his neck that says "I USED TO BE STAN LEE," and place him randomly in crowd scenes? I think that would be more effective than stopping the movie cold so we can have an uninterrupted scene of Stan.

So, bad movie...with some good aspects to it. But if there's an FF3, they need to go back to the casting stage if there's going to be any improvement.

* I remember reading a letter in some comics magazine written by Bill Mumy (as "Billy" Mumy, he played Will Robinson on "Lost in Space"). He was responding to an interview with Carmine Infantino, who was editor-in-chief at DC when Kirby was working there, and Infantino had some critical things to say about Kirby's work, to which Mr. Mumy took great umbrage, and declared that he was going to have to re-evaluate Infantino's own artwork, given his words regarding "The King." I would say that my opinion of Mr. Mumy's work might have been influenced by his letter, but it wasn't--I've always thought he was a talentless hack.

San Andreas

Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?
or
"...And Upon This Rock I'll Build My Search."

San Andreas, like Titanic, hits the disaster movie formula just right—have a catastrophic event, but concentrate on just a handful of people. Oh, there are a lot of people in San Andreas. it's just that their roles amount to only a few seconds before we don't care about them anymore. They're basically innocent by-standers caught in the shaking.

Nope the action is extraordinarily focused: it's just Dwayne Johnson's extended-family-by-divorce (Carla Gugino, Ioan Gruffud, Kylie Minogue, Alexandra Daddario), the love interest for Ms. Daddano (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his brother—who fulfills the role of "kid in jeopardy"(Art Parkinson), the folks at CalTech (Paul Giamatti, the handy reporter-expositioner played by Archie Panjabi, and some student-players).

And that's it.*

No, really. That's it. It ain't an all-star cast in line to fall through the cracks, it's basically that clutch of actors doing their best to be interesting...and the rest who get minimal screen time, who are lucky if they last past an edit. If you're going to have a big disaster, best to keep it intimate, I guess.

It's just another day for LAFD Chief Rescue Pilot Raymond Gaines (Johnson**): a blonde in a tank top and tight jeans (Morgan Griffin) has just careened off the freeway (damn kids, texting and driving) and her car is suspended on a tree-limb in a deep and tight gully and it takes some kind of helicopter wizard to get deep enough in the trench to winch her out. Ray's your man. One of the young turks on-board decides she's cute enough to rescue himself but gets himself pinned in the attempt. And (uh-oh) they're running out of gas. So, even though he's the Chief Pilot, Ray does the job himself, grabbing the girl, freeing the turk and whisking them both up to the chopper. Radiant smiles all around.  

"They" say that this is a shot from San Andreas on the Interwebs,
but it's actually from Fast and Furious 6..because 1) that's Gina Carano
(not Carla Gugino, but one can see the confusion..???) next to The Rock and
2) he's not wearing his LAFD helmet (which is why they're using the pic)

Hey, we're just getting started. Witty banter post rescue turns into domestic drama/skin shot as Ray cell-talks to daughter Blake (Daddario) sunning herself poolside in a bikini. I have completely forgotten what they talked about. I think it was a bicycle. Now, one could grouse about this (if this male writer weren't so grateful), but there is a general obsession with pulchritude in San Andreas. Now, it is both of the female and male variety, which is damned fair of them. And one would be suspicious of that if the women in this film weren't as capable (and frequently more so) than the men involved (when they are not completely incapacitated, like stuck in the back-seat of a vehicle being crushed by a crumbling garage, for instance). No, Carla Gugino runs like Captain America across calving roof-tops rarely missing a step; Daddario can find emergency supplies at the drop of fire-truck and doesn't even break a sweat when pulling a big shard of glass out of a femoral muscle, and when she runs...whatever else is in the frame becomes irrelevant. And forgotten.

Oh. The bicycle. Back to that. She needs it for going to school in San Francisco, which Ray will be driving her to. Well, that plan collapses when he drives over to his estranged wife's house and finds that boyfriend Daniel (who's moving in) will be doing that. Oops. Somebody forgot to mention that. Poor Ray. His family is starting to split apart.

He thinks HE has problems.

Now, if somebody is taking this too far in any film-scholarly direction, one could say that this is a character set-up of magnification/identification.  As his word starts to shatter, Gaea does the same in sympathy. Well, if so, she's overdoing it. Over at CalTech, seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Giamatti), who, after giving an alarming lecture in his Earthquake 101 class, is excited to hear that a bunch of "magnetic pulse rates" are "spiking" in Nevada.  Road trip!  So, he and a research assistant (Will Yun Lee) go to the oh-so-safe location of Hoover Dam to do "spike readings" (to quote any Republican taking money from coal interests or big-oil: "I'm not a scientist, so I really can't say...") with Giamatti safely on top of the dam and the disposable minority actor deep in some dam bowel of the thing. Things get spiky, then shaky, and ...oh no!

This might be from Superman, the Movie, come to think of it...

Giamatti runs back to CalTech (because that's what you do when you've been in a disaster that has probably closed roads including the one on Hoover Dam that doesn't exist anymore. And he has time enough to speculate to the handy TV reporter (who just happens to be filming there) that "The Big One" is coming, without once recalling Fred Sanford.

"So...WHEN did you say it was going to happen again?"

Back to the San Francisco trip, Ray, who had planned to take Blake, finds out creepy Daniel is taking her, instead. Ray furrows his brow and takes it like a 260 pound man. It turns out he's flying that day, anyway—what, he didn't know he was working?  Good thing, too, because he's the only one with his feet not on the ground when "The Big One" hits. Ray's ex is caught having a high-rise lunch with her future sister-in-law (Minogue), while Blake is cooling her heels in one of Daniel's San-Fran high-rises, passing time with a nervous job interviewee (Johnstone-Burt) and his buttinski little brother (Parkinson). And before you can say "spiking magnetic pulse rates" things start shaking.

And falling over.

Yowtch. These are the scenes we came to see—wholesale CGI destruction on a city-wide scale along with the resulting tsunami's, flooding and sinking buildings. And to insure the thing gets a PG-13 rating, we don't see that many people getting hurt. You know, they run out the exit door and the person following them sees that (woopsy) the next step is 40 floors down. Buildings calve on-camera.  People die off-camera. Just like real life. The scenes are spectacular, sure. But, they are also soulless to anyone without an Edifice Complex.

"Think Blake's in there?" "Hope not."

The rest of the movie is spent trying to put together what Nature and family history has rent asunder—Ray and ex try to get from smashed-up Los Angeles to crushed San Francisco to try and find Blake to be re-united as one big happy family...who have to live in a tent for the next twenty years. What do you think happens?

The "Hollywood" sign collapses for the umpteenth time in movies.

In the meantime, there are set-pieces and falling pieces of sets. There are enough practical effects with water that probably are the sole reason for California's drought and anything and everything citified gets smashed, crashed and dashed. Meanwhile, the problems of the Gaines family is all the movie cares about—one gets the impression that the "pitch" says "Family splits apart. Earth splits apart. Family gets back together." "Family Values Movie of the Summer." And California? Well, let's say we can start re-developing. The rental prices have finally bottomed out.

An extreme way to handle Norovirus...

The whole Gaines family story-line would have made a mere sub-plot in the old disaster movies of old—the The Hurricane's, the San Francisco's, even The Towering Inferno's. Those movies usually handled the entire of San Andreas' entire plot in a couple of shots—you see a distinctive couple early on and then several story-lines  and a whole lot of destruction later, you can pick them out re-united in a pan shot. But, it takes all of San Andreas to do that. Yes, the shots of earthquackery in both Los Angeles and San Francisco are spectacularly and even (perversely) lovingly rendered in their detail, and that's where the most care went into the film. Other than that, there's not much there, as the basis of it is pretty weak. But isn't that the lesson of every earthquake movie (or, for that matter, earthquake)? That you need to have a better foundation? 

"And I bought this place for the view..."

* Um, but if you look at IMDB, you'd think every actor in Hollywood worked on this thing. Yeah, maybe a couple hours.  It makes me wonder how many people on IMDB pad their resumes with this thing.

** An odd thought struck me in this particular performance: Johnson could be the love-child of Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger (With Schwarzenegger, you never know...)

Well, this'll solve California's water shortage