SolarPlexus

I managed to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer last night.

I’m not terribly impressed by superhero movies. Oh, I can appreciate the yarncraft of something like Superman (the Donner version) but I’m always a little uncomfortable with blokes in tights running around on screen - even if the tights are clad in leather armour (X-Men). Without wanting to (or being able to!) analyse it too much it seems to me that the stories and situations sit better at another layer removed - ie. on the comic page, in a boxed panel. Sticking them on screen brings it all uncomfortably close to real-life, and too close to the novelty Spiderman who opens village festivals. But perhaps that’s the nerd in me squirming - I mean, there may be folk in the audience who laugh at superhero comics, oh the shame.

Back to FF: ROTSS - on my scale of 1 to 10 for superhero movies, where 10 denotes Blade, and 1 denotes the mooted Antman movie (I mean, Antman? That’s got to be crap from the outset.), I’d pitch the FF sequel at a very average 5. It’s enjoyable enough to maintain interest for 90 minutes but I can’t help but view it with the lens of insider knowledge, and that, unfortunately, means I hated their vision of the world-eating Galactus…

Forgive me if this topic has already been done to death, but as the movie is still fresh in my mind I’ve got to let off some steam.

If you buy into the charm of the comic FF, you must be using the original Stan Lee / Jack Kirby stories as your guide. There was an inherent wackiness to their adventures, driven from the oddball team itself and their oddball adversaries. To NOT have Galactus as a 100-metre tall, purple-clad humanoid with square irises just flies in the face of the Lee / Kirby vision. Moreover, not having the guts to use this version, and instead opting for an interstellar cloud of fog smacks of a cop-out.

We could explain this away as the cloud being the carrier for our planet-smashing Galactus - in other words, he’s cloaked in a shroud of debris surrounding his vessel, and by removing him as a sentient character we simplify the story. But that’s as boring as this blog.

I note that several reviewers offer the phrase, “…using the comic Galactus would never have worked on film…”, and they singularly miss the point. Have they not seen Transformers yet?

An opportunity, missed.

A smashing site providing complete resources from the classic Look and Learn magazine - and an image gallery of approaching 20,000 pictures!

Mate Greg P went to see the third Spidey movie a few days ago. He commented on in a casual fashion in an email to me. It struck me as a lucid and balanced piece so I thought I’d present it here. Be warned - a couple of spoilers have slipped in!

“Spiderman 3 is an enjoyable movie but it fails to ignite fully - suffering from…

• too many supervillains and supporting characters, a-la ‘Batman & Robin’
• a slow start (after all the fuss made about the black suit, he doesn’t even put it on until about an hour in). Whilst most big budget blockbusters fall down by not having enough story, this stumbles for the opposite reason.
• a couple of contrived plot points (without dropping too many spoilers) concerning the deaths of both Peter’s Uncle Ben and Norman Osborne. These events may well have been lifted from the pages of the comics, however they are ’shoehorned’ into the storyline with a hefty agenda and little finesse.

However, some favourite moments are…

• the opening title sequence which offers a concise and stylish reminder of the previous two movies
• a mean and moody Peter Parker - watch out for his funky strut
• cameos from Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi and the now obligatory appearance by Stan Lee
• JJJ being JJJ
• Venom! Whilst this particular story thread is a bit rushed (well, there are two and a half films worth of plotlines to fit in) it’s great to see Spidey and Venom duking it out.

Overall - an entertaining film. Some good humour and exciting action sequences, but let down by including too much. The irony is that Sam Raimi may have expected this to be the last in the franchise, and packed it out with all the things he wanted to show us before bowing out. If he’d held back a little it would have made for a better movie that would have undoubtedly secured a fourth outing. As it is I think its touch and go, I’m sure the box office will have the final say.”

I’ve heard rumours that Spidey 4,5 and 6 are on the cards, if not actually in the bag. With record box office takings a feature of recent news, it’s a dead cert there will be a third sequel.

Wired News’ Tony Long explains that graphic novels are less worthy than “real” novels, in a stroke completely belittling the genius, intelligence and planning behind the creation of the graphic part of the equation. I replied, perhaps taking things to heart a little too much.

Footnote: since I’m reconstructing this blog from the old Blogger version, and editing the timestamp to maintain chronology, I can add crystal-ball type comments. I revisited this blog entry on the Wired site, and strangely all of the original comments have vanished, or been deleted. Odd.