Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer (2007): Untimely Reviews

Here’s the link to the video version if you prefer sound over text. It’s also at the end of this article as well.

Yo, welcome to another Untimely review. This time we’re talking about a sequel to a video that I did about the fantastic four movie from 2005 which if you’re interested, you can see here. Don’t worry though this video is going to be easy to watch and enjoy if you still haven’t seen it but I will reference different changes to characters or other things if I think its important.

Alright on to the story.

So major spoilers for Chris Evan’s second attempt at playing a super hero.

STORY `

We open on (INSERT GENERIC PLANET NAME HERE) as it looks like its starting to turn into some smoker lungs that they show on those Smoking stops here commercials. And after all the planets life seems to have been drained away, we see a little beam of energy fly away which takes us to our movie logo.

Moving on from that lifeless planet, we fly past the moon, same vibe so it makes sense and we see that little energy beam fly towards Earth. It flies through Japan, which this movie is so nice to tell us and we see some Japanese fisherman react but we don’t know what they’re saying because they didn’t decide to put any subtitles.

Then we see the beam travel through Giza, Egypt. This time they didn’t really need to tell us since the pyramids are right there but hey I appreciate the help.

The last place the beam travels through is LA and it knocks the power out as it travels

And even though we just saw that happen, we get some exposition from a news lady about it and we found out that Reed Richards and Susan Storm are getting married. With that we see that the Fantastic Four have become celebrities as they’re hounded at the airport and as a souvenir for some kids, Ben Grimm or the THING gives some kids some rock eczema. This movie might already be better than the first.

We get some more of that Chris Evans charm and their commercial flight takes off.

There’s another news broadcast about the things we’ve see twice already and we see the remodeled Baxter Building.  For some reason, now Reed can move his rubber fingers super quickly and it is disturbing. We see that Johnny is trying to get Reed to have a bachelor party and at first he doesn’t one but says alright we can have one but. Reed says NO EXOTIC DANCERS . Considering that this movie is rated PG, I’m sure there were several non-adults who learned what that meant at a time they probably shouldn’t have.

We switch to see that the beam of light is still traveling the world and we pick up in Latveria where we see that VICTOR VON DOOM is BACK BABY.

Then we go back to see the bachelor party in full swing which definitely meant that Johnny was gonna throw it anyway. Some stuff happens that doesn’t matter, The Thing makes my new favorite dancing video and we see some military guys going up to the double ff’s place.

Anyway, when we get back to the bachelor party Reed is explaining to the women around him  how the big bang happened and that somehow transitions to him dancing, doing some stretching white people dances and getting caught being a little too handsy by his fiancé and those military guys.

We find out that the military guys were looking for Reed because they need his help in figuring out what that beam of light is, that’s been traveling around the world. He declines because he’s getting married on Saturday, which is nice but seems to be really shortsighted but hey I’m not getting married anytime soon maybe I’m off in that.

After the military guys leave, we go back to Latveria to see DOOM taking off his mask and then we just cut right back to the Baxter building, where we see that Reed is actually building the sensor for the military and just lied to save face. Huh maybe men are all the same.

The next day, it’s the wedding day and we get a Stan Lee cameo where he tries to get in the wedding but the guy doesn’t believe that he’s Stan Lee. Come to think of it, as far as I know, I think this is the only cameo where Stan Lee technically just plays himself.

Then we see that the beautiful chocolate queen from the last movie is still with Ben and she gives a pep talk to Sue, who’s having some wedding jitters. Then we see Reed going through the same feelings, we get a sex joke, again in a PG movie and after all that we see DOOM in the same chair that Wade from Kim Possible had as he’s monitoring the beam of light.

We cut back to the wedding ceremony but its interrupted because of the beam of light coming through New York. Luckily, nobody dies when a HELICOTER just plows through the ceremony, Johnny chases after the beam and then we see that this whole time, it’s the Silver Surfer. Wow almost like the movie was named after him. Johnny chases him to DC and gets choked out by him which is honestly pretty cool and then takes him into the upper atmosphere and drops him back to Earth.

We then see the Silver Surfer call out to someone and say that the planet awaits them.

When we get back to the Baxter Building, we see that the Silver Surfer knew he was being tracked and destroyed the sensor and Sue and Reed talk about never being able to lead regular lives because well I think you would know by now.

Since Johnny was feeling weird after his run in with the Surfer, Sue goes to check on him and their powers switch so Johnny can turn invisible and Sue can be on fire. Once that’s resolved, it happens again but with Ben so he loses his rocky exterior and replaces it with fire, while Johnny looks like he needs some Lubriderm Extra Strength. It’s resolved but Johnny has to isolate from the others just in case.

Reed tells Sue that after everything is over, they can stop being superheroes and move away from the city life so that they can live a normal life but Johnny overhears and takes it a ways

We then see a Von Doom helicopter in Greenland, which is strange because it sure seemed like he lost his company in the last movie but I guess I missed something. Anyway DOOM talks to the Surfer and tries to join forces, The surfer is just like Nah, then DOOM attacks him, the Surfer shrugs it off and looks like he disintegrates him at first but he just gets transported inside a cave but we see that his scars are healing.

When we pick back up with the team, Johnny tells Ben that Reed and Sue want to the leave the team, we find out that after the Surfer visits a planet eight days later, all life on that planet is gone and they figure out through some quick maths, that the silver Surfer is going to be in London but for some reason, they don’t specify that its London. I mean yeah they show off Big Ben and that giant ferris wheel but I would like some consistency here.

While on the ride there, the team is super dysfunctional because of the whole team disbanding thing, once in London, we get some heroic moments, Johnny is blamed for something that wasn’t really his fault, and Reed kinda turns on him.

After the failure in the London, the military bring in DOOM to help. Now this is where I think the movie really starts to fall apart but I’ll get to that later.

After they beef for a minute or 2, DOOM explains that they need to separate the Surfer from his board, Ben and Johnny have the closest thing to a heart to heart that they can have and Reed figures out a possible solution to get the surfer off his board.

Once the machine is done, we pick up with the team in Germany, hey they brought the text back and Reed gets in his bag and tells the head military guy, he’s calling the shots or nothings getting done.

When its time to get the plan going, the Surfer pops up on Sue and explains that he’s not the one that’s destroying the planet and while Sue is doing a good job at getting some answers, of course the military thinks its taking too long so they shoot a rocket at Sue, Reed and the surfer, like that was going to help.

The surfer uses his board to eat the fucking rocket and guess what the military decide to do. Shoot even more rockets which obviously makes the Surfer mad and several people are undoubtably killed just because of this.

Once Sue finishes her part of the mission, the machine is done, activated and the Surfer falls off his board.

After that, they take him to Siberia for questioning which does not seem to be on the up and up but the US military in this movie kinda sucks so far so makes sense. Anyway, the Surfer is being interrogated and tortured and once the military decides to take a break, Sue sneaks in to talk to the Surfer.

Once there we get the Galactus name drop that we’ve been waiting an hour for and the surfer shows Sue a nice home video on his wash board abs.

The surfer gets really cliché about why he serves Galactus but I’m pretty sure it’s the same reason as in the comics so whatever I guess but the part about him protecting Sue because she reminds him of the one he wants to protect is CORRRRRNY.

We then cut to Galactus chewing through Saturn like its nothing,

Then we find out that Doom is apart of this mission because he wanted to do some experiments on the board but duh he’s the bad guy from the first one, theres no way he was telling the   truth so he zaps these guys with his home made lighting fingers and he even made sure to bring his mask just for his supervillain scenes and at least for the remaining 30 or so minutes of this movie, he gets the power of the Silver Surfer.

Doom then goes on to kill the head military guy, good, the team go break out the surfer and track down DOOM in the Fantastic-car, it’s a bad name but at least its on brand. Specifically the dodge brand cause even superheroes gotta eat.

They find DOOM, fight in some mountains for a bit, end up fighting in China, Sue gets stabbed and the giant space storm Galactus is here.

Then Johnny gets the idea to take everyone’s powers into himself, super Skrull style and gives DOOM the hands to break his connection with the board.

Sue straight up dies but then the Surfer does something, with his hands that causes her to come back to life, he flies up to Galaactus and sacrifices himself to save Earth.

Then the movie ends with an impromptu Chinese wedding that they definitely had on a green screen, and we see that the Silver Surfer is still alive.

Alright now that the story’s out of the way, how was it?

OVERALL THOUGHTS

Well first of all, it felt way longer than only an hour and half and part of that is because it feels like nothing is fucking happening during the movie   until the last 30 minutes.

The pacing is just awful, there’s way too many scenes where either nothing happens or something happens but much of the conversation was unnecessary. Like we really didn’t need a scene of seeing the Surfer call out to Galactus, We definitely didn’t need so many scenes of DOOM in Latveria doing nothing.

The movie just feels all over the place, there’s relationship drama, family drama, END OF THE WORLD problems and the issue is, the movie kinda makes all of them feel equal because of how the characters react. There’s also just unnecessary tension between characters like with DOOM and everyone, the Surfer and everyone and the military just being jarheads.

But lets get into some of the acting

Same as with the first movie, Chris Evans is great as Johnny, Michael Chiklis is fun as Ben, it actually seems like they gave Jessica Alba less to do and uhhhhhh Reed actually has some cool flashes of being a leader but it never feels like they change throughout the movie. Sure Johnny I guess becomes more aware of his actions but that was supposed to be his arc in the first one, Sue and Ben don’t do anything or change and Reed’s confidence boost kinda comes out of nowhere.

Even the ending sucks, everyone who knows anything about comics and have seen this movie already knows that what they did to Galactus was just fucking disrespectful honestly.  For those that don’t know anything about Galactus, just know that he’s this huge Cosmic being that eats planets, the movie got that right but he isn’t a space cloud. He actually kind of has a personality and feeds on planets to keep the universe in order along with some other stuff that doesn’t matter to the average person. Also just FYI, there’s absolutely no way that the silver surfer could kill Galactus by himself but whatever. But even looking at it like I don’t know shit about comics, there’s no way that you could look at a space cloud and think that yeah, this should be the big bad of the movie.

Speaking of characters I love, they somehow made DOOM worse in this movie. Like even if we just look at his character from the first movie and not bring comics into this, when did he fucking learn how to do all this tech stuff? He barely seems to act like he knows how to use a phone in the first movie but now he can make this lighting wrist under Reed’s nose and its like yeah I’m a tech expert too. What the fuck?

If they had it where DOOM was working alone in Latveria while Reed worked in New York and we see both of them struggle on their own and come up with their own solutions then they both attack at the same time and it seems like DOOM is on their side would’ve been waayy better and would have actually worked with his character since he said that he hates the Four so much.

The writers must have just taken whatever criticism from the first movie and just went too far and just started adding random stuff.

Even though Julien McMahon did a good job, the character sucks. He’s boring, he’s motivation isn’t even in the fucking movie and having him put the mask on during the scene where he steals the board plays like it was written by a kid who said, wouldn’t it be cool if he put the mask back on?

Like the more that I think about it, most of the characters are just boring in this movie even Johnny and Ben get annoying near the end just because they’re the comedic relief but they only have two or three types of jokes so you get tired of it really quick.

Since this movie uses CGI way more than the first movie, everything aside from the Silver Surfer himself looks like garbage, Reed stretching everywhere looks like something out of Garry’s mod and I get that it was 07 when this came out but it doesn’t hold up at all. I get that hey wanted to do a bigger movie and maybe it looked good at the time but the choices don’t work today.

It’s actually really surprising how the first movie wasn’t great but it at least functioned as movie,  the sequel just threw all that out and made something that doesn’t even feel like it was made by the same people.

I can definitely see why the fantastic four have been on a hiatus for more than the past decade if this was the best they could do with it.

But what did you think, was the review fantastic or just a four outta ten, yes I did use the same joke twice because I don’t care enough to make a better joke for such a trash movie.

Let me know what I should review next and thanks for reading.