movies: fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer

fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer - discover the secret of the surferWhat with the $10 ticket thing... and the running out of job soon thing, plus the plethora of current movies thing, we took ourselves off to the movies again today, this time to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer...

The original Fantastic Four movie was the second review I ever posted here, and basically what I said about that one pretty much holds true for the sequel...

"Okay... between you and me, I actually liked Fantastic Four... I mean its not the greatest movie ever made, its basically fluff, but its not trying to be anything other than fluff..."

And this one is very much more of the same... okay, it might actually be slightly more fluffy than the last one, but it's not pretending to be great art. And it's not a whole world of dark and brooding like a lot of the other superhero movies, but according to something I read earlier in the week, the comics aren't dark, they're fun and a little campy and, I guess, a little fluffy... so it's not like it's straying from that part of the source material's appeal.

It also has "To Be Continued" printed all over the movie in massive glowing neon letters... a bit like the first one I guess, but at some points this almost feels like half a story, since we don't really learn a whole hell of a lot (okay, if you have no idea who the Silver Surfer is, then you might learn things)... and we don't really delve that deep into the story, the whys and wherefores... but then I guess that's part of the appeal of this type of movie.

Speaking of the Silver Surfer, the animation is pretty good, which it should be, being Weta and all... so much so that later on in the movie when he loses his silver sheen for a while I couldn't actually tell if the non-shiny Surfer was a real actor or a CG creation (I'm guessing it could have been a real body with some work around the head in CG, but not with any certainty). They do have an actor listing for the Surfer, the uber talented Doug Jones (who was amazing in Hellboy), but that could just have been the motion capture actor, ala Andy Serkis as Gollum. I'm guessing that without the sheen he's pretty much all Doug under a ton of latex though.

They should also write in a much longer scene in the next movie (should there be one) where Chris Evans keeps his shirt off... I mean we do get a scene in this movie, just like we had one in the last movie (and it might actually be in the exact same corridor, or at least a corridor that looks very, very similar)... or else, you know, somebody should just point me to another movie where he runs around mostly naked... because, damn but that boy is hot... with the pecs and everything... even with the chest hair, it just works for him.

One thing that did keep distracting me from the moment though was the really appalling job they did on Jessica Alba's wig (it looks a little like it's been in the box too long and has a fold in one side), contacts (she just ended up looking stoned, since here pupils didn't dilate) and the godawful job her makeup artist did on here eyes, with this fat blue line along the lid... FUG-UL-LEE!

But then there's the skin tight blue costumes on Chris and Ioan Gruffudd that show off some nice shapes here and there... which more than took my attention off of Ms Alba...

yani's rating: 2 silver surfboards out of 5

No comments: