Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
June 15 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 24
In 1970 a Japanese robotics professor named Masahiro Mori came up with a concept called bukimi no tani, rendered in English as “the uncanny valley”. The uncanny valley is a phenomenon wherein something (like a robot) that very abstractly has signifiers of something in the natural world it is understood to be an abstraction, and is thus pleasant to behold (like Wall-E, the adorable Pixar robot with expressive camera “eyes” and extendo-grabber “hands”); something that perfectly replicates something in the natural world is indistinguishable from the real thing and thus is pleasant to behold (like the T-800 from the Terminator series, mostly portrayed by Arnold Schwartzenegger without additional special effects makeup), but something that almost replicates a natural object but falls short is unpleasant and off putting (like the titular robot of M3GAN (2022), a robot that turns into an evil murderbot and is creepy and weird). When I sat down to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer I wondered, can an entire movie fall into the uncanny valley?
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is the sequel to 2005’s Fantastic Four. Having defeated Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon), Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm aka Invisible Girl (Jessica Alba) are planning their wedding. Johnny Storm aka The Human Torch (Chris Evans) is seeking sponsorship opportunities to improve the group’s cash flow, and Ben Grimm aka The Thing (Michael Chiklis) is… I dunno, being grouchy. The group’s personal plans are put on hold however when an alien entity dubbed The Silver Surfer (a cgi spectacle done with body doubling by Doug Jones and voice acting by Laurence Fishburne) appears to scout the planet Earth for potential consumption by the planet-consuming being Galactus. In order to defeat the incredible power of the Silver Surfer, The Fantastic Four, a US Military special ops team led by General Hager (Andre Braugher) and Dr. Doom himself must team up to stop him and save the planet from consumption.
The Fantastic Four is the title that made Marvel Comics what it is today. Prior to its introduction in 1961, Marvel was an also-ran in the comics world, having produced exactly one title (wartime propaganda hero Captain America) most casual comics fans would recognize today1. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s success with The Fantastic Four allowed them to expand Marvel’s repertoire with characters like Spider-Man, The X-Men, and The Avengers. If there is no Fantastic Four, there is no Morbius (2022), and I do not wish to imagine a world where it has never been Morbin’ time. Naturally, there have been many attempts to bring the Fantastic Four to the screen, from a 60s Hanna Barbera animated TV show to a film made by Roger Corman but never released so that he could retain the rights to the property, but every time other superheroes succeeded on the screen, the Fantastic Four always fell flat. I have not seen the 2005 film, but apparently it was successful enough to warrant a sequel. If there was any continuity between the teams of these two films I have no idea how though.
First, there’s the acting. On one level all an actor needs to do to do their job well is to say the lines, hit their marks, and adequately perform their blocking. The actors in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer adequately perform these tasks. This does not mean that the acting is good though, and it has to do with some kind of intangible believability that the actors fail to bring to the screen.
For quite some time I took a hard line that if an actor wasn’t believable in a role, but they confidently said their lines and hit their marks that the problem wasn’t the actors, it was the writing and directing. This all changed when I learned about LA Takedown. LA Takedown was a 1989 TV pilot created by director Michael Mann, intended as his followup to his highly successful run as showrunner of Miami Vice. It was never picked up, and would be a small footnote to Mann’s broader career, but for the fact that Mann took the broad concept and several scenes from LA Takedown and applied them to his 1995 masterpiece Heat. What this means for film nerds like me is that we have examples of perfect A/B comparisons of filmed material where the writing is identical, the direction is identical, but in one instance the scene is being played by perfectly competent TV actors Scott Plank and Alex McArthur and in the other it’s being played by titans of cinema Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
They’re not completely identical. The fact that one scene happens in an R rated motion picture means that they can say “fuck”, and a couple of lines of dialogue are changed, but mostly its the exact same scene played the exact same way, but I dare anyone to watch both and tell me that Pacino and DeNiro don’t play that scene with a kind of power and magnetism that just doesn’t exist in the LA Takedown. Why am I telling you about this in a Fantastic Four essay? Because every line of dialogue, every exchange between characters, every non-action scene felt like watching the LA Takedown version of that diner scene. I cannot point to a specific acting choice or line of dialogue or anything like that as to why. I just know that I’ve said “I love you” to a plate of spaghetti in a more compelling way than the way Ioan Gruffudd says it to Jessica Alba.
It might be tempting to say “but it’s a superhero movie, who cares if the acting is a little off”? Here’s the thing: the secret sauce of the Fantastic Four comic that made it such a huge success was its characters' personalities. Stan Lee’s great innovation as a comics writer was that these characters might be tasked with saving the world from supervillains and monsters, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have feelings about each other and interpersonal drama. The dynamic of the big problems of the world and the small problems like Reed & Sue’s romantic relationship woes is what makes The Fantastic Four themselves. Every personal scene is played too small to be read as a broad abstraction of human emotion, but it also isn’t played realistically enough to be believable. It sits in that uncomfortable uncanny valley space where it just kind of stinks. If you take away the believability you just have bad theater shoehorned between action scenes.
Now about those action scenes: there’s something unsettling about the way that the Fantastic Four’s superpowers are depicted onscreen in this film. I will grant that I have no problem with the way Sue Storm’s invisibility and force field powers are depicted, but everything else looks more than a little off. Johnny Storm never really looks like he’s on fire as he’s an orange human with a blur effect added. Reed Richards’ elasticity effects look like the work of a teen who just discovered the clone tool in Photoshop. Worst of all, Ben Grimm doesn’t so much look like he’s believably made out of rocks as he looks like he’s believably made of foam rubber made to look like rocks. The movements of his eyes, mouth, and hands are all very cohesive and make him look like a living benign of an artificial material, it’s just that that artificial material looks like something from the Mondo Mascots instagram page.
I suspect that part of this is just an intrinsic problem of putting the Fantastic Four on screen as a live action project. On a static comic page the illustrations of Reed Richards’ extendo-arms and Johnny Storm’s flame effects allow the reader to fill in the blanks of what the actual movement and form would look like. The abstraction allows us to fill in the blanks to create a perfect image that the world of motion pictures cannot. The thing is, I don’t know if there is such a thing as a “good” version of live action special effects depicting these characters. We know what a human being consumed in flames looks like, and it looks nothing like the way The Human Torch is depicted. We know what a human form made of rocks looks like. You can go visit the sculpture wing of your local art museum and behold it yourself, and it looks nothing like the way The Thing is depicted. Seeing Superman fly or seeing Spider-Man swing on a web or seeing Wolverine deploy his claws in live action on film looks cool as hell. I don’t think there’s a way to make Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy arms look anything but goofy. Here’s the thing. I think the creative team behind Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer also knew this, because they made the purposeful choice to not depict Galactus. Galactus in the Fantastic Four comics is a giant spaceman with a big tall helmet with horns and a mauve and navy kilt. There is no way to put Galactus on screen in a dignified way, so this movie simply opts to represent him as an abstract force rather than as a giant dude munching on Earth. The question is: if you know that Galactus is goofy, why wouldn’t you realize that the heroes are also gonna look goofy?
As I write this, we are a mere month away from Marvel/Disney’s biggest gambit on the future of the MCU: a retread of this exact story. Fantastic Four: First Steps. First Steps is likewise a Fantastic Four story about the Silver Surfer and Galactus. The ways that this upcoming movie appears to differ from Rise of the Silver Surfer are:
1. The new film is set in the 60s when The Fantastic Four comics first came out.
2. Silver Surfer is a girl now.
2. Marvel Studios have had 18 years of experience at making comic book movies.
3. Galactus’s big goofy feet are present in the trailer.
If there is anything that might make me believe that this is the time they’ll nail it and we’ll finally have a successful Fantastic Four movie, it’s point number three. But I can’t help but think watching that trailer that while The Thing looks a little better, he doesn’t look a lot better. Pedro Pascal is a talented actor… but so is Chris Evans2. And I can’t help but think about Galactus’s big goofy feet. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I’m quite afraid that any attempt to put The Fantastic Four onscreen is just going to end up in the uncanny valley.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ The best I can say about this movie is that it’s only 90 minutes long (functionally 80 or so when you consider the end credits). Even that felt like an eternity.
Economics: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer opened to number 1 at the box office 18 years ago today, June 15, 2007. It quickly fell from that perch and would go on to make $131 million at the domestic box office against its $130 million budget, which makes it a turbo flop. Just kidding! I didn’t count the international box office which added an additional $157 million, which makes it an “underperforming” film, but not a complete flop. This turd made money. Thankfully “underperforming” was enough to euthanize the franchise.
Worst Fit: Johnny Storm is supposed to be a hotheaded young man, and hotheaded young men often dress like douchebags.
I literally forgot about the existence of Ed Hardy shirts until this outfit popped up (like I literally forgot. I needed to google it).
Sufficed to say, the world is better off forgetting this particular brand.
Other 2007 films released this week.
Eagle Vs. Shark: There are certain artists who have a fully formed aesthetic straight out the gate, and Taika Waititi is one of those artists. Do you like the twee, awkward humor of What We Do In The Shadows (2014) and Our Flag Means Death (2022-2024)? You’ll like Eagle Vs. Shark and appreciate how well Waititi’s voice as an auteur was fully formed in this microbudget NZ indie comedy. If you think that Thor: Ragnarok (2022) was disgraceful and Jojo Rabbit (2019) trivializes the horrors of the third reich, you’re likely going to be irritated by Waititi’s overly twee aesthetic. Me, I had a good time watching an awkward lady (Loren Taylor) attempt to woo the worst guy in the world (Jemaine Clement) by offering him free cheese. ★★★☆☆
yeah that’s right, I said it, come at me, Namor the Sub Mariner fans
Both star in an upcoming romcom called Materialists and I desperately want to know if the two ever chatted on set about their respective Fantastic Four experiences