I’ve tried to remain positive about Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Granted, the trailers have looked like ass and the movie seems to be tossing out the titular four in favor of obsessing over the movie’s villain, but the first one was kind of fun and there was a lot of great building material there which could have been used to make a fantastic sequel.
Boy it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
Instead, it looks like 20th Century Fox is ruining yet another superhero franchise. I’m not sure why they even keep making them, they clearly hate the genre, and hate anyone who is a fan of it. You see, we heard a long time ago that Galactus would be in Fantastic Four 2. Now the cool thing about Galactus is that he’s huge. He’s basically a giant. In fact, he walks through the galaxy eating planets. Yeah, it’s a bit silly but Fantastic Four is the light, fun superhero franchise and you can imagine what a mind-blowing visual that would be to have an actual giant battling a bunch of superheroes. Come on, that’s just cool.
And earlier this week it was starting to look even cooler, because we got word that Laurence Fishburne will provide the voice for the character. One problem though, Laurence Fishburne is providing the voice not for an incredibly huge giant, but for a stupid cloud. Yep, that’s right. According to AICN, Fox has turned Galactus into a stupid storm cloud. There will be no big battle between the Fantastic Four and a giant. No mind-blowing effects shots, no super-cool planet eating sequence. Just a stupid, idiotic cloud.
Now I’m not some Fantastic Four purist. I’ve never read the comics, and I really don’t care that much about the integrity of the stories or the characters. I don’t even care about Galactus. But I do care about a movie studio which seems to intentionally remove anything that could possibly be cool from their movies. As AICN rightly points out, Fox is the jackass studio that REFUSED to put Sentinels in the X-Men movies, Sentinels being incredibly cool giant robots which would have been the most amazing thing every seen on screen if they’d actually put them in X-Men 3 instead of coming up with another lame mutant on mutant battle. This is just more of the same from them. We should have seen it coming.
