Fantastic Four (2005)/Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

rating (combined): ****

the story: Reed Richards leads a scientific mission that inadvertently gives his team superpowers; the Silver Surfer arrives on Earth as a herald of the apocalypse.

review: In hindsight the Fantastic Four duology featuring Ioan Gruffudd (Mr. Fantastic), Jessica Alba (Invisible Woman), Chris Evans (Human Torch), Michael Chiklis (Thing), and Julian McMahon (Dr. Doom) is one of the most tightly-conceived superhero movie experiences yet filmed.

In the wake of the X-Men (energized comic book fans) and Spider-Man (energized mass audiences), the Fantastic Four always had a tough few acts to follow.  Where the X-Men became known for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Sam Raimi only ever had to contend with one hero.  History has shown that if you try to focus on a number of superheroes in one movie, you really need to earn it.  And Fantastic Four (2005) introduced, well, four of them, and they all compete for attention.  You can kind of tell in the sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) how there was the perception that Chris Evans' Human Torch dominated the first one too much, or that maybe Michael Chiklis's Thing was too depressing.  One consistent element was the relationship between Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman.  They go from catching back up romantically in the first one to spending virtually the entire second one trying to get married.  There's no loss of focus there.  It's the most direct a second superhero movie has ever come to being a true sequel since Superman II played out the threat of General Zod and company introduced in the first one.

I can only guess the number of reasons why these movies have always been perceived as familiars.  Aside from Thing, it's also depressing to think that the nominal lead, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), is basically the Absent-Minded Professor.  The Robin Williams version of that character has virtually the same arc as Reed across his two movies in Flubber (1997).  Unlike Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker (Spider-Man), Ioan Gruffudd never gets to look cool, partly because, again, Evans spends all his time in the first one making Johnny Storm (Human Torch) look as cool as possible.  And Johnny is also just as clearly always a supporting role, made all the more clear in the second one, even though technically he has the most redemptive arc and gets the save the day.

I also get the sense that superhero movies viewers will never be able to admit how uncomfortable they are watching women be superheroes.  Jennifer Garner, by all rights, should have become iconic after Daredevil (2003), but her solo follow-up Elektra (2005) was the flop that doomed both the character and the franchise.  Halle Berry's Catwoman (2004) was a flop, too, and she was consistently deemed a weak link in her role as Storm in the X-Men movies.  And despite there being ten years worth of Avengers movies now, there has still not been a single solo Black Widow movie.  Yet there are plenty of high profile action movies led by women, including the Hunger Games series and Wonder Woman (2017). 

So the fact that Jessica Alba has a prominent role in both movies as Susan Storm (Invisible Woman), to my mind, is no coincidence.  You might try to argue that it's the nature of how she's used in the movies, but I don't buy it.

It might not help that along with Chiklis (The Commish, The Shield) and McMahon (Charmed, Nip/Tuck), Alba was previously best known in a TV show (Dark Angel), so it gives the movies a smaller feel than the superhero movies before and after it, by and large populated by known movie stars.  The only one among them truly hamstrung in performance for this is McMahon, who never really earns the menace needed to sell the Doom the mere human Victor Von Doom becomes.  I don't usually like manipulating voices; giving him an entirely new one might have done the trick.  Laurence Fishburne is fantastic (heh) voicing the Silver Surfer in the second one.

Speaking of Rise, a lot of fan complaints for this one stem from the fact that we never actually get to see Galactus.  For those who don't know, Galactus in the comics is a gigantic humanoid in purple armor.  I don't know how that works in a movie.  Rise instead depicts him as a menacing cloud.  If anything is wrong with the concept it's that the movie dedicates all its foreshadowing of his threat to the random journeys of the Surfer around the globe.  There's very little effort made to sell Armageddon.  You can see, throughout both films, that the budget was mostly reserved for selling how cool the team's superpowers are, and certainly in contrast to later Avengers movies that's going to look disappointing, but the team's powers are cool, especially Human Torch and Invisible Woman's.  Thing stands out so much, it's really a wonder that so little effort has ever been made to give him solo stories, in the comics.  If there were solo movies for these guys, he'd be a natural lead, right along with his frenemy Johnny Storm.

Even if Doom can be disappointing, he makes for an effective, well-explained enemy, which is something a lot of superhero movies struggle to find.  That's another reason these movies look better in retrospect.  They have a lot going on, but they never bog down in following the journeys of each member of this strange family.  They have much better defined arcs than the generalized family shenanigans of the Pixar Four, the Incredibles.  And they're always going to have much more storytelling potential.  There was a reboot in 2015, equally underappreciated.  Tim Story directed both of these, and he's made a career directing duologies.  Just, never again, superhero movies.  That seems a shame.