The thing about the first Spiderman film was that Spiderman looked like Spiderman. More amazingly, he moved like Spiderman. He web-slinged (web-slung?). While it didn’t follow the original Spiderman stories to the letter, it captured the heart and soul of them and still kept an impressive number of details faithful.

The first X-Men film managed to largely do this as well… I didn’t think it was quite as successful, but at the time it felt like the most faithful comics adaptation I’d yet seen, especially considering how it had to deal with the excessively complicated long-term story of the X-Men. Plus, it managed to make fun of superhero suits.

The first Fantastic Four film had none of this. Form a comics perspective, it would have been better for it to be presented as an action flick inspired by the Fantastic Four. They nailed Johnny Storm’s cocky attitude, but outside of that, a bunch of clunky one-liners and four people in blue unitards do not the Fantastic Four make. Plus, they butchered Doctor Doom. The film had every earmark of having been written by a soulless Hollywood committee.

Granted, the FF mythos has some particularly difficult things to swallow when taken too literally… villains with names like “Doctor Doom”, and perhaps most importantly a god-like being clothed in purple armor and (in his original appearance) pink hot-pants, named “Galactus”.

So I don’t know why I ever got my hopes up that the second FF film would be any better than the first, except that the material they were covering - the coming of Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and his herald, the Silver Surfer, is probably one of the most significant (and potentially apocalyptic) stories in comics history. I’m sure that I’ve been hoping that the film would be better than the first because I would love to see a good depiction of Galactus on the big screen. Galactus should be awe-inspiring… fear-inspiring… shocking. And when the news recently broke that Laurence Fishburne would voice Galactus, I had a brief feeling of “maybe this will be okay”.

Galactus has gotten a lot of play the last few years… he wanders the universe eating the life energy of planets. He’s the last survivor of the previous incarnation of our universe. He’s the original Marvel Comics cosmic being… later to be joined by a panoply of increasingly random deity-like figures as different creators wanted to leave their mark on Marvel’s cosmology. He’s been killed once, been separated from the power cosmic, been explained as a fundamental force for balance, and been used as a cosmic oil-well by a bug from the Negative Zone.

And so it is with a heavy heart that I must convey the news that came out today that in “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, Galactus will appear as… a storm cloud.

Thanks guys for continuing to butcher the material, for deciding that your vision is greater than Jack Kirby’s, and for generally ruining what could’ve been a great film.

Via:
Ain’t It Cool News: So We Know What GALACTUS Will Look Like Now…
[tags]galactus, devourer of worlds, movies, comics, fantastic four, silver surfer, jack kirby[/tags]

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