Fantastic Pwe

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Directed by Tim Story
Written by Don Payne and Mark Frost

God help the fanboy in me if the digital hallucinogenics that flesh Norrin Radd out here ever get beneath me, that eyecandy's psyched- - -could use a few trippy minutes more of just the Surfer floating through the Black Forest,of course. God help me more,though, if that should suffice. Kirby took three issues to map out the saga that gets supercompressed into kid size for pea brains here. You lose many things that way. With Oatu out of the picture, exposition is reduced to corny tete-a-tete. No Shalla Bal means the change of heart that reverses apocalypse loses the nuances that made it more inevitable, more rah-rah. And Galactus as a black cloud that's not that impossible to defeat anyway does nothing to up alert levels. Oh and Sue Storm does a Trinity - - -that's inept. Odd that a man named Story has no clue how to tell one. Odder still that you secretly wish for Michael Bay rehab. That way it gets scale and the writing would've sucked less. Fanboys go postal over wrong-footed adaptations for reasons saner than just being anal and having no lives- - - the comics got it right. And with so much to work on laid out on a silver platter, you're either arrogant or stupid if you squander the surplus. Or both. * *