Although it boasted the state of the art in product placement, collagen injection and tiresome Stan Lee cameos, I’m still going to have to give the new Fantastic Four movie a thumbs down. Emily says that it’s silly to carp about the movie failing in ways that any reasonable person would expect it to fail. So while I was taken aback to find the writing well below even the “doomed TNT original sitcom” level of quality and closer to “decent fanfic”, maybe it’s not fair to complain about the ways this expected-to-be-bad movie resembled… a bad movie. I paid for a bad movie, and that’s what I got.
But disrespect for the Marvel canon? That just won’t stand. The guy playing Dr. Doom seems like he would be better cast as a brooding new doctor on Grey’s Anatomy than as the fearsome and merciless ruler of Latveria. And where the hell was Galactus? Yeah, that was a voracious-looking space cloud. But it boggles my mind that a creative process that settled on “my bad” and (immediately before the deployment of a cyclone-based attack) “let’s all go for a spin!” as mots justes somehow decided to forego an awesome CG version of the comic book Galactus, presumably over worries that it might come off as cheesy.
UPDATE: A proof that a giant dude with enormous metal sideburns can be made to look totally rad, I offer up this screencap from the Marvel Ultimate Alliance videogame, which I found on this webpage. Given that this is just from a videogame cutscene and that the FF movie seemed to have a pretty big SFX budget, I’m confident that the creators could have come up with something cool.
Christian McMahon, aka Dr. Doom, does indeed play a brooding doctor, on Nip/Tuck. He’s far better in that role than his F4 stint would have you believe.
However, in our reality, he maintains his secret identity as Julian McMahon.
I thought that the movie was alright, except, tim story said galactus would appear and we wouldn’t be dissapointed(which any comic book fan would be). I was pissed coming out of the theatre, first, no REAL GALACTUS, THEN the silver surfer actually beating him, are you friggin kidding me. Why was this end rushed? It could have been a two parter and been good with them fighting galactus in the sequel(just like the real story). STan lee is a jackass for allowing this.
i found the galactus character well done in the game (Ultimate alliance) the pc version of course, it was cool but i wonder how can this character be defeted? where he lives? and most like how he wonders and and find the planet to feed on?
There’s a great wikipedia article about Galactus.
Also, if you read the Ultimate Galactus graphic novel, you’ll see the Devourer-of-Worlds represented as a swarm, and not a single entity. It’s still incredibly disappointing, but it almost puts the gaseous cloud into context.
Galactus is a single entity that is derived from Garon (an alien) and I think Death. Garon was a simple citizen in his race, but his universe was a “Cosmic Egg” a primal sphere with “compact primordial matter” and then the “Big Bang” happened and a new universe was created over the old one, Garon’s people were among the last civilizations as radiation from the big bang was killing most others. Then matter started drifting to a center point, again creating a “Cosmic Egg.” The radiation starting killing Garon’s people. Garon proposed that they die gloriously by going straight into the “Cosmic Egg,” as they neared the center point, all of Garon’s people died from radiation except Garon, who felt a little empowered. As you should know the current Marvel universe has ethereal embodiements, sort of like what the universe is represented by sentient beings, well the sentient being of the Garon’s universe contacted him and didnt allow his ship to be pulled in by the “Cosmic Egg,” he told Garon that they would both die, but be reborn. The “Cosmic Egg” absorbed Garon into it, it then underwent another big bang, sending Garon’s ship far off and creating the current Marvel Universe. Garon then became Galactus and became aware of his power, and needed to feed on planets, although he restrained himself from devouring planets with sentient beings, or in simple terms, people on them. He transformed his ship into the Taa II, which sucks the energy from a planet. Every once in awhile though he couldnt get to a planet without sentient life in time and had to feed on a planet with sentient life. With all the gases and such on these special planets he began to think that he was a higher being and that these other beings are nothing compared to him. Which is when he started devouring planets with sentient beings on them, and in one case, when he was about to devour a planet called Zenn-La, but Norrin Radd, an alien from the planet, offered to find planets with sentient life on them for galactus in return for the safety of Zenn-La. Galactus agreed and then transformed Norrin into the Silver Surfer. This is the origin of Galactus and I’m pretty sure you know what comes next, he devours worlds, as time goes on the silver surfer asks for his freedom and is granted it in which he finds new heralds.
Galactus has attacked Earth two times that are worth logging, the first when he attacked and The Human Torch went to Galactus’s domain and retreived the Ultimate Nullifier. Basically its a device that can wipe anything out of existence, Reed or you may know him as Mr. Fantastic spared Galactus and made him take an oath not to devour Earth. The second time I’m not sure of the details but Galactus can’t take his hunger for Earth and in the end Reed saves Galactus’s life and Galactus then becomes friends with Reed and never attacks Earth again. Although it is portrayed that in the future Galactus did come and devour Earth when man was no longer on it, feeling his oath ended with man.
One more thing, there is actually one time when the ultimate nullifier is used on Galactus and he dies. Yes, Galactus actually died. Due to Galactus’s death out of Eternity formed a being called Abraxas who said that through his existence the end of the universe would come. Franklin Richards, Reed’s son, combined his cosmic power with sister Valeria to ressurect Galactus and restored balance to Eternity. Galactus took the Ultimate Nullifier from Abraxas and gave it to Reed, who used it to destroy both himself and Abraxas. With Abraxas’s death the universe re-aligned reality to where Abraxas never existed, allowing Reed to survive.
Death was the ethereal embodiement of the old universe, the current ethereal embodiements of this universe is Eternity and Infinity.
Fantastic 4: Silver Surfer didn’t really suck because that cloud wasnt Galactus, its the substance created from his spaceship, so he wasn’t actually there yet he was ABOUT to get there. I do agree that the part about the silver surfer single-handedly repelling Galactus was stupid. Let me point it out though in the movie silver surfer did not defeat Galactus he REPELLED him. Although in the original story of Galactus the silver surfer teamed up with a bunch of super heroes and the only reason they won is because the human torch got the ultimate nullifier. The silver surfer isn’t even NEARLY as powerful of Galactus, to further go into this look at the next paragraph. Also in the original story after the silver surfer helped Earth he was imprisoned on Earth by Galactus as punishment.
To clarify the heralds of Galactus’s power basically originally they are just normal beings. Galactus gets his power from the power cosmic, kind of like the power of the universe he can actually create, destroy, teleport, pretty much anything with matter. He bestows a tiny fraction of this power, like 1% to his heralds, although makes it so he can take the power away. Don’t say Galactus can just create a planet to devour because the energy it takes to create the planet is as much energy he would get from devouring it.
Whew, so there you go.
Rail- *slow Clap* Great job bud, that was awesome. Absolutely great work my man. BTW, Kerry Washington was hot in the movie.