An OK start, but where's the ending?

Rating: 4/10 (28 October 2007)

There are several good reasons why this movie gets such mixed reviews and that both the positive and negative ones make sense; RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER gets started just fine, apart from an awkward recurring bit in which the four magically exchange powers, and then -- appallingly -- two-thirds of the way through the story, apparently the production staff got tired of working on it and decided "let's just not bother filming a third act." What people are really saying when they say they are disappointed Galactus appears as a cloud here is that they have paid their money to see a whole story and been deprived of that. The feeling you are left with after watching this film, since its main villain, Galactus, never makes it to Earth, so there is never a meeting between the principal villain of the piece and the heroes, is that the filmmakers were actually too afraid of the character themselves to actually include the big sequences the story builds up to.
We SHOULD have seen giant purple boots squashing buildings -- the ominous helmet with distinctive side ornaments blocking the sun -- Reed Richards scrambling to try and make the ultimate nullifier work in time -- rebellion by the Surfer against his master, and lots of terrific special effects as a city is destroyed as Galactus ALMOST eats earth, but they just skipped the idea of letting us see what SHOULD be there. The climax of the film just ISN'T THERE. It's built up to, but when you think it's about to start, an abrupt and not-very-believable character reversal and event takes place which tidies things up like magic, and our heroes don't have to lift a finger.
This is seriously cowardly, lazy film-making. We could have had one of the best superhero movies ever made here if the original story had just been filmed as it was envisioned and written by Jack Kirby in the 1960s. What we get instead is something that plays like a Sunday Matinée musical that had to be called off early and an abrupt ending fudged because the actor playing the villain forgot he had one more entrance to make and left the building to go get an early dinner.
And, for the record, Stan Lee had NOTHING to do with "creating" the Silver Surfer, or the X-Men or Spider-man either, for that matter; he has made a lifelong career out of exploiting brilliant original work developed and done for hire by writer/artist Jack Kirby and others and been able to get away with his claims because he knows the public assumes that Marvel comics of the 1960s were WRITTEN before they were DRAWN. In fact, the complete opposite was the case where the seminal Marvel stories were concerned. Stan Lee is not now and never was a good storyteller, nor was he an avid reader of classic science fiction and mythology as Jack Kirby was. What he is is a brilliant publicist who added "groovy" dialogue to illustrated stories which were handed to him completely plotted and drawn by artists such as Kirby and Steve Ditko AFTER they were complete, sometimes even including summaries of dialogue to be added to the page written in the margins. The credits for those old comic book stories should have said "Written and Drawn by Jack Kirby, Dialogue by Stan Lee." But, with Lee having the final word on what words got printed on the page, we got deliberately misleading inflations of the truth instead. Since the artists that developed the early Marvel stories did so work-for-hire, and Lee worked for the company, it was in his power to credit whoever he wanted, including himself, however he wanted, so first he promoted himself from dialogue writer to story author, then moved right along to "creator." Baloney. I know who really had the creative imagination on the team and put in the time at the drawing board. (Show me one Stan Lee dialogue script ever actually written for a Marvel comic and I'll eat this review!) At least Kirby's name appears in the credits of this movie -- it should, since he envisioned the amazing story -- one of the best ever told in comics -- and all its characters.
It remains a shame to this day that Lee, in the late 1960s and early 70s, took Kirby's Surfer out of his hands and transformed a character that the writer/artist had envisioned as the very personification of pure, unfettered cosmic adventurousness into yet another whiner; Kirby's Surfer had no name, no missing girlfriend to cry about -- he was a blank slate, eager to be free of his servitude and fly through the stars at top speed and explore the universe and learn about anything, everything, with great enthusiasm. He was ignorant but learned compassion from his visit to Earth, which is why he rebelled against Galactus. Not because he missed his girlfriend! The original Surfer never whined, he battled, he quested, he flew, he dreamed. The Lee influence unfortunately affects the Surfer character in this film too; he's taken captive at one point which unfortunately for no apparent reason emotionally paralyzes him and by the end of the film, as happened in the comics as well, all life ends up sucked out of the character, as he sinks apparently into what is essentially a suicidal sort of depression, so this movie ends not with a fight but with a cop-out. Ugh.
This is not to say that what DOES make it to the screen in this movie is "bad." It's generally not. The film just needs to be sent back into production and finished appropriately.
They should have made this film years ago and let Jack Kirby direct it; he would never in a million years let this truly "fantastic" cosmic battle have been filmed without an ending.
Mr. Kirby, and your spirit of adventure, you are missed.