A cosmic letdown

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2007)

As a comics reader who knows the source material, FF2 left me with a great deal of reservations. The ending in particular disappointed me. The new superhero movies always let us down when it comes to the cosmic part of the original stories.
Let me be clear: I am not a purist. I don't demand that the movies should be slavishly faithful to the comics. It's fine by me that they change the story, as long as what they put in there instead is just as good. And this, of course, is the problem. In the X-Men movies, we never see the alien Shi'ar, even though that's where the X-Men got their super-science. In Spider-Man 3, we never saw the planet from the Secret Wars storyline, where the alien symbiont, Venom, came from. And now, in FF2, we don't get the huge back-story of Galactus. We don't even get Galactus as a defined character. In the movie he's just some sissy-ass cloud monster who, ridiculously, can be destroyed by his own servant, the infinitely less powerful Silver Surfer. No way. Does not compute.
Galactus, in the comics, is a force of nature. He can be stopped, and sometimes even reasoned with, but he can't be destroyed. His fate is tied in with the fate of the universe. If you like the science fiction part of superhero comics, the ridiculously diluted "Galactus" of this movie is a massive, massive letdown.
And unfortunately, there were a great deal of other problems with the climax of FF2, especially this:

The power swapping. That kind of thing does not happen in the comics without a whole lot of proper explanation. Here: none. AND, after seeing that whoever the Torch touches will swap powers with him, how does it follow that he can just absorb all the powers of the other three, who are then powerless? It doesn't. But they just casually know that that's what will happen, and casually go ahead with it, making the fight and climax equally casual.

The Surfer's allegiance. When exactly does he switch? Surely not before he sees Susan die (another stupid element - the comics Surfer does not go around resurrecting the dead). And yet, Reed and the others plan for him to stop Galactus even before Susan dies. Doesn't make sense.

And that was just the climax. We also have other problems: Why is Doom even in the movie? They tried to conflate several of the greatest FF stories of all time, but stuffing these plots into this storyline just makes it half-assed. There's none of the original impact here.
Another thing I wasn't too fond of was the comedy. It's okay to have a few funny scenes, but in this movie they just went on and on playing the powers for laughs. It detracts from the seriousness of the story; ESPECIALLY a Galactus story, for cripes' sakes! So, I have to say this movie was a big disappointment to me. I really liked the first one. I rated it an 8. This one only rates a 3. Considering my great expectations, this comes as nothing less than a cosmic letdown.
And to all those who claim that this sequel is better than the first one: Shyeah. What do you know.