The Rise And Fall Of Doctor Doom

I love comics, I really do. Money matters however mean that I generally don't get to read as many of them as I like because a weekly visit to Forbidden Planet is far too much of a strain on my already strained wallet. I generally stick to graphic novels because they are (A) Cheaper and (B) You get the whole story in one chunk without worry that your wages have ran out for another month so you can't get #232 and so you'll miss the conclusion to one story arc or another. Comics are kinda like soaps in a way. You miss a couple of issues and suddenly you're sitting there thinking "WHo is this guy?" and "Why's he doing that?".

But films are a different matter. I somewhat shamefully admit to owning pretty much every comic book movie ever made (except for Road To Perdition - that movie was so depressing it made me want to slit my wrists, and I generally like depressing movies) and some of them I own more than once. I have the original theatrical versions of Spiderman 2, Daredevil (now there's an underrated movie) and The Fantastic Four as well as the extended editions. I made my sister buy me the limited edition 3 disc Hulk special edition one Christmas, like I made my mam get the director's cut Hellboy from America. I even own Howard The Duck on DVD for God's sake. And I tend to get a little... intense about them.

Which is why Rise Of The Silver Surfer pissed me off to such a degree. The first film is no great shakes, I'll admit that from the off. But there's a lot of good stuff in it (mainly Michael Chiklis and the unfortunately named Chris Evans) which gives me cause to cut it a lot of slack. It's certainly better than the Roger Corman effort, which I mainly remember for the fact that Harmony off of Buffy and Angel plays the young Sue Storm and well, wouldn't she make a better Sue now than Jessica 'I swear I'm too hot!' Alba? But it's lacking a third act. Basically, imagine Superman 2 ending at the point where Supes and General (Kneel Before!) Zod have their big duff up in the city street, the bit where Supes gets chucked into a bus (a bizarrely similar thing occurs in Fantastic Four, but I'll chalk that one up to coincidence). So, in the film as finished, Supes then leads Zod and his cronies off to the Fortress Of Solitude where he defeats them. This is what Fantastic Four needs. But no. They defeat Cole of off Charmed there and then and that's it. The end. But we kind of let them off with that because it's a freshman movie and they're never perfect. Even the beauty that is Spider-Man has it's faults. At least they don't kill off Doom. If there's one thing which annoys me about superhero movies it's that they often needlessly kill off the villain. Look at Burton's Batman, a true piece of art, and, where it not for Nolan's Batman Begins, the definitive Dark Knight on screen. But they kill off the Joker. Which is just wrong on so many levels. It would be like Superman killing off Lex Luthor. (Now, minor digression here in that while I am slightly pissed at Sipder-Man 2 for killing off Doc Ock, I have no such qualms about the first film killing off the Green Goblin because, and my sister was incredulous when I told her this, his death happens almost exactly the same way in the comic - well, it did until they royally fucked continuity up with the Clone Saga.) So, we've seen in recent movies that they have become much less cavalier about killing people off. The Scarecrow survives Batman Begins, Magneto manages to get through all three X-Men movies with barely a scratch on him and so on.

So Dr Doom survives the first Fantastic Four film, unlike Ben Grimm's relationship with his fiance Debbie who can't cope with that fact that her husband to be has turned into a lump of orange rock. Her loss I say. The Thing is the best thing (oh God, was that an intentional pun?) in these movies. And, true to form, he's back in the sequel, attempting to twoc the Silver Surfer's board for his own nefarious ends. Never mind the fact that somehow the Surfer's energies transform him back into a human so that Julian McMahon doesn't have to wear make-up/his mask the entire time, never mind that somehow his murderous rampage in the first film has been forgotten and never mind the fact that somehow Jessica Alba's eyes are now blue (maybe she witnessed an exploding Rutan ship?). What does matter however is how abominably Doom is treated in this movie.

I'm not talking about the fact that he gets the crap kicked out of him again. No. I'm talking about the fact that Dr Doom is one of the greatest villains in the Marvel pantheon. There's a fantastic X-Men story starting in #145 of The Uncanny X-Men (and reprinted for us cheapskates in The Essential X-Men Volume 3 which sees Chris Claremont at the height of his powers following the Phoenix Saga (another beloved comic story fucked up by cinema)). Like Magneto, he's a hardy perennial and yet his inclusion in Rise Of The Silver Surfer smacks of contractual obligation, or desperate screenwriters looking to put a more concrete threat into the movie than the (literally and figuratively) nebulous menace of Galactus. His entire arc can be laid out as follows: Gets revived by Surfer, teams up with the military to steal Surfer's board, steals Surfers board, get crap kicked out of him. That's it. He doesn't even warrant an exit. He simply gets smacked down (into some conveniant water) and vanishes from the plot. But isn't this the guy who couldn't even be stopped by the power of a supernova in the first film? And now you're telling me that a bit of a duffing up (even by a multi-powered Johnny Storm) is enough to finish him off? Give me a break.

The problem with both F4 movies is the finale. They both clock in at something like an hour and a half (the extended edition adds on twenty minutes or so, but it's all character stuff, unlike the director's cut of Daredevil which added an entire subplot to the story) which just isn't enough time. Spider-Man tells a fairly simple story (Boy wants girl, boy becomes superhuman spider mutant, boy's best friend's father goes insane, boy kills him, boy gets girl but rejects her because it's not a safe life) and it takes two hours to do it. That extra half hour is vital in building up the plot (and notice I said plot there and not characters - despite what Hollywood's current thinking may be, if the plot sucks you can have the best characters in the world being played by the best actors but the movie will still suck). Rise Of The Silver Surfer attempts to do a globe-hopping world threatening adventure story with six lead roles. It falls down for the same reasons that X-Men - The Last Stand did. It rushes from one set piece to the next with little rhyme or reason, only concerned with giving people enough bangs for their buck.

It's not a complete disaster (it's certainly nowhere near the train wreck that was X - Men - The Last Stand). The plot does hold together. Kind of. But it's no surprise that the best part of the film is the beginning, where the threat of Galactus has not yet risen it's ugly head and our main concerns are whether or not Reed and Sue's wedding is going to go ahead. This sort of sequence could only appear in a F4 movie, the Four are unique among the Marvel heroes in that they are very much in the media spotlight. Were Spider-Man 4 to feature Peter and Mary-Jane's wedding, it would be very different from the media circus we see here. The Silver Surfer, despite his entire backstory being reduced to two lines of dialogue (and doesn't Norrin sound like a duff name when Alba says it?) fairs amazingly well, as a CG character, he's far more successful than Venom in Spidey 3. In fact, he's possibly the best realised effect of its kind since Gollum. I'm not sure how much work went into the creation of the Surfer, but he's good to start with and when he loses his board, he becomes even better. A tarnished vision. I don't think the character would ever be able to sustain his own movie (like I have doubts about the Young Magneto movie that keeps on cropping up in conversation). As a supporting lead, however, he's good. In fact, he may be a little too good, seeing as how he's the one who saves the day at the end. Where it not for Doom's questionable presence in the movie, the Four's entire purpose in the story would simply be to convince the Surfer that Earth was too good to be Galactus' mid morning snack.

Overall, I'd give it 3 out of 5. But I'll still buy the DVD when it comes out. I'm weak like that.