Category Archives: Fantastic Four

Episode 9: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Fantastic Four

So here’s a thing you don’t do: make a movie that gets 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, and then make a sequel that assumes that we adore the characters. But 20th Century Fox is not always adept at reading the room.

So the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer begins with a full half-hour of preparations for the painfully traditional wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, two characters who we have not and do not intend to grow to love. Once that’s out of the way, everbody gets upset about the Silver Surfer, a galactic herald who flies around digging inexplicable holes, and not actually telling anybody what it is that he’s supposed to be heralding.

It’s a difficult movie to get your head around, so luckily I’ve got Becca Petunia of the blog The Daily Fantastic and the Muppet quiz show podcast Hubba-Wha?! to help me make sense of it. We discuss Chris Evans’ destiny, what the film is trying to do with Doctor Doom, and whether the ancient Israelites went surfing, among many other fascinating conundrums.

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible, Stitcher and lots of other places. Come check it out!

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The Fantastic Four 60.1: Fun with the Fantastic Four, part 2

Fantastic Four, ,

In the first half of my Fantastic Four adventure on The Signal Watch Podcast, we discussed the 2005 Fantastic Four movie, and here in Part 2, we talk about the 2015 reboot, which is seriously just as bad as everybody said it was.

This objectively terrible movie shows the FF as nobody wanted to see them: deeply unhappy government assets, who are locked up in a secret underground bunker and despise each other.

But you can sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as Ryan and I tear apart all of the decisions that director Josh Trank and the incompetent studio execs made, as they desperately tried to land this film. Body horror! A completely unnecessary CGI chimp! Finding a clearly dangerous and unstable form of energy in an unknown dimension, and sticking your hand in it! And the two words you must never say to anyone who has seen this movie: Pattern recognition!

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Fantastic Four 28.1: Fun with the Fantastic Four, part 1

Fantastic Four,

People sometimes ask, if I’m writing about superhero movies in such painstaking detail, how am I ever going to get to the later movies?

Well, this is one way: going on other people’s podcasts to talk about them! This week, I’m the guest on a 2-part episode of The Signal Watch Podcast, comparing the 2005 Fantastic Four movie and the 2015 Fantastic Four movie.

Continue reading Fantastic Four 28.1: Fun with the Fantastic Four, part 1 →