CONTRARIAN FANBOY: Fantastic Four Rise of The Silver Surfer Is Actually a Great Movie

There are the comic movies everyone hates (X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3), the ones everyone loves (Avengers, Nolan’s Batman films), and the ones you don’t discuss in polite company. The one’s that it’s best to just forget about. They may be worse than the ones you hate, but to hate them would be to give them too much credit. They’re forgettable and they should be forgotten.

And yet there is one movie in this category that I can’t forget, that I, actually, kind of adore. No. That’s not it. There is a movie in this category that I love. Not only do I love it, but I think you should too.

That movie is Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Yup, this piece of crap.

This movie is awesome. Maybe not introduce-your-buddy-to-comics awesome. But a kind of I’m-hungover-and-this-movie-is hilarious awesome, or maybe a see-if-your-new-friend-has-a-sense-of-humor kind of awesome. It’s so awesome that I wish I could hate it more thoroughly because in spite of being awesome, it also kinda sucks.

So, let’s get some things out of the way. This movie sucks. Everybody is miscast, every plot point is ridiculous (and most of them are dropped as soon as they’re brought up), the special effects are a joke, it’s poorly directed, poorly acted, and poorly plotted. In short: this is a bad movie.

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But lots of movies are bad and for some reason people find something in them that makes them enjoyable. Point Break, They Live, even Evil Dead (the first one, not the second) are all objectively shitty movies that, for some reason, people have grown to love. But this doesn’t happen in comic movies. Fans have a hard time accepting that comic book movies can aspire to things other than turgid self-serious Nolan-ism or…you know, anything Joss Whedon does. I think it might have to do with some kind of need to convince people that our make-believe worlds are often intelligent, socially aware, and engaging. But comics are just as often low-brow, ridiculous, and silly affairs with bad characterization, worse dialogue, and written-on-the-fly stories. Why can’t we have more movies that embrace this element of comics? I mean, do we really need every comic movie to be a gritty re-imagining? Can’t we have some dumb? Some schlock?

What upsets me is that we act morally affronted when a beloved series gets made into a movie that doesn’t live up to a set of expectations that, often, even the books themselves don’t live up to. I mean, is a bad Fantastic Four movie as egregious an affront as making a 200 million dollar Avengers film when there are a host of nations that make less than that per year. I mean, if we’re going to wage our moral battles, let’s at least have a sense of perspective, no?

So, gentle reader, I’d like to nominate Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer as the best bad comic movie ever. I think it is so bad that it is a kind of transcendental experience. I think you should watch it, not just once but a million times.

So here’s what I think. I think you and your friends should get together, Rocky Horror Picture Show style, and act along. Deliver the lines along with Johnny as he ridiculous sexual innuendo about The Thing (and during what I think is a rape innuendo afterwards).

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Put on your worst sneer and say, “Now, let’s be clear about this, shall we? I hate you.”  along with Julian McMahaon (who delivers EVERY ONE of Dr. Doom’s lines as if he was actually trying to hit on Reed in an Italian gay bar).

Dance along during THIS monstrosity. (I won’t spoil what is the most hilarious dance scene ever recorded, but it makes the dance scene in Spidey 3 look like high art, PROMISE)

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All I’m saying is this: not every comic movie needs to be as pitch perfect as The Avengers or as serious and The Dark Knight. We’re going to get another few Spider-Man 3’s and Daredevils. That’s just the way it’s gonna be. But we can find something to enjoy in these failures, sometimes. And I think that there is plenty to find in FF2. So, please, check your affronted fanboy attitude at the door, sit down, and watch this beast with your friends.