Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer

(Movie Reviews)

The other day I was awakened from bed by a phone call at 11 O'clock. (Since I usually work evenings, I tend to sleep late). The manager was asking if I would be willing to drive down to Oita city to cover their branch there. "Someone called in sick," she explained. "Nobody else is available to cover it."

"Is this a joke?" I asked. Oita city was about an hour and a half away. I'd spend almost as much time driving down there as I would working (I was scheduled for a 4 hour shift that day).

Turns out it wasn't a joke. I could have stood on my rights and not made the trip down, but I decided to help them out.

And I actually had a really great time. I've been sleepwalking through some of my lessons here in Nakatsu recently, but meeting new students at the Oita branch reminded me how much I loved this job when I first started and was enjoying getting to know all the students.

Anyway, while I was in the big city, I thought I would take the opportunity to go to the cinema, something I can't really do in Nakatsu. There were a lot of summer blockbuster movies I would have loved to see, but they never made it down to Nakatsu, and I couldn't justify all the expense of going down to Oita or Fukuoka just to see a movie: Spiderman 3, Ocean's 13, Shrek 3, Transformers, Harry Potter, etc. Now I'm just waiting for those movies to come out on video.

But when I got to Oita city the other day, all of those movies had stopped running. (I should have arranged to do a help shift back in the summer). But I wanted to see something in Oita since I had driven all the way down here, so I decided to see Fantastic Four 2 (which, due to the weird scheduling of release dates, is just coming out in Japan now).

I had seen the original "Fantastic Four" a couple years ago, and felt it was a good enough popcorn flick but nothing special. And that's more or less how I felt about the second one.

(Although, that being said, I've been re-watching a lot of movies from my childhood recently: Superman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Etc, and it's interesting how standards have changed. The action sequences in this "Fantastic Four" movie would have completely blown away all those movies of the 1980s, but now this film is just struggling to get noticed among all the other summer blockbusters. But of course I state the obvious. It's no secret movie technology has improved and bigger and badder action sequences have become standard.)

Having grown up a DC rather than a Marvel fan, I'm not quite as familiar with the mythos behind the Fantastic Four, so I can't comment (like this reviewer) on how they got the tone of the superheros right or wrong. But I enjoyed the movie and I thought that the addition of the Silver Surfer helped to keep things interesting. It's no classic and it's a very quickly forgettable movie, but it was entertaining while I was watching it.

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Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Movie Review (Scripted)