At last, the Silver Surfer!

I was a big comic book fan in my youth (60's and 70's, the Silver Age, if you will, of American comics), and though my heart was with DC kid, I read Marvel books, too. One of my favorite characters was the Silver Surfer, who was a bad guy turned good guy. To save his planet Zenn-La from destruction by the energy-devouring villain Galactus, Norrin Rad sacrifices himself to become a herald to Galactus, getting covered in a protective silver shell and surfing the galazies to find plants to satisfy Galactus' hunger. When he arrives on Earth, however, he takes a shine to the humans, joins with the Fantastic Four, and manages to save the Earth, at the cost of being stuck here forever.

I'm not sure what about the Surfer grabbed me. It might have been the almost psychedelic artwork (the galaxies are full of bright colors and light-show shapes) or the almost-naked physique or the sad exile story. Though I missed the original Surfer stories that ran in the Fantastic Four, I did manage to catch most of the run of his first solo book in the late 60's. My favorite t-shirt (and I pretty much live in t-shirts) when I was in college was my "Jaws" poster shirt, but my second-favorite was a Silver Surfer shirt, black with the Surfer in glittery silver, covered with a thin clear plastic-ish coating. I loved it, but the Surfer figure was heavy and gave me a sweaty chest whenever I wore it.

Now the Surfer comes to the big screen, albeit as a "guest star" in the second Fantastic Four movie, RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. For as much of a comic book fan as I was, I have not enjoyed most of the recent comic book movies: they take themselves way too seriously, and they are way damn too long. But I enjoyed the first F4 film because it was dumb fun and was well under 2 hours. (And, yes, Chris Evans was hot in more ways than one as the Human Torch) The new one is even shorter--with the requisite endless credits, it's still just a smidge over 90 minutes--and if it's a little less fun than the first one, it's still quite watchable. Evans gets a short shirtless scene and the Surfer, a mostly CGI figure with an actor (Doug Jones) buried in there somewhere, is very well done. I wish it was a little wittier and more clever than it is, but the superhero angst that overburdens the recent Spider Man and Batman movies is largely absent here. I'm not crazy about Ioan Gruffuud and Jessica Alba as Reed and Sue, but Evans and Michael Chiklis have welcome light touches as the Torch and the Thing. Julian McMahon is underused as baddie Dr. Doom (and I kept thinking he would have made a good Reed Richards). But as noted above, they pull off the Silver Surfer perfectly, and I was happy. Now if I can just find a Silver Surfer shirt that fits me!