Fantastic Voyage - The Team Is Back'Fantastic' voyage
A comic book team is back and battle-ready
By JOHN CLARK
Monday, June 11th 2007, 4:00 AM
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'Fantastic Four' opens this weekend.
Jessica Alba stars in the flick.
Jessica Alba is going on about the many virtues of her new film, "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," opening Friday: "It's fun, it's a family comic book movie, it's a great summer movie, it's a great popcorn movie and it's only 90 minutes long."
In other words, "Rise of the Silver Surfer" is trying not to be a big, bloated bag of tricks, like some of the other sequels this summer. Instead, it picks up where the first "Fantastic Four" left off two years ago, following the trials and tribulations of four (mostly) reluctant superheroes: Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), a supersmart and superelastic scientist; Sue Storm (Alba), Reed's feisty, sometimes invisible fiancée; Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), Sue's ball-of-fire brother, and stony strongman Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis).
Together, they face the Silver Surfer, a sort-of cosmic errand boy preparing Earth for destruction by Galactus, a godlike, world-eating entity. He rides a surfboard and looks like the T-1000 in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."
As cool as the Surfer is, this film also develops the main characters in ways the first one didn't permit, since that one was all about setting up who they were, how they related to one another and how they got their powers, learned to use them and came to terms with them.
But here, all of the characters have had personality enhancements. Alba, for instance, freely admits that in the first film Sue was a bit of a nag, "always arguing and yelling at Johnny and Reed." But now she's getting married to Reed, in what Alba describes as the "wedding of the century between superheroes," so Sue needs to lighten up a bit.
"She's planning her wedding, and she's got all of these romantic ideas about what her life is going to be like with Reed," Alba says. "She's stuck between being a workaholic and a family person. I think a lot of women relate to that. So I wanted to make Sue more human and dynamic and relatable to working women."
"Sue is now more lovable and stronger," says director Tim Story. "She's definitely the Invisible Woman, not the early comics' Invisible Girl. She's the one who keeps everything together."
Chiklis' Grimm also lightens up, although some of that may have to do with the advances made in the actor's prosthetic costume. For "FF" No. 1, the star of TV's "The Shield" had to walk around in a 60-pound body suit that he describes as a "broiler." He lost 10 pounds in water weight; he was miserable. For the sequel, technical advances allowed him to take the "Thing suit" off between takes, though he left the head on. "Which was quite a sight," Chiklis says.
Meanwhile, Reed is more "manly and sexy" in this film, Alba says. "We see him becoming Mr. Fantastic," Gruffudd says. "They've written the character as he is in the comics, which is great. It's much more fun to play a high-status character" (rather than, um, a nerd who stretches?).
And Johnny Storm has matured, as sometimes happens to people when they are faced with planetary extinction and have no one to spend their last moments with (Johnny does finally get a love interest, played by "Turistas" actress Beau Garrett). Johnny doesn't become a complete bore, however; he still embraces his celebrity, and he's the mastermind behind the FF's merchandising efforts - T-shirts, action figures - which not only finance Reed's experiments but also pay for day-to-day expenses and all the damage they do when they're crimefighting.
"New York City is charging the FF for cop cars that get blown up," Alba says. "Superheroes can get billed, apparently."
They also get to exchange powers, in what Alba calls "a fun little gag," courtesy of the Surfer - whose nearly infinite powers come from the same source as theirs - and when he has a run-in with Johnny, switcheroos start happening.
It's all in summer fun, though that doesn't mean it was necessarily fun to make. Chiklis, of course, was tormented, but as Gruffudd says, "It's about hitting marks and imagining the background. It requires a lot of concentration to do that over and over and over."
It also has meant a lot of postproduction, which Story says he's just now emerging from. But he's quietly confident about the film's prospects. In fact, if it's a success - his first "FF" grossed over $300 million worldwide - there will probably be a third (the actors are signed up for three, including "Nip/Tuck" star Julian McMahon, who returns as Reed's archnemesis Dr. Doom).
But Story has been careful not to get too far ahead of himself. After all, the plot of this movie is part of a classic 1960s story arc (see sidebars) involving the Surfer and Galactus that many comic book fans consider sacred text.
"I've found out that you get yourself in trouble when you start dealing with expectations," Story says. "I think I've made a film that will give the fanboys what they've been waiting for. And the audience that doesn't know about the Silver Surfer will get a clear-cut, emotional tale that I believe everybody will like.
"It's up to the audience now."
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