In The Gate, writer W. Andrew Powell heaps criticism on “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” for various artisic reasons. Fair enough. But then he goes off on a tirade about how the movie needed to more closely follow the comic book version. For example (spoiler alert):
In the world of comic books Galactus was a major player who kept coming back to destroy entire worlds at a time, and he had his eye on Earth a few times. But the important thing to note was that he was this massive robot creature that was the size of a few planets put together. For some insane reason this threatening, kind of funky looking robot was ditched in this film in favour of something simple though.
Instead of a robot coming to destroy Earth, what do we get? A pissed off cloud. That’s right – the sentient creature launching itself through space is really just a galactic thunder storm and apparently he’s going to rain on us until we’re too damp to fight back.
Now, I understand that there’s another (most likely superior) film coming out this year about robots. And I get that a giant planet-sized machine might look silly, or look too unbeatable, but you can be damn sure that when it comes time to fight something that size, it going to look pretty cool. By comparison, how do you fight a cloud exactly? Well, leave it to the Silver Surfer – he does something or other and then it’s over, but you can hardly call it a fight.
I share the concern about Galactus being portrayed as a cloud. I thought the film miss out on a huge “wow, you’ve gotta see this, moment” by not having Galactus stride through the streets of New York until he reached the Baxter Building. But, unfortunately, there’s a fatal flaw with Mr. Powell’s little thesis: At no time in the history of the character was Galactus a robot. He was a guy. A dude. A gigantic, cosmic-powered dude wearing funky purple armor with hockey sticks as antlers. But he was a guy. He was hungry and only planets satiated his appetite.
This is Galactus:
Perhaps Mr. Powell confused Galactus with this guy:
It’s an easy mistake to make. Galactus is a villainous humanoid who was about as tall as a skyscraper, and first appeared in a storyline that is considered one of the classics of comics literature. H.E.R.B.I.E. is a floating non-humanoid robot that first appeared in a Saturday morning cartoon that most people have forgotten.
It’s an easy mistake to make, I guess, if you are an asshat who’s pretending to know what he’s talking about.
Geez, big deal. Chill out. Mixing up that he was a humanoid vs. being a robot strikes me as a relatively minor mistake. Doesn’t concern me too much – I know I’m more on the ball than most critics.
That said, I’ll make a note in the review since I’m all too happy to admit when I’m wrong and sign my name to it as well.
W. Andrew Powell: Glad that you are ‘fessing up. Considering that half of you review revolved around this “minor” mistake, that’s might big of you.
I can’t get too worked up around the portrayal of Galactus. I grew up watching television and movies just butcher the characters I loved. Compared to these bad old days, we are living in the Golden Age of Superhero movies.