Silver and wedding

“Fantastic Four” is back on screens in Moscow and around the world

We had to wait two years for the second coming of Marvel's quartet of genetically modified heroes on wide screens. The timing is perfect - it didn’t work out to forget who is who in the Fantastic Four and what properties they have, but you couldn’t even make a face, like when you see an annoying relative who, half an hour after the end of the family holiday, returns, supposedly for an umbrella, and stays for another a week, it seems to be of no use. And so - everything is in place. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), aka Mister Fantastic, capable of stretching his limbs to incredible sizes, Invisible Sue (Jessica Alba), in addition to complete transparency, endowed with the ability to control force fields, her brother Johnny (Chris Evans), nicknamed Torch, who can turn around a flying clot of fire, as well as Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), who once turned into a stone Something, and remained so, joined the American society around them as everyone’s favorites and constant heroes of gossip columns.

And now the media are discussing in every possible way the details of the upcoming wedding of Richards and Sue. And only after this event, news reports began to contain reports of strange cataclysms that engulfed the Earth - a large part of Tokyo Bay was covered with ice, that your skating rink, the Egyptian pyramids were covered with a five-centimeter layer of snow, and in Los Angeles and the surrounding area the power supply was cut off every day. And neither global warming nor other natural disasters have anything to do with it. From the depths of the Universe, the Silver Surfer (Doug Jones, in the original speaking in the voice of Laurence Fishburne) is moving to Earth - the carrier of the same radioactive influence that once made the four four, a ruthless and invincible harbinger of the death of all living things: not a single world to which the Surfer is on got close enough to his board, he didn’t last more than eight days. So our superheroes will have to take a break from choosing wedding china and trying on outfits for a while and take up their direct responsibilities of saving the world.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the ordinary military, without special qualities, decided to play it safe and released against the Surfer the long-time enemy of the four, and of all humanity as a whole - Victor von Doom (Julian McMahon). There was no need to do this under any circumstances, but what to take from ordinary people... Fortunately, the Surfer himself, after all caught and deprived of his wonderful board, shows consciousness and decides to help earthlings fight their own master, the true culprit of all troubles named Galactus - the planet eater, pure evil from outer space.

“Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” like the first part, directed by Tim Story (“Barbershop,” “New York Taxi”), in principle consists of three layers of approximately equal volume. The first is jokes and reprises about the fact that superheroes are also people and are forced to exist in the ordinary world, and the jokes are mostly quite simple-minded (“What is the main thing for the Human Torch’s girlfriend?” - “Fireproof underwear and sunscreen”). The second is a pseudoscientific game library, where columns of numbers run, trembling, across the monitor screens, light bulbs wink, chrome “dashboard handles” glorified by Soviet science fiction half a century ago gleam, and the viewer has the opportunity to become familiar with such shudderingly interesting concepts as “transformation of matter into subatomic level", "Tachyon pulse" and "magnetic track with liquefaction capacitor". And finally, the third, for which everything was started - specially effective scenes of the struggle between good and evil, during which the Thames merges into a funnel, as if into the drain of a giant sink, the Great Wall of China crumbles into small bricks, and the Silver Surfer rushes through office buildings like a hot knife through vegetable oil.

Neither the first, nor the second, nor even the third of the components of the “Fantastic Four” makes any sense. All the motivations of the characters are extremely simple, and it is impossible to interpret them in even the slightest unexpected way - even seemingly reliable psychoanalysis turns out to be of no use here. “Four” is entertainment in its purest form, and old-fashioned entertainment, trying to amaze, but not frighten, make you laugh, but not confuse, make you empathize, but not think. It is no coincidence that at the box office the film was awarded a more than gentle PG rating (children of any age accompanied by parents) - in the entire history of film adaptations of Marvel comics, only the film "Howard the Duck" was awarded this kind of qualification - the adventures of an alien mallard, blatant in their idiocy . But maybe this is for the best - you can get your share of pleasure in this situation, especially since, unlike most summer blockbusters this year, Storey’s film was very lenient with the duration - only an hour and a half (where is “Man- Spider" with 140, and the third "Pirates" with 168 minutes of screen time). So it seems that you just start to get bored and toil, but, lo and behold, the world has already been saved, the wedding has been played, and the heroes are rushing to new exploits right from the crown.

Stanislav F. ROSTOTSKY