Like most comic book loving guys my age, growing up the Silver Surfer was one of my favorite fictional characters. He was a stoic creature who traveled the cosmos on and with nothing but a board, had cosmic powers, and looked cool as fuck. And even though his task was to endlessly seek out inhabited planets for his master Galactus to raze into non-existence, he was strangely benevolent. For me, the Silver Surfer shared top honors with Thor, Hulk, Blackbolt, and Machine Man.

I’ve always dreamed about seeing the Silver Surfer up on the big screen. What Doug Jones (the actor behind the Surfer body) and the Weta Digital effects crew did in crafting the herald of Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was quite actually the fulfillment of one of my childhood dreams. It’s not often that you can say something like that without being facetious. And not only does the Surfer looks amazing in this movie, thanks to Laurence Fishburne — who provided the Surfer’s voice — he sounds great, too.

In this sequel to 2005’s Fantastic Four, mysterious unnatural global occurrences begin to take place. Seas turn stone-like, massive holes appear out of nowhere, and power outages wreak havoc throughout the planet. Enter Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba) — the super couple least likely to finish a wedding ceremony — and their ever-bickering teammates The Thing (Michael Chiklis) and The Human Torch (Chris Evans), collectively known as The Fantastic Four — our super-group of convenience in this film. The group is recruited by a military special forces team (led by Andre Braugher) to investigate the phenomena, which coincides with the arrival of the enigmatic Silver Surfer, who summons to him the world-eater Galactus and hence the impending doom of Earth. Oh, and the Fantastic Four suffers through some power-switching and another impending doom — the reemergence of Doctor Doom (Julian McMahon).

Ok, great stuff for a movie, right? Yeah, now about this movie — let’s talk a little about that …

I’m usually an easy-to-please kinda geek. All they had to do with this film was keep the energy up, keep the slapstick to a minimum, and stay on story, and I would happily sing its praises right now.

Unfortunately, I was left with so many questions and issues after seeing this film the first time in the theater that I almost turned down doing the DVD review. I gotta say I’m glad I didn’t, because after watching it on DVD with the commentary tracks and then spending the time checking out all of the included extras, I know why the movie was so inconsistent and ultimately missed the mark for me.

Too many cooks. Plain and simple.

This ‘Power Cosmic Edition’ DVD comes with a boat-load of revealing extras, some of which I’m honestly surprised made it onto the 2-disc set — most notably, the commentary track by producer Avi Arad, writer Don Payne, and film editors Peter S. Elliot and William Hoy. They do a great job of shadowing the production issues they had during the filming and bringing to light the causes for a ton of issues that I initially had with the movie. Listening to them talk, it seemed as if nearly every cool-seeming idea that they had planned was changed by ‘higher-ups,’ reworked, or written out entirely. I actually had to stop the disc and ask if it just seemed that way to me, or if they were really coming off kinda passive/aggressive about the whole thing. They even went on to talk about how when effects shots came back from the SFX houses nearly unusable (which I had no idea was even an possible), set-pieces and key scenes had to be re-sequenced and thought-out to accommodate whatever portions were deemed usable. They were actually scraping scenes together. How could that be good?

I’m a huge proponent of comics-to-film, but some media outlets have stated that the Fantastic Four franchise ‘doesn’t take itself too seriously’ and I’ll admit that at first, I thought that, too. But after watching all the extra material included in the DVD set, I realize that a lot of good thought was put into this franchise, though it wasn’t always possible for the filmmakers to have their vision transferred to the screen.

Ultimately, my assessment of Rise was that it became into a means to an end. The powers-that-be at Marvel’s media wing had it in their heads that a Silver Surfer’s origin tale movie is a monster success in the making, so they insinuate him into the public through their campy Fantastic Four franchise, test the focus-group waters, them BAM!, give him his own bad-ass film. And since a Silver Surfer movie IS in the works, I’d say that’s exactly how it’s playing out so far.

After how they pwnd Norrin Radd in this mediocre popcorn pusher, they BETTER fucking make his solo film bad-ass.

’nuff said.

DVD Special Features:

The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer single-disc DVD release will be presented on a flipper disc featuring both widescreen (2.35:1 aspect ratio) and full screen versions of the film plus English 5.1 Dolby Digital and Spanish/French Dolby Surround audio with English, Spanish and French subtitles. DVD bonus features include:

• Commentary by director Tim Story
• Commentary by producer Avi Arad, writer Don Payne, and film editors Peter S. Elliot and William Hoy

In addition to the above single-disc content, the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – The Power Cosmic Edition two-disc DVD release will showcase the added special features including:

• Extended/Deleted Scenes (with optional commentary by director Tim Story)
• Family Bonds: The Making of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer documentary
• Sentinel of the Spaceways: Comic Book Origins of The Silver Surfer featurette
• The FantastiCar: State of the Art featurette
• The Power Cosmic special effects featurette
• Character Design With Spectral Motion featurette
• Scoring the Fantastic featurette
• Interactive FantastiCar concept images gallery
• Theatrical Trailers
• Still Galleries (Behind the Scenes / Characters / Concept Art)