Latest news with #SilverSurfer
Time of India
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Who are Galactus and Silver Surfer? Meet MCU's new villains in Fantastic Four: First Steps
Fantastic Four: First Steps: Marvel is about to reintroduce the Fantastic Four, but this time, it's not just about stretchy arms or invisibility. The real buzz is around the cosmic villains, Galactus and the Silver Surfer. They're not your average bad guys. These two come from the far ends of space, and their presence signals a big shift in the MCU's tone. Instead of another city-level threat, Marvel is aiming for something way bigger, older, and stranger. If you're wondering who these two are and why the internet is so hyped, here's a quick, easy breakdown. Galactus: A god-like force of nature Ralph Ineson, known for his deep voice and serious screen presence, plays Galactus. But don't expect a typical villain. Galactus is older than the universe. He doesn't want to destroy — he needs to. He feeds on planets to survive, like a cosmic predator. As Ineson put it, "He's not evil. He's beyond good and evil." Galactus in 'THE FANTASTIC FOUR' Director Matt Shakman described Galactus as a '14-billion-year-old vampire,' which tells you a lot about the movie's tone. He's not going to give speeches or throw punches. He'll loom, he'll consume, and he'll make the Fantastic Four feel small. Visually, this Galactus looks more like the comics. No more cloud nonsense like in the 2007 version. He's huge, armored, and alien, with glowing eyes and a voice that could shake space. Silver Surfer: Tragic, powerful, and not who you expected Julia Garner plays Shalla-Bal, not the usual Norrin Radd. In the comics, she's from the same planet as Norrin and is often his love interest. In this version, she is the Silver Surfer — Galactus' herald, searching for planets he can consume. The first look at Silver Surfer in THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS Garner says her Surfer is quiet, conflicted, and tragic. 'She doesn't speak much,' she explained in a recent interview. 'You feel her pain just from her body language.' She's not just a shiny alien on a board. She's someone who's lost everything and now serves a being who eats worlds. This version of Silver Surfer adds mystery to the film. Is she loyal? Is she planning something? Can the Fantastic Four reason with her? That tension runs through the film and adds more emotion to all the action. What is The Fantastic Four: First Steps about? Marvel hasn't released the full plot, but this isn't an origin story. The movie is set in the 1960s, on an alternate Earth. It picks up with the Fantastic Four already formed and working as explorers and scientists. According to early leaks and set reports, they get pulled into something cosmic, something way beyond science. That something turns out to be Galactus, the planet-eater, and his mysterious herald, the Silver Surfer. While Reed Richards and team try to stop them, the story also plays with themes of sacrifice, duty, and survival. Expect space travel, a retro vibe, and more serious emotions than your typical superhero flick.
Evening Standard
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
The Fantastic Four: First Steps finds surer ground after Superman face plant
Storm is pregnant and Reed is under pressure to figure out a new threat from space. A Silver Surfer, Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner) sweeps down to Earth as a herald for a being called Galactus, who is a planet eater; our planet is next on the menu. Cue an exciting trip up into space for the Four to speak to this Galactus, a giant machine-man god of sorts (played by Finchy from The Office, it turns out, Ralph Ineson) with a compulsion to destroy and devour holy bodies with his industrial space ship. When the Four come face to face with him, the being senses something special about Storm and Reed's unborn baby and says he'll spare the earth if they give the child to him. The superheroes barely escape back to Earth, and have to figure out what to do, for Galactus is on his way...
Evening Standard
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
The Fantastic Four: First Steps review: 'shows Superman how it's done'
Storm is pregnant and Reed is under pressure to figure out a new threat from space. A Silver Surfer, Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner) sweeps down to Earth as a herald for a being called Galactus, who is a planet eater; our planet is next on the menu. Cue an exciting trip up into space for the Four to speak to this Galactus, a giant machine-man god of sorts (played by Finchy from The Office, it turns out, Ralph Ineson) with a compulsion to destroy and devour holy bodies with his industrial space ship. When the Four come face to face with him, the being senses something special about Storm and Reed's unborn baby and says he'll spare the earth if they give the child to him. The superheroes barely escape back to Earth, and have to figure out what to do, for Galactus is on his way...
RTÉ News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
The Fantastic Four: First Steps . . . And baby makes five
The Fantastic Four's unhappy history with big screen adaptations finally gets some good news with this zippy and mostly fun reboot from director Matt Shakman. Set in a retro-futuristic New York in an alternative 1960s (VW Beetles but no Beatles), it's no stretch (terrible pun intended) to say it's the coolest looking MCU flick in far too long and it leaves previous efforts at turning the blue-suited nuclear family into a viable franchise looking very lacklustre indeed. It doesn't hang about either. The manageable two-hour runtime flies by and any idea that is a genesis story is knocked on the head early with an entertaining and witty opening montage that tells how our family of astronauts - Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Ben Grimm/The Thing and Johnny Storm/Human Torch - got their amazing superpowers. They are now globally admired and adored planetary elders in comfy looking onesies, who preach peace and strive for humanity's best interests, while clobbering baddies with righteous zeal. However, nothing could have prepared them for their latest adversary. This is Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a skyscraper tall super villain with a stadium-filling voice, from somewhere out in the depths of space who survives by literally eating whole planets. His imminent arrival to dine on little old Earth is announced by the cooly fatalistic Silver Surfer, who is played with a well-pitched indifference by Julia Garner. And so, our heroes battle to prevent their newest foe from turning the planet into his latest meal. They do this with an appeal for global cooperation, which might be possible in the film's idealised vision of the 1960s, and some scientific tricks that strain even the parameters of the MCU's built-in credulity. Still, the deeply silly plot does present one or two moral dilemmas for our heroes, not least one involving Reed and Sue's newborn, Franklin. Pedro Pascal, the hottest thing in Hollywood right now, plays patriarch on the spectrum Reed with a quiet authority, Vanessa Kirby is her usual flinty and impressive self as Sue, and the Human Torch may or may not be falling for Silver Surfer; in one of the film's better lines, he asks her "So, are you actually attached to that board . . . ? At one point, The Thing, who already looks like a jumbo Weetabix in a hat, seems like he's going to turn into Cookie Monster, and thankfully the family's cute but slightly irritating robot H.E.R.B.I.E. isn't given too much screen time. A now rehabilitated but still cankerous Mole Man (actor?) is also good value. The inevitable city destroying finale works very well, with Galactus barging around New York like a bored Godzilla. In fact, The Fantastic Four: First Steps keeps its head and isn't as protracted and messy at the usual MCU fare; Shakman even cheekily makes at least two visual references to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Gallactus laments in his Grand Canyon of a voice, "who can stop this blank, eternal hunger?", those of us perplexed by the planet-eating MCU will similarly wonder if fans will ever fire of the formulaic superhero genre. Still, The Fantastic Four: First Steps manages to find a look, feel and sense of cool all of its own that that sets it apart from the usual big screen Marvel chaos and confusion. However, the question does linger - didn't The Incredibles do all this with much more flair and fun?
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Movie Review: The villains steal the show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps'
More than six decades after Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a superhero team to rival the Justice League, the Fantastic Four finally get a worthy big-screen adaption in a spiffy '60s-era romp, bathed in retrofuturism and bygone American optimism. Movie Review: The villains steal the show in 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' Though the Fantastic Four go to the very origins of Marvel Comics, their movie forays have been marked by missteps and disappointments. The first try was a Roger Corman-produced, low-budget 1994 film that was never even released. But, after some failed reboots and a little rights maneuvering, Matt Shakman's 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' is the first Fantastic Four movie released by Marvel Studios. And a sense of returning to Marvel roots permeates this one, an endearingly earnest superhero drama about family and heroism, filled with modernist 'Jetsons' designs that hark back to a time when the future held only promise. 'First Steps,' with a title that nods to Neil Armstrong, quickly reminds that before the Fantastic Four were superheroes, they were astronauts. Reed Richards , Sue Storm , Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm flew into space but return altered by cosmic rays. 'We came back with anomalies,' explains Reed, sounding like me after a family road trip. They are now, respectively, the bendy Mister Fantastic, the fast-disappearing Invisible Woman, the fiery Human Torch and the Thing, a craggy CGI boulder of a man. In the glimpses of them as astronauts, the images are styled after NASA footage of Apollo 11, like those seen in the great documentaries 'For All Mankind' and 'Apollo 11.' But part of the fun of the Fantastic Four has always been that while the foursome might have the right stuff, they also bicker and joke and argue like any other family. The chemistry here never feels intimate enough in 'First Steps' to quite capture that interplay, but the cast is good, particularly Kirby. In the first moments of 'First Steps,' Sue sets down a positive pregnancy test before a surprised Reed. That night at dinner — Moss-Bachrach, now an uncle rather than a cousin, is again at work in the kitchen — Ben and Johnny immediately guess what's up. The rest of the world is also eager to find out what, if any, powers the baby will have. We aren't quite in our world, but a very similar parallel one called Earth-828. New York looks about the same, and world leaders gather in a version of the United Nations named the Future Foundation. The Thing wears a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Someone sounding a lot like Walter Cronkite reads the news. And there's a lot to read when the Silver Surfer suddenly hovers over the city, announcing: 'I herald your end. I herald Galactus.' The TV blares, as it could on so many days: 'Earth in Peril. Developing Story.' Yes, the Earth might be in danger, but did you get a look at that Silver Surfer? That's Johnny Storm's response, and perhaps ours, too. She's all chrome, like a smelted Chrysler Building, with slicked-back hair and melancholy eyes. He's immediately taken by her, but she shoots off into space. In a rousing, NASA-like launch , the Fantastic Four blast off into the unknown to meet this Galactus. But if the Silver Surfer made an impression, Galactus does even more so. Fantastic Four movies have always before gone straight for Doctor Doom as a villain, but his entrance, this time, is being held up for 'Avengers: Doomsday.' Still, Galactus, a planet-eating tyrant, is no slouch. A mechanical colossus and evident fan of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis,' he sits on an enormous throne in space. Sensing enormous power in Sue's unborn child, he offers to spare Earth for the baby. What follows casts motherhood — its empowerments and sacrifices — onto a cosmic plane. There's a nifty chase sequence in space that plays out during contractions. The two 'Incredibles' movies covered some similar ground, in both retro design and stretchy parent and superhuman baby, with notably more zip and comic verve than 'The Fantastic Four.' That's part of the trouble of not getting a proper movie for so long: Better films have already come along inspired by the '60s comic. But as good as Vanessa Kirby is in 'First Steps,' the movie is never better than when the Silver Surfer or Galactus are around. Shakman, a former child actor who's directed mostly in television , proves especially adept at capturing the enormous scale of Galactus. 'First Steps' may be, at heart, a kaiju movie. What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It's a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive. I was more likely to be moved by a really handsome chalkboard than I was by its vision of motherhood. But, especially for a superhero team that's never before quite taken flight on screen, 'First Steps' is a sturdy beginning, with impeccable production design by Kasra Farahani and a rousing score by Michael Giacchino. Even if the unifying space-age spirit of Kirby and Lee's comic feels very long ago, indeed. 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps,' a Walt Disney Co. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for action/violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes. Three stars out of four. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
