Silver Surfer as Christ Figure June 17, 2007
Posted by Steve in : The City, Movies, The Cultural Conversation , add a comment
Just got home from seeing the latest summer blockbuster, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer that has been brought to the big screen by Stan Lee and 20th Century Fox. It was an excellent movie with incredible special effects and a strong Christ figure in the Silver Surfer. The good story line comes from the comic books (although no face for Galactus?). The cinemaphotography was superb. This blockbuster is supposed to have done nearly $60 million this opening weekend. It will be interesting to see how it does. As of Sunday night, it had more than 4, 700 ratings and an average fan rating of “B” at Yahoo Movies. What do you think?
Wikipedia tells us that “the Silver Surfer is a fictional Marvel Comics superhero created in 1966 by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby. They created a character, Norrin Radd, who was a young astronomer of the planet Zenn-La. In order to save his homeworld from destruction by a fearsome cosmic entity known as Galactus, Norrin made a bargain with the being, pledging himself to serve as its herald. Imbued in return with a small portion of Galactus’ Power Cosmic,[1] Norrin acquired great powers, a silvery appearance, and a surfboard-like vehicle — all modeled after a childhood fantasy of his. Known from then on as the Silver Surfer, Norrin began to roam the cosmos searching for new planets for Galactus to consume. When his travels finally took him to Earth, the Surfer came face to face with the Fantastic Four, a team of powerful superheroes that helped him to rediscover his nobility of spirit. Betraying Galactus, the Surfer saved Earth but was punished in return with everlasting exile there.[2]
Writer/editor Stan Lee, Kirby’s “Fantastic Four” collaborator, loved the character. “I felt that he had to represent more than the typical comic-book hero,” he wrote later. Lee gave the Surfer his own book (without Kirby) and made the character a noble philosopher and Christ figure, trapped on Earth, suffering for mankind’s sins, even doing battle with a Satan stand-in called Mephisto.
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