Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer Will Be the Best One Yet, for a Very Good Reason

Last week it was revealed that MCU’s Silver Surfer will be Julia Garner. Julia will be portraying Shalla-Bal, Norrin’s love interest in the comics, but there is a reality in which Shalla serves as the Herald of Galactus as well, Sunglow.

The reactions to Julia Garner’s casting were extremely polarizing with a good part of the community feeling that genderswapping Silver Surfer, whom 99% of people associate with being male, is extremely disrespectful to the character’s legacy. The second part of the fandom however feels that other versions of Silver Surfer – notably female ones, should get their moment of glory.

Needless to say there are already calls to boycott the movie, but this is wrong, no matter what your feelings are about the movie, you should first watch it, if only so you can criticize it later in an informed way. Now that we’ve touched upon the topic of Silver Surfer in live-action, it’s a known fact we already have live-action Surfer. He debuted in ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,’ played by both Laurence Fishburne and Doug Jones, with Fishburne providing the voice and Doug Jones providing the looks and motion capture.

The movie itself was a tragedy with poor critical reception and one of the most criticized aspects of the movie was Silver Surfer itself, so Julia Garner’s Surfer will, however you look at it, be better than him.

It’s not all about poor CGI, the 2007 Silver Surfer was a poor character overall, there was little to no humanity in him, his powers were ill-defined, and the ending left people wondering, why didn’t Silver Surfer kill Galactus in the first place if he had the power to do it?

With Garner’s Shalla-Bal there is an ample opportunity to fix these mistakes. Obviously, CGI and motion capture have drastically changed since the release of ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’ so the same actress can provide both the looks and the voice for the Surfer, and it can look great.

There’s also an opportunity to give her powers a unique twist without relying too much on the established canon, now that we are already changing it from the core. There’s ample opportunity to make Garner’s Silver Surfer more humanlike, by giving her distinct personality and goals, and hinting at her redeeming qualities as the movie progresses (if she will have them that is). We also hope that the filmmakers will give her a good origin story and that we will see some scenes of her before she took on the mantle of Herald of Galactus, so the audiences will be able to connect with her better.

What’s the point of all of this? Well, I’m convinced that Garner’s Silver Surfer will be the best one yet, mainly because the first Surfer was poorly done.

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