If you plan on going to see “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” there’s nothing I can say to dissuade you, and to be honest, I don’t really want to. As far as these bland summertime wasters go, this film is okay, but with a budget of $130 million, shouldn’t we be doing better than “okay”?

There’s something offensive about spending this much money to make a movie that has the look and feel of a direct-to-video flick you might find on late-night cable.

Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby invented the Fantastic Four back in 1961, and it quickly became Marvel Comics’s flagship title. Working together for 102 issues, this pair of Jewish kids from New York threw off mad ideas like lightning. The world of the Fantastic Four was littered with lost cities, studded with secret races, thick with aliens, bizarre machines, and cosmic beings who ate entire planets like pizza pockets.

The writers’ most famous storyline involved the arrival of Galactus, a gargantuan fellow with a purple, pronged bucket on his head who wanted to eat our planet. He was preceded by his herald, the tragic/noble Silver Surfer, and was finally chased away when Reed Richards threatened him with an item called the Ultimate Nullifier.

Just roll that surreal nonsense around in your head: planet-eaters, space surfers, Ultimate Nullifiers — it’s got a nutty poetry to it. With pulp craziness like this on the newsstands, is it any wonder that Roy Lichtenstein started blowing up panels from comic books to make his overheated pop art paintings? Kirby and Mr. Lee were trying to sell the world mind-blowing concepts such as a race of “Inhumans” living in a secret city on the dark side of the moon. But the most mind-blowing concept in “Rise of the Silver Surfer” is that the Fantastic Four, with all their money and fame, would fly commercial.

As written by Don Payne and Mark Frost, the movie revolves around the difficulties Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) have getting married, none of which are very interesting except for the disgusting revelation that Sue can clear up her complexion by turning her zits invisible.

Simultaneously, over in a slightly more interesting part of the movie, a silver guy on a surfboard with the voice of Laurence Fishburne sails in from deep space and begins drilling great big holes in the planet like finger holes in a bowling ball. This causes the audience to rustle excitedly. Could he be heralding the imminent arrival of a giant, interstellar bowler named Stu who is going to throw the planet in a perfect strike and win the big tournament? Turns out he’s heralding the arrival of a briefly glimpsed cloud of computer generated dust that plans on making the planet very, very dirty. Or eating it. Or something.

This leads to a lot of global high-jinks, which range from the predictable to the moderately interesting, but which never quite tips the needle over into exciting. At one point, the U.S. Army shows up, imprisons the Silver Surfer in a dark facility, and immediately starts torturing him. Making political statements is the right of every filmmaker, but here it’s a tacky bit of overreaching, as if the director, Tim Story, looked up some big words he doesn’t quite understand in the thesaurus and is trying them out for the first time.

“Rise of the Silver Surfer” isn’t much worse than “Spider-Man 3” and fortunately it’s only half as long as the third “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment, but there’s something almost immoral about a movie that burns this much money and can’t even raise the pulse of its audience. It seems odd that it cost the producers $130 million to take a wild, nutty comic book and suck all the joy and craziness out of it, replacing its rich red blood with computer-generated dust. Ms. Alba in a wetsuit is a small consolation for what’s been lost. What remains is summer blockbuster wallpaper: It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just sits there on your walls and doesn’t move.