The Fantastic Four: First Steps
H.E.R.B.I.E, How's that movie coming? Okay! That is decidedly okay!
Let me get this out of the way immediately: James Gunn’s (and thus DC’s) reinvention of Superman versus Matt Shakman’s Marvel’s new take on its First Family with The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a fascinating microcosm of the two studios’ constrasting approach towards its iconic characters.
Whereas Gunn threw everything and the kitchen sink into his present day reimagining of the Man of Steel, Marvel only has enough imagination to wash its hands in the thrown sink. As a result, Superman is a great (if flawed) movie with a LOT of interesting ideas while Fantastic Four is merely a good movie with just a couple of okay ideas.
Smartly eschewing the usual origin story route in favour of a (somewhat clumsy) film-within-a-film narrative device that yada-yadas through exposition and the alternate Earth-828 setting, the movie throws us into the mix immediately and expects us to keep up. Not that it takes much to keep up, but they’re trying.
Anyway, we’re quickly introduced to the Fantastic Four - Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal); Sue Storm, aka The Invisible Girl (Vanessa Kirby); Johnny Storm, aka Sue’s younger brother or The Human Torch (Joseph Quinn; and Ben Grimm, aka Reed’s BFF or The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach - and the movie’s stakes: Sue is pregnant and Reed is nervous as hell.
Oh and a cosmic naked silver person(?) on a silver surfboard called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) has come to Earth with news that her literal giant of a boss, Galactus, (Ralph Ineson) is on his way to eat everything, so it’s up to the Fantastic Four to stop him.
One thing I have to tip my hat off to First Steps is how it leans into its mix of anachronisms to tell a pretty simple and self-contained story, something that’s been sorely missing from Marvel movies of late and has only started to veer back towards a more coherent direction with its previous entry, Thunderbolts*.
Director Matt Shakman brings his visual flair from Wandavsion to fully realise a bizarro, retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetic - a welcome feast for the eyeballs after many years of Marvel CGI slop - and combines it with present-day anxieties about family and parenting. It’s just a shame that the visuals and production design has far more depth than the script, which was written by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer. It’s almost never a good sign when there are more than two credited screenwriters.
With fatherhood looming, Reed Richards has a lot more to think about than just smart person stuff and Pascal’s years of experience playing scared and occasionally neurotic father figures makes him the perfect choice to embody this version of the character. There’s a scene midway through First Steps where Reed holds his newborn son for the first time and the look on Pascal’s face ranks up alongside the first time he looks at Grogu sans helmet in The Mandalorian or when he tells Ellie he loves her in The Last of Us. Just try not to be disgusted with the horrendous CGI blob Pascal is “holding” because that thing is the antithesis of “cute baby”.
While there’s at least a bit of nuance in Reed Richards, Sue Storm’s whole schtick can be summed up as “baby”. It’s quite disappointing to see a character like Sue being reduced to a cliched maternal figure, but Kirby elevates what little she’s got to work with into something worthy of applause. In the hands of almost any other actress, lines like “we will fight it together… as a family” can come off corny and cliched, yet Kirby manages to make lower-tier dialogue sing throughout First Step’s surprisingly brisk 114 minute runtime.
At least Sue gets a one-word summary of her character. I don’t even know what Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm are really doing in the movie other than dropping typical Marvel one-liners and doing hands-on gruntwork. Quinn flip flops between snarky quipster and hotshot with a chip on his shoulder without really committing to either one, whereas Moss-Bachrach’s entire schtick involves bantering with Johnny and having a crush on a Hebrew teacher (Natasha Lyonne) that goes absolutely nowhere. It’s a credit to Quinn and Moss-Bachrach’s charm for elevating their nothing-there characters to occasional moment stealer.
But top quality actors and visual spectacle can only elevate subpar screenwriting by so much, and First Steps can’t overcome the usual Marvel shortcomings of a thinly-drawn villain, little to no actual stakes, and a third act filled with CGI mess. Oh, Silver Surfer is also in there occasionally, but her presence is pretty perfunctory and only really serves to move the plot along.
Galactus is about as fleshed out as his name and his size is as laughable as his motivation - i.e he’s hungry and only Reed and Sue’s baby can satiate him or he’ll eat Earth-828 - and you already know going into First Steps that no character of importance is going to die at this stage of Marvel’s overarching story, especially a baby, so the final battle ultimately fizzles rather than crackles.
Shakman may have an eye for aesthetic, but he does nothing interesting with any of the Fantastic Four’s powers. Again, it’s all very safe and formulaic stuff from Marvel. It also unfairly hurts First Steps that Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and Incredibles 2 already did the superpowered family with a baby thing fantastically well (pun intended) and there’s almost nothing Shakman can do with the Fantastic Four that won’t be compared to those two animated masterpieces.
I also find it interesting that one of the throughlines in First Steps is how the world will band together behind the Fantastic Four with almost no hesitation. Compared to the realistic skepticism shown towards the Man of Steel by the masses in Gunn’s Superman, it feels almost naive to depict people in such an unrealistically innocent way in 2025. Then again, First Steps takes place on an alternate Earth-828 and that version of life does seem easier to digest than our own, so maybe Marvel’s onto something there when it comes to the whole escapist fantasy thing.
That’s probably why despite suffering from all the now-typical Marvel flaws, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a fun enough romp where I can suspend my disbelief long enough to buy that people still wholeheartedly believe in altruistic good acts from people who wield great power. But that suspension of disbelief is already at its limit, and Marvel surely - surely - knows it can’t keep relying on good vibes and visual spectacle for yet another merely ‘okay’ movie. Avengers: Doomsday, let’s see what you got because it’s all on you now, big boy.