The Fantastic Four: First Steps – Strong Cast, Light Stakes

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an entertaining and handsome nostalgia trip in the mold of its source material, one of the comic-book giant’s earliest superhero franchises. The retro-future action adventure is chock-full of good acting (Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are particularly strong), and it wears its 1960s affectations with style. But after a couple of hours of watchable superheroics, the movie never seems to get going, nor does it ever seem to get as desperate as its heroes as the stakes get apocalyptically high.

Producer Kevin Feige called the movie “a no-homework-required” experience, and it’s true. Marvel films can often be weighed down by referential complexity, such that to fully enjoy them, one has to already be conversant in the story threads of the wider cinematic universe: the multiverses and timelines, the surprise cameos and callbacks, the unexpected connections to other Marvel properties, and more. First Steps is different. It’s the start of a new era in the Fantastic Four franchise, bringing Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm back to life on screen without invoking the broader continuity and narrative baggage of previous adaptations. It’s a standalone story that, with a few exceptions, revels in its simplicity—and sometimes to a fault.

The movie begins with a flashback to a chat show hosted by Mark Gatiss in a suit and ’tude that recalls an almost long-dead British time traveler. Gatiss provides exposition on how the Fantastic Four became the Fantastic Four. About four years before the movie’s action takes place, the quartet was on a space mission that ended with exposure to cosmic radiation and a DNA-altering mutation of their cells. Reed, thoughtfully and good-humoredly played by Pedro Pascal, was blessed with super-stretchy limbs, so that he could elongate his body like taffy. Sue, brought to the screen by Vanessa Kirby, can turn invisible and channel force fields from her hands. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny can engulf himself in flames and fly like the Human Torch. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm is, after being zapped by the radiation, permanently deformed into The Thing—a hulking strongman coated from head to toe in gray rock-like skin.

All four live together in a home that looks like a mid-century modernist architectural compound out of a 1960s concept album, complete with flying cars, chalkboard equations adorning the walls, and a toddler-size robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. who’s programmed to assist around the house. The world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps is retro-futurism as envisioned in a more square-cornered ’60s design aesthetic—square television screens, no iPhones, wide collars, clean lines, and an almost naïve utopianism in its physical mise-en-scène. It’s a visual trip that melds The Jetsons with Lost in Space as if rebooted through a Marvel comic.

The plot is less adventurous. A through line of the movie is family, the close-knit nature of the central four characters. Sue reveals early in the film that she’s pregnant, and Reed reacts in the understandably nervous and slightly panicked way that most future fathers do. At one point, as part of a funny montage sequence, Reed programs H.E.R.B.I.E. to baby-proof not only the couple’s domestic living space, but also their secret science lab. Meanwhile, Johnny and Ben offer sibling-style double-act quips and comic relief, but the subtext is that these two are also already accepting of the roles they’ll soon play as parental figures to Sue and Reed’s child. They are—each in their way—an especially close family.

The fun family time is soon interrupted, of course, by an existential threat to that same family. The movie’s big bad is Galactus, a hulking armored being with enormous glowing eyes. He’s a colossal omnivore in search of a new planet to devour. But before he gets to Earth, he sends ahead a silver-skinned herald (Julia Garner in motion-capture performance) to break the news to the newly reunited Fantastic Four. The Silver Surfer sweeps in looking, as her superhero alter ego should, sleek and menacing. She’s also a source of titillation and object of teenage lust (for Johnny, in particular).

The tension never builds the way it should. The action—across our heroes’ space chase of Galactus and their evasion of the Silver Surfer’s zaps and lightning blasts—fits the retro space-time vibe of the overall production. So the special effects, especially during the action sequences, are mostly blasts of light, tendrils of flame, or colorful atomic-style booms. Sue goes into labor as part of the movie’s climax. On a visual level, it’s no doubt very impressive. But the sequences of heroism set against Sue’s childbirth feel more surreal than suspenseful. There’s an odd disconnect here: the birth of a child and the apparent end of Earth in a 1960s space-age color palette.

The disconnect sums up the film’s tonal aim. There are real, if buried, moments of emotional sincerity, even nobility. But in a movie that is otherwise so soft, so rendered in pastel-hued primary colors, the stakes never feel high, not even when the end of the Earth is at stake. It’s more a children’s adventure story than a big-budget superhero thriller.

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an altogether likable and eminently watchable superhero reboot, but compared to the company’s best cinematic offerings in recent years, it’s lighter on the pulse-pounding. Accessible, nostalgic, and sincere, the movie is just that—not much more, but also not much less. For anyone who’s also in the mood for something lighter and less than world-ending, it will be just the thing. For most others, it will likely feel like a beautifully wrapped gift with hollow contents inside.