20th Century Fox comic book characters continue to make their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the first film from Marvel Studios to feature the legendary superhero team. Like Superman earlier this month, this is a movie that already assumes you get the gist of these heroes and their powers, so it opts for a speed run through their origin story. Four astronauts — Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) — survive a cosmic ray blast while in space and come back to Earth with unique abilities. Reed is able to stretch his body into impossible shapes, while his wife Sue can turn invisible and project powerful force fields at will. Ben’s skin has transformed into rock and given him superhuman strength, while Sue’s brother Ben has the ability to manipulate fire and fly.
Together, they make up the Fantastic Four and are held in high esteem as celebrities to the general public, so the news that Reed and Sue have a baby on the way is met with an outpouring of excitement and support. But the hoopla isn’t long lived, as a creature known as Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) gives the Four a heads up that her planet-devouring boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) is hungry and Earth is next up on the menu. Attempting to reason with the gigantic cosmic being on behalf of humankind, the Fantastic Four discover that Galactus will spare their world in exchange for Reed and Sue’s unborn child. The pair rebuff the giant’s offer but after returning home, they find their adoring fans are much more willing to sacrifice the newborn if it means saving the lives of every other human. Desperate to find another way, the team works day and night to develop a plan to get rid of Galactus for good.
One of the primary ways The Fantastic Four: First Steps stands out both from previous on-screen iterations of this cosmically-converted crew and other MCU entries is its retro-futurist setting. Taking place in an alternate 1964 where flying cars exist alongside Volkswagen Beetles, every inch of the film is covered with rich details about what people in the past thought the future could look like. Production designer Kasra Farahani crafts immaculately-rendered props and sets that reflect the technological optimism and collectivist spirit of the early 1960s. It’s neat to see a Times Square that at once looks accurate to the period and is nevertheless peppered with technology that still doesn’t exist in 2025. An aerial chase scene midway through the film leverages this juxtaposition seamlessly, as a character wirelessly broadcasts audio signals to TV monitors within their breakneck pace proximity.
While I appreciate the whiz-bang zip of that particular sequence, I wish the pacing of The Fantastic Four: First Steps didn’t consistently try to match the velocity of the mid-flight superheroes. Director Matt Shakman forgoes the typical Marvel Studios production logo and goes right into a brisk catch-up montage on how the Fantastic Four came to be. But within the sub-2 hour runtime, it feels like Shakman and his quartet of screenwriters pack in too much incident and too few occasions for the characters to breathe. Shakman’s resume thus far is primarily within the realm of TV — including his work on the MCU series WandaVision — and had there not been 15 other MCU shows since that inaugural entry, perhaps Fantastic Four would’ve worked better within a television framework. This is our first time together with these performers as the Four and outside of an early dinner scene, in which Ben correctly deduces that Sue is pregnant, we don’t get enough of a sense of how their personalities colorfully bounce off one another.
The cast does what they can to punctuate their scenes with clues as to what makes their cerulean-sweatered superheroes tick. Pascal and Kirby have both romantic chemistry and tension as soon-to-be parents trying to reckon bringing a son into a world getting more cosmically horrifying by the day. I’m still not completely sold on Quinn as an up-and-coming star but he does his best bringing the brashness out of his hothead hero, even if it doesn’t quite top what Chris Evans did with the Human Torch in the past. Moss-Bachrach isn’t given much to do as The Thing but he shows a sweet side of the character we haven’t seen before and his naturalistic voice work is absent the obvious choice to go gravelly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn’t as marvelous as it could be but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Score – 3/5
New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, is an action comedy reboot about a detective following in the footsteps of his bumbling father, who must solve a murder case to prevent his police department from shutting down.
The Bad Guys 2, starring Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, is an animated sequel reuniting the crackerjack criminal crew of animal outlaws, who are pulled out of retirement and forced to do “one last job” by an all-female squad of bandits.
Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is a body horror movie involving a couple who move to the countryside but find themselves encountering a mysterious force that horrifically causes changes in their bodies.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup