2025 | PG-13 | starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss -Bachrach, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson, Paul Walter-Hauser, Mark Gatiss | directed by Matt Shakman | 1 hr 55 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
Fantastic Four: First Steps, marks the 4th time this comic book franchise has been rebooted for the big screen, including the 90s version, and the 5th time if you include Pixar’s neo-classic The Incredibles. We’re going to end up talking a lot about The Incredibles today because from its 60s spy setting to its Mole Man villain, First Steps leans hard into globing onto the creative success of Brad Bird’s superhero examination in ways that aren’t flattering.
In a multi-verse variation of Earth set in a time of flying cars, helper robots and 60s aesthetic, four astronauts came back from space with superpowers to become Earth’s greatest guardians. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) is the smartest man in the world, stretches his body like rubber and hosts a Fantastic Science show for the kids. Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) can turn invisible and her pregnancy announcement kicks off the movie. Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn, Stranger Things stand-out) can burst into flames and fly and Ben “The Thing” Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach in there somewhere) is a big strong rock monster. All is fantastic until one day a Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) shows up to warn the world it is marked for annihilation by planet-eating mega-beast Galactus (Ralph Ineson).
The highlight of this film is the look of it, the retro-future 60s, Tomorrowland, aesthetic is unlike anything in the Marvel Universe and any sci-fi film we’ve seen in years, with its own obsession with dark dystopian future visions. There is also a scale to the film that is fun to behold, not just that the Fantastic Four are so popular that they can command a world-wide counter-strike effort, but the sight and scale of Galactus as a character is something to behold. He “eats” planets. How cool is that. The stakes couldn’t be higher and that’s a big plus for recent Marvel movies that have been built more around street-level fights and resetting it’s stakes back to square one.
But the look of the film is a case of the difference between Art Direction and World-building. The art and set design look great but scratch the surface and there is no world-building here, no idea of how this world functions other than that it adores these four super-mutants and that they show up on TV all the time. We don’t even know who the president, if they have one, is. The characters are equally one-dimensional, as are the villains. The action scenes are quick light-and-sound shows with little juiced for suspense or excitement. As a superhero movie, we don’t get an opportunity to see their powers very often either. Reed Richards so rarely stretches that it’s shocking when he does and Sue doesn’t turn invisible except in the middle of stress zero-gravity labor pains. Normally a movie like this would open with a crime our heroes effortlessly dispatch of designed to show off their powers. Here we get their back story in a montage on TV chat show (hosted by the one and only Mark Gatiss) where fighting weird villains like the Mole Man (Paul Walter-Hauser) are just a normal day.
While the film lacks suspense, it is almost aggressive in its desire to entertain. In First Step’s best moments it recalls a big fun 90s summer blockbuster tone. Director Matt Shakman’s resume reads like a rogue’s gallery of some of the best TV series and mini-series of the past 20 years, including Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and for our purposes here, Wandavision. He comes to play, but the script is shallow and jumps eagerly from one thing to the next. It has the issues of many of the self-contained Marvel movies, it has to set up the new characters, set up their world, introduce a catastrophic villain/threat and have our heroes fall out and in with the public. A tighter movie can juggle all this and still make the character beats satisfying, the un-cannon Fantastic Four film The Incredibles does that all day long. The problem here is the Core Four themselves, adide from the speeches about family, our heroes aren’t fully fleshed out and Johnny and Thing are mostly reduced to cringe one-liners.
So Fantastic Four: First Steps has its merits, mostly in the visual department, along with a zippy pace, a fun atmosphere and very good villain in Ineson’s Galactus. But the movie didn’t make me want to see more Fantastic Four. It just made me want to see an Incredibles 3 set in space.