The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in theaters Friday, July 25.
Marvel’s first family finally shows up to the MCU in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and there’s a lot resting on their retrofuturistic shoulders. These new versions of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue (Vanessa Kirby) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) bear all the anxiety of expectant parents, world-protecting superheroes, and franchise-resuscitating characters. Happily, director Matt Shakman and the team behind First Steps very capably manage some, but not all, of those concerns in a family dramedy that only stops working when it tries to be too much of a superhero movie.
There’s almost an unfair amount of pressure being placed on The Fantastic Four: First Steps – expectations to do what it was most likely never designed to do. Thanks to all the things we know about what’s coming next for the MCU – most notably a green-cloaked villain played by the actor who helped launch the whole franchise. Dr. Doom is, after all, both a traditional Fantastic Four villain and the next big thing for Phase 6, so yes, expectations are high.
The good news is, First Steps lives up to most of these expectations. To start with, the actual Fantastic Four are great: There’s a charisma to each of them individually and chemistry between them all. It may seem like an obvious thing, but they feel like a proper family, and you can tell the actors and director really put the work in to make it so. Scenes with the whole family can deal with heavy questions one moment, and lighten the mood in the next without ever feeling out of character. I truly bought these characters as a family unit.
In fact, Ben and Johnny are a lot more fun together as the world’s greatest uncles than they are apart. Ben in particular feels like a lot of his story was cut from the final film. It’s not a huge loss, because The Thing more than does what he needs to do for the movie. If Ebon Moss-Bachrach did lose some of his screen time, it was chiseled down to the right size. Johnny, meanwhile, gets a little extra to do with a pivotal bit of the story – and a little more fire with which to execute it, thanks to his interest in the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). Motivation, however, is not in short supply for Johnny or any member of the family. All four of them take their jobs as protectors of Earth seriously, and take pride in doing those jobs well.
I also think Pedro Pascal got Reed just right. Reed Richards has always had a lot of potential outcomes in the comics – a lot of different directions in which to stretch (har har) as a character. Sometimes that means going full megalomaniacal Illuminati; other times he’s just a gentle smart guy trying his best to be a hero. What’s sharp about this version of Reed is that all of those options are on the table.
The good and the bad about Pascal’s performance is that it can at times seem a little flat. There are campy moments that land in the nervous nerd stereotype arena – but in the next moment, there’s something else bubbling underneath it. You can see Reed struggling with problems he can’t solve, terrified by all the unknowns he’s suddenly faced with.
Reed doesn’t do a lot of growing or changing; Fist Steps doesn’t teach him any life-altering lessons. But, for a character who we presume will have plenty to do in the MCU moving forward, it actually might be the perfect start for him. It feels like more of a first episode for him than a wholly contained movie.
But the real star of First Steps is Vanessa Kirby. Sue Storm saves all the days. Multiple times throughout the movie, Reed, Johnny, and Ben are tossed aside, incapacitated, but Sue comes through – one time while she’s in labor no less. She’s fierce and protective and clear-eyed about all the danger her family is in. She’s also the only one that can talk to Mole Man, played by Paul Walter Hauser, who absolutely steals a scene right out from under all four of the stars. But the point is, Vanessa Kirby has been one of my favorites since she was the best part of Mission Impossible: Fallout and nothing in First Steps changes that. In fact, Sue is set up to be a more crucial player in the next MCU movies than anybody else in her family.
But it’s her dynamic with Reed as new parents that really gives this movie its heart. They’re a couple from an alternate retrofuturistic universe imbued with superheroic abilities by cosmic radiation, yet their most impressive power is being super relatable. In fact, there’s one argument between the two of them where Sue’s manic and exhausted new-mom energy is so spot on, it unearthed a fear in me that I hadn’t felt since I was a new dad – one I could see Pascal’s face reflecting just as accurately.
Being a father of two, I really felt First Steps’ more or less on-the-nose parenting metaphors – especially the one involving the big bad. Galactus is coming to devour the entire world, but first he sends a messenger to let you know he’s on his way. That is basically pregnancy. A positive test, the first ultrasound – these are parental equivalent of the Silver Surfer riding through the atmosphere and saying, “Hey, heads up, your world is about to be devoured, time to get your affairs in order.” For nine months, all you can do is prepare for the worst and try to convince yourself that it’s not the end of life as you know it. First Steps puts Reed and Sue through both of these experiences – though one eternally hungry entity gives them more time to prep for his arrival than the other.
Rooting the story in something as basically human as becoming a parent is the smartest move Shakman and First Steps’ four credited screenwriters could’ve made, even if they’re less than subtle in doing so. And subtlety is not something this movie is terribly concerned with: The story is a little nuts, and the “world of tomorrow, today!” setting is bizarre, but they go out of their way to make excuses for it. But there’s some intention at play here: By using some zippy, early montages to set up a baseline outlandishness, First Steps preps us to not overthink the Fantastic Four’s ultimate plan to defeat Galactus – a plan that, in hindsight, doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny even by comic book standards.
Some of that has to do with the pace. First Steps zooms through its less-than-two-hour runtime with an energy that doesn’t allow you to stop and ask too many questions. Sometimes that can be a Band-Aid for sloppy filmmaking, but it can also be a savvy use of shorthand – fortunately, it’s more often the latter than the former with this movie. First Steps isn’t an origin story, and we don’t need it to be: If you don’t know that tale from the comics or the two previous movies that told variations on it, a little TV-show-within-the-movie will catch you up on it. The more impressive thing is, Shakman and the writers put a little faith in us to pick up what we need to and go with the flow – and they keep the flow moving quickly enough that we’re not bothered by mentions of Super-Apes, the underground kingdom of Subterranea, time dilation, or anything else we don’t quite get.
A lot of this movie works – in fact I’d say there’s nothing that’s actively or truly wrong with it. But there’s not a lot that stands out about it. What’s missing are those capital-M Moments that superhero movies need. I mean this on an emotional level: Nothing in First Steps had me on the verge of tears, happy or sad; nothing had me nervous for the survival of the folks on screen. But I also mean this on a technical level. The most heroic-looking shots are in the montages, not in the big climactic events of the film. As visually interesting as all the bubble cars and space-age architecture of Earth 828 is – not to mention the sheer scale of Galactus and his planet-grinding spacecraft – there’s a hair that I’ll split by saying I didn’t find it visually compelling. The actors are giving engaging performances in unique wardrobes on a slick looking set, but the camera isn’t doing much else to help.
There’s not a ton of action in this movie, either, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, focusing on introducing and fleshing out characters who’ll presumably be very important to the MCU moving forward is 100% the right call. But the action that’s there seems to leave some money on the table so to speak. I want my comic-book movies to at least have a couple great comic-book-worthy images in them. I want to see those really active frames that convey a ton of energy and emotion and leave an impression. First Steps just doesn’t have enough of that for my tastes.
I do want to shout out the score, though. Composer Michael Giacchino does a lot of the heavy lifting in one of the moments I actually would count as a hero shot. In the sequence where The Fantastic Four blast off to go negotiate with Galactus, there’s this wonderful, sweeping, heroic bit of music, while the rockets are firing, and it’s all smoke and fire and the majesty of slipping the bonds of gravity and soaring into the unknown, seeking adventure! But I got that bit of passion from the music, to be clear – not the visuals.
I went into The Fantastic Four: First Steps wanting it to do more for the broader MCU, and that’s why I think I’m a little disappointed with its specifics. It’s impossible not to consider its place within the entire 37-movie, 14-Disney+-series (and counting) franchise and the heralding of what Marvel hopes will be two world-devouring capstones to Phase 6 in the form of Doomsday and Secret Wars. I’ve been thinking a lot about Thor: Ragnarok, and how the destruction of Asgard was such a propulsive force to the story – the momentum in the build up to Infinity War. It gave Thor, a franchise cornerstone, more than just an eyepatch to move forward with. It was loaded with stakes. They blew up a whole realm for Odin’s sake. That’s what I wanted for the Fantastic Four. “Blow up planets or get the f*** out!” is something I actually said, less than a week ago.
What I got instead was a much quieter family drama, completely unconcerned with moving the MCU ball forward. It does exactly the thing I was preemptively mad about – and yet I can’t be completely angry with it. Beyond its obligations to the constellation of movies and shows around it, this is a solid foundation on which to (re-)introduce Marvel’s first family. Wherever they go from here, it’ll be on to bigger and better things.
