The Fantastic Four: First Steps Review: Some Quality Family Time in the MCU

The hour has grown late, and the sun’s drawn low. Such ominous tidings definitely apply to the denizens of Earth in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. For it is in this movie that Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds, has come. However, it also applies to many longtime Marvel Comics fans in the audience. Despite four previous movies, countless cartoon shows, and a smattering of video game adaptations to boot, Marvel’s First Family and the crown jewels in Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s collaboration have never transferred smoothly to another medium. And while it’s not been overtly stated, First Steps implicitly feels like the chance. As the health of the superhero genre comes into question, this might very well be a final roll of the dice to get these icons right.

So if your chief concern is seeing Marvel’s Fab Four fully realized, take a breath and rest easy. Director Matt Shakman, a legion of screenwriters, and producer Kevin Feige are aware of the solemnity of the task in front of them, and as is often Marvel Studios’ last fallback, the company maintains a canny knack for distilling the spirit of their characters to a visual medium. They do it again here with the kind of seeming ease which eludes or bedevils other studios (here’s looking at you, 20th Century Fox).

It is thus a relief to say that Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben are all faithfully introduced to the MCU sandbox, albeit in a different corner of the multiverse from all the other movies. And most of them are spectacularly well cast too. Joseph Quinn captures the self-assured swagger of the Human Torch without turning him into a narcissist or sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, a la Chris Evans’ version from 2005; Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s voice exudes the avuncular warmth and gregariousness of the bag of rocks they call the Thing; and most refreshingly Vanessa Kirby at last instills in a cinematic Sue Storm her ferocious intelligence and an even fiercer maternal quality that’s largely absent in the superhero genre.

If you strictly yearn to see Kirby’s band of explorers at last with their sails set, and free from the ropes and constraint of shore, The Fantastic Four: First Steps fulfills the dream of launching them toward the waves, even if only insofar as to still see the safety of land on the horizon. This is a Marvel movie, remember, and the studio never drifts too far from the security of bedrock formula.

As an actual narrative film, though, First Steps is not entirely a pleasure cruise. It is even ironically the second superhero movie this month to begin in medias res, deliberately starting after a skipped origin story, and with a mountain of exposition to surmount. Like James Gunn’s Superman, First Steps wants to be a zippy bit of Silver Age comics triumphalism; but at the same time it hurriedly seeks to redeem one of the greatest stories ever told in a superhero magazine, Kirby and Lee’s “Galactus Trilogy” from 1966.

This impulse to be both a fresh beginning like the title says, as well as one of the most somber Kirby tales about Marvel’s happy heroes staring down the End of Days, makes First Steps a movie divided against itself. That does not mean either side of the narrative doesn’t work; they just make for curious bedfellows.

The lighter aspect of this setup is the one you’ve likely seen in the marketing: in the alternate reality of Earth 828, they’re still partying like it’s 1962 and Kennedy’s Camelot is never going to end. In fact, because the Fantastic Four got slammed with cosmic rays some time ago and came back supercharged, things have only gotten groovier. Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards has invented flying cars; they have an adorable robot helper named H.E.R.B.I.E. in the Baxter Building; and as far as pop culture is concerned, this foursome is bigger than the Beatles. The way First Steps tells it, they might even be the only things popping in this alternative 1960s.

At this height of such success, the movie also opens on the loveliest of realizations for Reed and Sue: she is pregnant, and the test came back positive just in time to tell her little brother Johnny and everyone’s surrogate big bro, Ben Grimm, at Sunday dinner. Alas the good vibes are to be brief and fleeting, for no sooner have the Fantastic Four announced to the world that they have a prospective fifth member in the offing than a sleek, silver harbinger of doom (or the “naked space girl” as Johnny enthuses) descends from the heavens to announce the end is nigh. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) has come to herald that Galactus will soon be here… eventually. And with his approach, First Steps is going to become a much different movie.

The sense of foreboding and inescapable doom that pervades the last two-thirds of the movie clash tonally and aesthetically with the faint ‘60s optimism and retrofuturism that First Steps strives for in its first act. Yet this is not wholly a problem. I would even argue the last two acts are the most coherent and focused an MCU movie has been in a number of years, not least of all because Galactus is a genuinely menacing villain, particularly in his first scene which occurs after the Fantastic Four travel to space to get a glimpse of the big guy for themselves.

Portrayed by Ralph Ineson with that wonderful Yorkshire accent he used to haunting effect in The Witch and The Green Knight, Galactus carries immense presence. Part of that is due to some cagey framing by Shakman who uses light, shadow, and perspective to make this un-jolly giant tower over the screen. He’s hidden enough in darkness to subdue the more outrageous aspects of his faithfully rendered purple Kirby designs, but it’s Ineson’s severity and purring indifference that makes him truly formidable.

His looming menace, and Garner’s ice-cold interpretation of Silver Surfer’s faint pangs of empathy—she says with flickering affection at one point “go die with yours”—gives First Steps a sense of stakes and emotional dread that’s largely elluded the MCU since the days of Thanos, or at least Willem Dafoe getting to mug it up again in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

However, First Steps never quite convinces one that this is a grand introduction for Marvel’s First Family. The Galactus saga gives the movie that Shakman made clarity and a sense of narrative propulsion—it’s also refreshingly self-contained—but only because so much of the movie’s first act is discombobulated as it strains to impress in shorthand all the yé-yé chic fun we missed out on before the story proper starts. There is a newsreel introduction that includes a glorified clip reel of the Fantastic Four’s greatest hits, including the delightful inference of a Mole Man adventure in Subterranea.

But we don’t really get to see or join in on the Fantastic Four having fun other than a handful of very nice family dinner sequences. Nor do we get to live in their world wherein the ‘60s setting feels like anything other than a thin veneer of window dressing while our heroes wander around otherwise empty, graywashed backlots. Yes, there is a nice Times Square set with vintage billboards, and all the male extras are wearing fedoras and trench coats, but there is nary an immersive ‘60s touchstone or needle drop. To put it another way, X-Men: First Class did a lot more to evoke some of the pop culture whiz-bang joy of this Silver Age setting 14 years ago.

Most of these elements feel skimmed over, because the film needs to get to Galactus and a storyline that works very well, but which makes for an oddly somber meet-cute with who are clearly meant to be the MCU’s most fun-loving characters going forward.

But our central quartet still works with shimmering charisma. The casting is uniformly good to great, with the usually sublime Pascal being the only one who doesn’t quite fully inhabit his archetype. Pascal still brings a sense of deep affection and concern opposite the other three, but not necessarily the Father-Knows-Best certitude that the story seems to demand. Also, no fault to Pascal, but it’s strange how no live-action Fantastic Four filmmaker has figured out a way to use Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy powers half as dazzlingly as Brad Bird’s animated The Incredibles from more than 20 years ago.

Nonetheless, Pascal, Kirby, Quinn, and Moss-Bachrach convey a deeply committed family unit who are so winsome you cannot help but be charmed by their bantering and playfulness, and concerned when their domestic bliss is pointedly and existentially threatened by the hungry, hungry, giant stomping around Midtown like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Spending time keeping up with the Richards and Storms makes for a lovely evening. It’s just that one might wish our first get-together wasn’t quite so morose.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters on Friday, July 25.