Movie Review: "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" Nails the Heart But Misses the Fun of Marvel's First Family
This Friday will see the official release of Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and below are my (mostly spoiler-free) thoughts on this 37th feature-length entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
If I come across as overly critical in this review, it’s because the Fantastic Four were (and still are) my favorite Marvel superhero team growing up. I read the comics voraciously starting around issue #300– published in 1987, when I was about 7 years old– and to this date I have read most of the title’s 700+ issue run. And since my fandom began at that young age, I have been waiting for somebody to get Marvel’s First Family right in movie form. First Steps definitely comes closest of the five attempts that have been made so far, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any reservations about this entry point for Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing into the MCU.
Plot-wise, The Fantastic Four: First Steps revolves around two major happenings in the lives of Reed Richards (played by The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal), his wife Sue Storm (The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby), her younger brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things), and Ben Grimm (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach): the first being the birth of Reed and Sue’s son Franklin– a monumentally important character from the source material who has never been brought to life on the big screen before– and the coming of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds (Ralph Ineson from The Witch). The latter has been done in a movie previously, albeit in the head-scratching choice of a cloud-like form, which makes those portions of First Steps kind of feel like a superior remake of 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Seeing Galactus fully realized in all his humanoid glory may be the most memorable takeaway from this film, as his terrifyingly true-neutral presence as an existential threat has always loomed so large (literally) in the comics. And in this iteration, the Silver Surfer is not the Doug Jones / Lawrence Fishburne-inhabited Norrin Radd but Shalla-Bal (Ozark’s Julia Garner), whose Stan Lee-co-created existence in Marvel Comics dates back to 1968. Still, her function is essentially the same here, almost beat-for-beat, except for the fact that the gender swap allows her to catch Johnny’s eye (this attraction inspires one of the funnier lines in the movie, which I won’t spoil here).
It’s no stretch (pun intended) to say that First Steps is instantly the best Fantastic Four movie ever made, though that was admittedly not a difficult bar to clear. The cast is great and their relationships and interplay with each other shine as the highlight, much like director Tim Story’s two stabs at the franchise. This take (directed by Matt Shakman of WandaVision fame) also accomplishes what Story’s movies could not because of their more meager budgets and less-advanced CGI effects, in that it captures the sense of wondrous scale and awe that the Fantastic Four and their enemies– especially Galactus– should inherently bring along with them.
But after a brisk opening montage– Shakman and his writers wisely skip over and briefly recap the Fantastic Four’s origin story that we’ve already seen too many times, much like James Gunn’s Superman did a couple weeks ago– the problem arises in First Steps’ second act, wherein the movie often forgets that watching these characters go on their adventures is supposed to be fun. It’s light on freewheeling action and heavy on self-serious, talky science fiction, which makes it feel tonally most like Eternals (a movie I liked, but did not love) when it comes to the MCU.
That might be good news for those– like me– who enjoy the weirder, more ponderous, cosmic side of the Marvel Universe, but maybe not so good for anyone who was looking for a playful, laugh-a-minute romp with the Fantastic Four. I’m fairly torn on it, because I usually prefer when fictional universes take themselves seriously, but at the same time I walked out of this movie feeling as though it was missing something… like it could have used a sequence or two more of the foursome showing off their powers in battles against villains from the comics that are name-checked but not shown on-screen (could the removal of John Malkovich’s Red Ghost have led to this anemia?).
Regardless, there’s a lot to like here, even though the movie never thrilled me enough to push me over into loving it. It will be worth seeing just for the introduction of these characters into the Marvel Cinematic Universe– a move that was a long time coming and took at least one major corporate acquisition to make happen. We already know that this story and its characters will reverberate into next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, and isn’t that a big part of what has been most exciting about the MCU from the very beginning: building anticipation for what comes next?
My grade: 3 ½ out of 5 black-and-white cookies.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens this Friday, July 25th in theaters nationwide.