All Style, Less Substance: The Fantastic Four Review

Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is a playful, often pretty-looking, throwback to one of the company’s earliest superhero teams. It’s also a movie that boasts some strong work from its cast, particularly Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, but one that never ratchets up the suspense or stakes enough to stay with you. What could have been a fresh new start ends up as a somewhat inert first installment.

Marvel producer Kevin Feige may have pitched the film as “a no-homework-required” experience, but there was something of a gamble in putting out a Marvel movie in the summer of 2023 that didn’t presuppose viewers’ awareness of past heroes’ entanglements with the multiverse, with big-name cameos, and with other Marvel spin-offs. First Steps, directed by recent Disney+ Original series filmmaker Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Love, Death & Robots, Control), keeps it simple by reintroducing Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm as standalone characters who don’t have to contend with past iterations’ continuity baggage from recent movies or TV shows.

The script, co-written by Grillo-Marxuach with Michael Dehs and Channing Powell, is content with being simple, sometimes to a fault. The film opens with a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss, who has a non-diegetic, handy-dandy way of telling the audience how the Fantastic Four became the Fantastic Four. Four years earlier, the group took a trip into space that exposed them to radiation that mutated their DNA. Reed, played with intelligence and wit by Pedro Pascal, can stretch his body like elastic. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue can become invisible and create force fields. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny can set himself ablaze and fly. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm is transformed, this time for keeps, into a rock-skinned giant known as The Thing.

The four friends now live together in what looks like a retro-futuristic space compound, complete with flying cars, chalkboard science formulas, and a toddler-sized house-robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. helping them with chores. The world they inhabit in First Steps is a cross between retro-futurism and Tomorrowland wish-fulfillment: square television screens, no smartphones or high-tech touchscreens, and an almost cartoonish level of optimism baked into its architecture and design. Think The Jetsons and Lost in Space going to a Marvel Comic store, and then living there.

The family-friendly aesthetic is the film’s greatest strength. It’s charming and a little playful, but the plot is mostly lacking in urgency. A throughline is that the four main characters act as a family unit, which means that when Sue reveals that she’s pregnant, early in the film, Reed’s anxiety is touching. In one funny scene, he has H.E.R.B.I.E. baby-proof not only their house but their science laboratory as well. Johnny and Ben joke and play off one another like fraternal twins and a younger sibling, while also clearly reveling in their new roles as honorary uncles.

The fun is soon cut short, though, by the incursion of a familiar cosmic menace. Galactus, a hulking, armored figure with glowing eyes, is on his way to Earth with plans to eat it. Before he arrives, he sends a herald, a woman with smooth silver skin played in motion capture by Julia Garner, to relay the bad news. The Silver Surfer floats in on sleek rocket waves, but before long, she’s being ogled (and gawked over) by Johnny. (If this is Marvel making the franchise more diverse and inclusive, it’s still playing in a too-familiar gendered terrain of portraying women as eye candy for men.)

Galactus and the Silver Surfer prove not to be much of a threat, though. As the movie’s central quartet zips around space and hurls itself between the Surfer’s punches, the special effects mostly hew to the film’s retro vibe. Fire and explosions look like bursts of color and light, with flames shooting out behind projectiles, as when Galactus goes in for a close-range bite on the Earth. When Sue goes into labor, at the film’s climax, it’s as if the movie were two chapters of Jack Kirby’s 4D comic smushed together: birth and annihilation, in a color-saturated outer-space palette.

That blend of earnest and wacky is indicative of the film’s overall tone. There are some earnest moments, but it’s hard not to feel like they’ve been absorbed by the movie’s pastel, candy-colored haze. It’s not just that the film never feels like its stakes are high (even when the fate of the planet is on the line, for a while), it’s that the film just never quite conveys a sense of driving toward anything. It’s more of a children’s adventure movie than it is a comic book movie, less about heroics than family values and time-honored traditions of Marvel optimism.

Fantastic Four: First Steps might have been the reboot Marvel fans were looking for, had it not suffered the classic curse of the family-friendly movie: it’s light on thrills. It’s still an enjoyable, well-acted film, with visuals and designs that sometimes wow, but it’s missing the kind of dramatic charge that has powered Marvel’s best entries in recent years. The film is easy to watch, yes. It’s nostalgic, earnest, and often very pretty. It’s also breezy—and in a summer that has seen Marvel’s most serious and dark-toned release so far in Deadpool & Wolverine, that breeziness might be just the right kind of change in weather. For Marvel fans who find the last few years’ lineup heavy on world-ending crises and climaxes, First Steps may hit the sweet spot of whimsy. For those who don’t? It may be a gift box so pretty and well-wrapped that you wonder what’s inside.