The ultimate nullifier

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

2025

Directed by Matt Shakman

Written by Kat Wood, Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer

Spoilers: high

There's a species of criticism, regarding The Fantastic Four: First Steps, that's more like a sigh of relief.  The consensus seems to be that through some clever-enough lateral thinking (mostly making it as self-contained as a story set within an interconnected multiverse could be and, having situated itself in a heretofore-unseen part of that multiverse, approaching it as a period piece set in a brighter and shinier alternative 1960s) it's managed to confine its ambitions to the single, simple goal of "properly bringing the Fantastic Four to the screen," a quest that's proven over the last three decades to be way harder than it sounds, previously culminating in the 2015 Fantastic Four that arguably remains the most misshapen—yet still somehow so representative—piece of studio filmmaking in the 21st century.  I wish that the sole purpose of the present film had been nothing but to capture the spirit of these characters, thereby establishing them as narratively-viable screen superheroes, because I'll eagerly give First Steps this much: it does.  But if that were the only goal, they'd have fought the Mole Man or something, and for the more thoughtlessly-ambitious purposes of First Steps, the Mole Man can be naught but a comic relief figure played by Paul Walter Hauser in full-on "jobbing cameo" mode.  Maybe it doesn't cut entirely to the heart of it, but while "functional's" a fine thing to be, and not something Marvel movies always are, First Steps is so dead-fucking-set on being functional that it forgets, a little more than halfway through, it also needs to be good.

It's not an avowed requirement, but it's often been a perceived one, that the MCU must seize as quickly as possible the highest-profile stories and iconography of whichever comic it's adapting this time; simultaneously, because there's a vague recollection of what "movies" are at Marvel (even if such a conception maybe isn't that useful in a film series now on its thirty-seventh entry), they tend to strive to the utmost to test their characters and provide epic emotions, all that stuff.  The MCU has fairly limited ideas on how to achieve such things, and they force the holy hell out of it to get there this time, to the point it doesn't work on those terms at all; frankly, this is already not very "Fantastic Four" of it, so I'm starting to suspect that the especially (even for a comic) episodic/soap-operatic nature of the FF's sci-fi/family adventures might be one of the reasons they've had a hard time finding their way into successful film adaptations.  (Then again, nor am I convinced the real problem's not just been "nobody who's ever worked on an FF movie has ever been sufficiently talented": this one's directed by Matt Shakman, whose TV show, WandaVision, prefigures precisely that "forgetting halfway through how to be competent" problem I mentioned.)  But I could produce as evidence that, across five films, we've managed a grand total of two FF stories: their origin, which always merges into a fight with Doctor Doom; and Galactus.  The last one did origins-and-Doom.  Now it's Galactus's turn.  And, like, Jesus.

Grudgingly, we can spot them the impulse: 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is nobody's paragon, and it was ashamed (rather selectively, as it still has a Silver Surfer) to be comics-accurate; and it was eighteen years ago anyway; and Galactus is tantalizingly iconic; and if the story's only iconic because, in 1966, the idea of cosmic giants portending armageddon was absolutely new, whereas in the MCU it's happened repeatedly (and when it happened recently in Eternals, it even did so within nearly-identical Kirby-inspired parameters), hey, that was on Earth-616, and this is on Earth-828, so it's new for them, and so it might feel new to us.  It's creative enough with its derived scenario that, later, it'll almost feel like it's sabotaging itself on purpose; First Steps is therefore more capable of pissing me off than Rise of the Silver Surfer ever was.

So we arrive in the alt-60s, four years after the spaceflight that created the Fantastic Four, cosmic rays having gifted Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) with fantastic elasticity, Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby) with invisibility and invisible force fields, her brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) with the ability to burn like a torch, and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) with titanic strength, albeit at the cost of becoming a thing that's no longer recognizably human.  A lot has happened since: the FF have become beloved heroes; Reed's genius has made them wealthy enough to afford their luxurious Baxter Building headquarters and to fund his myriad science experiments; Sue is a United Nations big wheel; and Sue, already married to Reed during their fateful flight (which is a liberty, though the more basic retcon is that it was actually a sanctioned flight rather than Reed committing treason), has, just now, and most unexpectedly, found herself pregnant with their son, eventually to be named Franklin.  This calls into further question why in the hell the movie was called First Steps, and the answer is no reason, only for vague Space Age associations and MCU brand management: we will get a flash-forward during the mid-credits to "four years later" with Sue and Franklin, and I almost said aloud, "but that's much too late for Franklin to be taking his first steps," and indeed it is, so what that means is that one hugely obvious thing they might've done to have softened one of the movie's harder-edged aggravations didn't actually occur to them, because whatever this movie might have you believe, none of this was ever about sentiment, only cold, impassive screenwriting mechanics.

But during the let's-set-things-up-and-wander-around phase, First Steps has brought us the single best fraction of a Fantastic Four movie.  The instinct to move immediately to the classic FF situation is inarguably correct, and it works even better than it did for Superman; yes, we do know all this already, and the writers (five of whom are credited) have figured out a pretty good way to drop us into a dynamic that's not exactly like any FF comic's I've ever read, but is certainly of a piece with any.  Likewise, though it's obvious enough that I'm sure I myself suggested it ages ago (though I guess I should've added "as a secret history of the MCU thing," not what amounts to an elseworlds), the decision to go back to the 60s is smart, and if there's one thing that recommended Shakman it's that WandaVision gave him experience in replicating or at least suggesting antique aesthetics, and that pays off to varying degrees: the origin-story capsule is doing everything in its power to be early 60s docufootage; a couple of times, Shakman drops in real-deal 60s splitscreen collage, and I was in hog heaven; and the balance of the movie isn't so formally interesting, but Shakman must've tasked cinematographer Jess Hall with making it look celluloid-y, and perhaps specifically Robert Yeomanesque, and it looks better than the MCU has in ages.*  It's reasonably colorful—not so much that you'd call it "saturated" (even so, it's sufficiently saturated that when the third act desaturates, to reflect the grimness of an all-or-nothing apocalypse, it's quite noticeable, while still having normal colors in it).  It'd be a little hard to tell if it were "saturated," though, thanks to the decisions that production designer Kasra Farahani's made about his color style that reflects "FF" colors in everything, chasing blues and whites amidst beigy neutrals into counterproductivity.

And despite that little quibble Farahani's still maintaining his position as the best production designer to work in the MCU for years (he designed Loki's two seasons, and having been the best thing about both, he's one of the few Marvel employees who actually have expectations attached to them).  This is simply a cool universe to have been dropped into, all atompunk science optimism with enough ritz and diligence to look more-or-less like what a 60s designer who had access to CGI would've done with it.  (I'm not thrilled by the Snyderesque Galactus ship, but it's more than serviceable.)  Just to mention it somewhere, this is one of the best-sounding Marvel movies in ages, too: Michael Giacchino appears to have written his own brief, and even though "get the Incredibles guy who's also done MCU scores" was plainly the exigence, this is neither "60s superheroics" nor "MCU," and the main theme is this weird choral thing that otherwise cheeps and chirps happily about the soundscape—it sounds like electronic music without obvious electronics—and which I, personally, would not have centered around a soaring choral "Fan-tas-tic Fo-OAR!", because that's stupid, but it sounds neat.  And then there's a more interesting composition over the end credits than anything inside the movie proper (also an original song called "Let Us Be Devoured" that's so 60s, and that I think might've originally been attached to the "Galactus cult" idea that's now just a throwaway line), and more's the pity, but it fits the pattern established with Marvel and Giacchino back in Doctor Strange, I suppose.

You'll say the most important thing was going to be how the movie does the FF themselves, and even if the implication of my argument is that it's apparently not, I'd still agree you're right, and First Steps does them well.  It's wall-to-wall well-acted: Pascal, despite the biggest extrinsic stardom, makes the least impression, doing what I suspect is an "autism representation" that drifts readily into "Wes Anderson character" in a movie that doesn't have anything but aspirations to Yeomanlike photography to support that, but even though this is Not My Mr. Fantastic and indeed is Not Any Known Mr. Fantastic (the inhumanity and peremptory arrogance is not showcased, and one of the screenplay's sins is that it believes they have been), Pascal's decent; Kirby is channeled into a pretty narrow Sue, as we'll see, but there's a physical immediacy that at least embodies the essentialized basis of Sue's whole deal here; and Moss-Bachrach gets a Ben who's surprisingly and maybe gratifyingly backburnered ("Thing-related bathos" is such an easy temptation), while his characterization's been softened (he's nice to HERBIE (Matthew Wood) now?), but Ben's still rather well-treated with a sweet and subdued "if you had one day left to live, would you finally talk to the pretty girl (Natasha Lyonne)?" subplot.  (And now that I've got to them, Sue and Ben represent a couple of other small reasons movies give the FF trouble.  With the former, I daresay it's obvious; the comics have traditionally solved the Invisible Woman's problem with dashed lines to let the reader know where she and her forcefields are, and certainly no movie has attempted this so far.  The latter's classic design is so dependent on abstraction and unmotivated inkblot shadows that while "orange rock pile" sounds like it should be doable, if this is the closest they've gotten in five tries, it's still not that close.  In other words, both characters are fundamentally creatures of graphic design, and possibly genuinely unadaptable into another medium.  The hypothetically-unobtrusive "soap-bubble" stylization they're trying here with Sue is just bad and confusing, even ugly, enough so that I kind of wish they had said "fuck it," gone the full Anderson, and rendered a superpower in a $200 million special effects film as dashed lines.**)  So you've noticed that I've skipped Johnny—for the record, Quinn is doing a platonically-ideal "Johnny Storm" (i.e., likeable-enough hotshot dipshit), despite a backstory that's a complete inversion (he's like a real grown-up astronaut now)—but I skipped him because, at some point during development, this was clearly Johnny's movie, and unfortunately it didn't stay that way.

Still, everything's running smoothly for a good long while, even into the FF's collision with Galactus (Ralph Ineson), initially in the form of his herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner).  You know how this goes, or how it's supposed to, with the Surfer's encounter with humanity reawakening, ahem, her deadened conscience, and, like some gnostic version of Jesus (I don't know if that was on Kirby's radar when he came up with a character that was originally a shouldn't-work-but-it-always-does design conceit), she rebels against God/Galactus, etc.  (I'm implying more "cetera" than we ever get, though.)  It's a story that isn't actually great in its original form, but shouldn't be hard to make great, because it encompasses such a beautifully mythic concept.  And First Steps has what it takes to make it so, cunningly remixing a couple of Galactus's heralds—"oh," as I said to myself once it became clear that this Surfer's connection with humanity was going to be Johnny Storm, "it's Nova," i.e. the one who was Johnny's girlfriend—and these five-credited-screenwriters-and-all-their-uncredited-friends put all these particular pieces together in this very interesting way and... thought they were done.  That's the only way to put it, "they thought they were done."  It's set-up, and pay-off, and no actual story in-between, or precious little ("Johnny Storm, moron, decodes the Surfer's alien language in several hours" is something I might agree to if it weren't the sole other component of their "relationship").  The potential is out-of-this-world, and the execution insulting: it has a tendency to feel like they gender-swapped the Surfer purely so Johnny could declare her sexy, then not do a romance anyway, and even this isn't as perplexingly bad as the script's deranged attachment to turning the not-really-all-that-open-of-a-question of whether the board's "a part of her body" into a "running" "joke," and also perhaps an obtuse, Cronenbergian paraphilia.  Johnny-and-Nova isn't a good storyline in the comic, either, but again, potential; my final judgment upon First Steps' Surfer shouldn't have been my initial reaction, "you do realize women aren't obliged to have hair, and so all you've done is distort one of the great superhero designs, right?"***  Though I'll offer that Garner is an effective herald of doom, albeit maybe a little overcalculated to be the diametric opposite of Laurence Fishburne's baritone; still, her (affected-or-not, I'm unfamiliar with her) almost-childlike voice is a nicely creepy way to hear that a god's about to eat your planet.

This is somehow entirely tossed-off; what actually predominates First Steps' back half (and what could have motivated Johnny and the Surfer having more than three interchanges) is Sue's baby, for Galactus recognizes in Franklin a being of inordinate power capable of somehow relieving him of the necessity of being Galactus.  (The tragedy of Galactus is something the movie gestures at without activating or explaining—we sure get a big, purpl(ish) guy, though!—and I guess it's a matter of taste whether that's better than what happens to the Surfer, who becomes some manner of metaphorical counterpoint to Sue, in that her long-ago connection to her home of Zenn-La is a child rather than a lover.  My taste runs, "I'm more interested in hearing her pine for Norrin Radd."****)  Anyway, momentarily, this even plays: the movie's by-far-best action scene is the Surfer's attempt to catch them on their warp-speed escape from Galactus, and its best beat is the presently-intangible Surfer's apparent attempt to snatch that damn baby directly out of Sue's belly (though the visuals make me suspicious that while the screenplay said "neutron star," some ill-educated VFX artists didn't know what that meant, so the finished film added dialogue to passive-aggressively agree that, sure, it's "like" the black hole they rendered instead).

But then the FF gets back to Earth to fortify it against Galactus's (arbitrarily slow) coming and, for some reason I missed during a bathroom break, they tell everybody that they've refused Galactus's cruel bargain: he'll spare Earth in exchange for the child.  Hence a shitload of movie is taken up with an ethical dilemma that it continually refuses to engage with or even properly define, to the point that Reed, weakly playing devil's advocate, is slapped down hard lest anyone in the audience entertain a notion counter to the Obviously Correct Morality.  It's offensively hectoring, and dull, and because there's no dissension, it's also dreadful drama that still sucks up a whole lot of screentime, whilst Johnny sits around teaching himself xenolinguistics and Reed's big plan (flowing from nothing the story's been about—no, no, it's good screenwriting, because they showed us a teleporter in the first act), operates almost in the backdrop, quietly misunderstanding how electrical grids work.

Now, everything works out, because when the omnipotent space god does arrive, the tiny insignificant superheroes just... beat him up.  It's slightly more complicated, though the complications themselves are underwhelming (if Reed had bothered even slightly camouflaging his teleporter, I think we can assume he would've outwitted Galactus with his outrageously childish trap, while the Surfer's reappearance is so belated it feels like the script misplaced her), but basically it really does come down to beating up fucking Galactus.  And I just read a story where superheroes beat up Galactus, and it's not good, and it also has dubious Saturday morning cartoon morality (it's the one with Nova's origin, where they revive Galactus because it's morally obligatory to doom trillions apparently), but 1)at least Galactus has cool and pompous dialogue and 2)John Byrne establishes why Galactus, at his lowest ebb, is capable of being beaten up, and 3)Byrne did this in order to pursue some actual (if lousy) ideas, rather than deliberately misunderstanding the concept of "Galactus" to deliver a theoretically fist-pumping climax that's so clumsily attempting to determine your reactions (that denouement with Franklin is despicable) that it's long minutes of basically nothing.  (While Galactus being a punk means it's not good spectacle, either.)  It angers me, because they've got the elements here, yet this movie that started so well settles so comfortably into that nothing.

Score: 5/10

*I regret I cannot currently speak to Thunderbolts.

**I do kind of love the "visible womb" notion, though, and likewise "Ben's beard."

***And unfortunately doesn't borrow from Nova's design via silver, either.  But it doesn't repulse me like the change to Galactus's eyes does, from technological-feeling square irises to round ones.  No, motherfucker, you're the nerd.

****The Surfer is Shalla-Bal now, incidentally—I think I did say aloud, "oh, duh."