The Fantastic Four: First Steps – the best origins movie Marvel has made in years? Discuss with spoilers
This is a Fantastic Four movie that finally figures out why the team works – not because they're the strongest or the smartest, but because they're messy, human and weirdly functional in the face of total annihilation. Yes, the fate of this gloriously future-retro version of Earth (828) is at stake. Yes, someone gives birth to a child that (at least in the comics) is basically a deity. But the thing you'll remember is the squabbling, the love, and the actual screen chemistry.
It's not flawless – the midsection wanders like it's looking for a post-credits tease that never arrives – but for long stretches it plays like the best origins movie Marvel has made in years: a superhero film with heart, smarts, and bonkers space Dada. Here's what makes it tick.
One of the greatest things about First Steps is how refreshingly normal it feels to watch a Marvel film with a beginning, middle and end. No portals to Phase Seven, no Hulk cameo to remind you that everything's connected, and that the entire movie might well end up as just emotional scaffolding for a Disney+ series about Ant-Man's aunt. Just four people, one suspiciously powered infant and retro-futurist weirdness.
Would you agree that Marvel's decision to set the film in an alternate universe where extraterrestrial space travel and flying car technology has somehow been achieved by the 1960s has paid off in spades? It certainly adds Apollo-era colour and chrome-plated optimism to an episode that could easily have been just another murky slab of multiversal franchise soup.
Most importantly though, director Matt Shakman delivers a Fantastic Four who actually – finally – deserve the moniker of Marvel's first family. Reed Richards is a man so pathologically rational he sees parenthood as a physics problem; Johnny Storm is a flame-powered himbo who somehow still nails the movie's major emotional beats; Sue Storm is the stabilising force of the group; and Benjamin Grimm is a sad slab of sentient gravel who delivers the film's most moving lines through a mouthful of misery and granite-hard Brooklyn stoicism. All basic stuff, you might think but something that no one has even got close to achieving before with this particular superhero team.
Previous attempts to bring Marvel's first family to the big screen always seemed to give us an Invisible Woman who spent most of the movie reacting to male genius or bickering with her brother. By contrast, Vanessa Kirby's version announces herself as a major force: a superhero capable of taking on Galactus, tempering Reed's more unhinged techno-saviour spirals, and holding the emotional centre of the team. She's not sidelined or fridged while the boys save the world. She's proactive, pragmatic and crucial to the team's survival. It's Storm's force-fielded stand against the oncoming god-storm that ultimately tips the balance – not Reed's madcap equations or Ben's giant rocky fists. For once, the Invisible Woman doesn't disappear.
One of the strangest – and weirdly most moving – aspects of First Steps is the way it frames the reality of Sue's pregnancy and baby Franklin Richards' impending birth not just as a plot device, but as a full-blown meditation on the terror of newfound parental responsibility. Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman are far from the first parents trying to understand the scary implications of raising something they can barely comprehend: all mums and dads know that the universe is about to change forever. The difference this time (as we know from the comics) is that the little bundle of joy in question isn't just a baby: he's a cooing, gurgling multiversal reset button in the shape of a very small god.
The movie doesn't oversell this shift with soft-focus sentiment. There are no cheesy monologues about motherhood, no slow-motion cradle shot. But what it does capture – with more resonance than most Marvel films manage – is the panic, awe, and overwhelming love that comes with the arrival of something entirely new.
Would you agree that the studio has seriously upped its supervillain game this time around? Julia Garner's Shalla-Bal is spellbinding as a chrome-faced angel of annihilation – she glides into view like a brushed-steel omen. And then there's her gargantuan boss Galactus – less a villain, more a celestial extinction event. How do you counter something so vast, so ancient, and so cosmically indifferent that it makes human fear feel like background noise. While Thanos committed mass murder with the cold, binary efficiency of a guy solving an overcrowded bus schedule, Galactus doesn't even bother with motive. He isn't evil – he's entropy in a helmet, a planetary digestive system with vague opinions on balance.
First Steps might be the closest the MCU has come to genuine cosmic horror – not just a threat that's big and powerful, but something unmistakably Lovecraftian: eerily unknowable, disturbingly inscrutable, and fundamentally indifferent – like being judged by a black hole. It was probably inevitable that the only way to defeat the devourer of worlds was to chuck him through a portal into who-knows-where and make him (at least temporarily) somebody else's problem. But how long before he comes back hungry to turn Avengers: Doomsday into the comic-book movie equivalent of La Grande Bouffe?
It's clear from the way Reed describes his son in First Steps that this baby might be just as powerful on screen as he is in print. If he's able to bring his mother back to life after her brush with Galactus, might he also be capable of creating entirely new worlds, and breaking down the boundaries between different universes, using just the power of his mind? (He certainly can in the comics.) Is that why Doctor Doom appears to be so interested in the mid-credits scene, set four years after the events of the film? He doesn't say a word, but the way he watches the child – now a toddler – suggests malevolent intent.
Shakman has already confirmed that is Robert Downey Jr in the suit in First Steps, but we're still not 100% certain that this version of the supervillain is the same one who will turn up in next year's Avengers: Doomsday. Is he a Tony Stark variant (explaining the casting) or is it a complete coincidence that he looks exactly like Iron Man? Does this scene directly set up the next film? Or is this just an example of Marvel distraction tactics? It would be uncharacteristically direct for the Disney-owned comic book studio to show its hand so clearly: Doom kidnapping Franklin and inspiring a multiversal rescue mission feels more like fan fiction than Phase 6 strategy. But this would certainly explain the sight at the tail end of Thunderbolts* of a retro-finned rocket, painted conspicuously in what appears to be Baxter Foundation white, heading towards the solar system. And how else are the supervillain (if it is the same version of him) and our heroes supposed to make the jump to Earth-616? Smoke and mirrors, or clear signposting for the next movie? Let us know what you think.
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