The Fantastic Four: First Steps grinds Marvel's First Family into the MCU machinery

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A summer without superhero movies may still be years or decades away, but at least Hollywood seems willing to achieve Origin Story Zero. Despite a title that tips a cap to the characters' Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, The Fantastic Four: First Steps joins this season's Superman and Thunderbolts as superhero stories that plop audiences in medias res, at least compared to the Fantastic Four retellings of decades' past. A title card lets the nerds know that this is all taking place on Earth-828, explaining the 1960s-ish retro-futuristic style and lack of any other visible MCU superheroes. Then off we go into an Easter eggy (but not off-puttingly so) newsreel-style montage chronicling the many adventures of stretchy scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), his sometimes-invisible wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her fiery brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and their rock-monster family friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), less charitably known as The Thing.
Generally, their superhero monikers don't get much play in this story, which is so family-focused that it becomes almost weirdly insular, with few other characters to speak of—and even fewer that aren't computer-generated. Besides The Thing, a wondrously seamless visual-effects creation, and the similarly well-rendered robot assistant H.E.R.B.I.E. (Matthew Wood), the heroes encounter a shiny alien being known as the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), who arrives on Earth to herald the arrival of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a vast, godlike, world-devouring creature. Though the Surfer evinces some oblique cosmic decency beneath her shiny metallic exterior, Galactus appears to be an unstoppable, unknowable force, and brainiac Reed must figure out how to protect his family and the rest of the Earth from this unimaginably massive threat. It must be said that some of the plans he comes up with do not sound like the work of a bona fide genius.
They seem, in fact, like remnants of smaller, dumber movies that preceded this one, heralding oblivion. Specifically, despite a trip to space and through some time-dilating portals, on paper First Steps more or less remakes 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. That low-rent sequel expends no small amount of its 87 minutes sans credits on a ghastly Mister Fantastic dance sequence and a scene where the world's most famous superheroes irritate passengers on a commercial airline. No such antics animate First Steps, and while the new movie is better than the two-and-done Tim Story-directed sorta-series by a factor that may reach the triple digits, perhaps a smidge more whimsy might have done some good. An odd moroseness takes over the movie in its back half, mostly due to a stakes-raising moral dilemma. Given, surprisingly, how much the advertising materials draw footage from the first half-hour, this turn probably qualifies as a spoiler. Suffice to say that there's a thoughtful, almost Star Trek-like moral question that the movie ultimately feels unequipped to take seriously—though that doesn't stop director Matt Shakman and four credited screenwriters from trying, exacerbating Marvel's ongoing tension between their grown-up aspirations and their four-quadrant instincts (or possibly vice versa).
Any break from the lightweight Marvel punch-up style is a welcome one, yet The Fantastic Four: First Steps still finds room for plenty of bad dialogue. The freedom once afforded actors as eclectic as the entire cast of Iron Man 2 is long gone, leaving this central quartet to play things respectably, honorably, and more than a little muted, with occasional outbreaks of Downey Lite yammering where certain words get repeated ('plan' is one here) like the characters are vamping on a third-tier single-camera sitcom. The endless possibilities of a retro-futuristic alternate universe are utilized, in part, to imagine that the laziness of writing in fist-bumps or dully contemporary phrasings and affectations can escape anachronism status on a technicality. The early scene where Sue announces her pregnancy is a deadly object lesson in forced multiple-draft chumminess, inspiring wistful thoughts of how Pascal was apparently warned off of doing a Mid-Atlantic accent. Stylish costumes are one thing; stylized acting is apparently quite another. For much of the film, the whole cast politely avoids stepping on each other's toes.
Granted, past Fantastic Four movies, Incredibles movies, and any number of Avengers and X-Men variations have taken up a lot of bickering-super-family real estate, which may explain why First Steps doesn't bother depicting much familial discord. The last thing the superhero subgenre needs is a bunch of people learning to, get this, use their powers and work together. But this movie's family dynamics feel especially frictionless; in depicting actual (not de facto or metaphorical) parenthood, siblinghood, and especially marriage, Marvel is as wobbly and tentative as first-time parents, only without ever admitting how tired they are.
It's particularly demoralizing to see an actor as striking and memorable as Vanessa Kirby reduced to nobly girlbossing her way through by-the-book protective-mom routines. Those piercing eyes, so consistently drained of personality, desire, or sexuality! Johnny Storm has a glimmer of those latter stirrings when he beholds the Silver Surfer—a naked woman astride a surfboard, he points out when protesting too much, though Reed performs a quick 'actually' about any implied nudity as if quoting Pope Kevin Feige himself. But it amounts to little. These movies have become so piously devoid of romance, nevermind sex, that one half-expects to see the happily pregnant married couple inhabiting separate beds, as in an early sitcom-spoofing episode of WandaVision, which Shakman also worked on. Like that show, The Fantastic Four: First Steps offers some delightful visual pastiche, including impressively imagined art direction, costumes, and visual effects, alongside a pervasive sense that there's less to the characters than meets (and fills) the eye. The Thing's adorable sweater-vests have more distinction than Moss-Bachrach's mo-capped performance, or even how his computer-generated character actually moves through the frame.
It's probably not easy to make a good Fantastic Four movie. The characters have power sets so difficult to depict in live-action that the grumpy rock monster consistently looks the best of the bunch, while various forcefields, flamed-on human torches, and stretchy limbs have been consistently shown up by an animated movie from two decades ago. The newest version has enough actor-based charm to distract from its jankiest effects, plus a damn cool Silver Surfer, a lot of bright blue in the color scheme, one hilarious Mole Man, and a zippy pace. Occasionally it even conjures images of sci-fi majesty, like Sue in zero-gravity labor or the Surfer riding molten waves. For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough. For the more superhero skeptical, it offers a helpful example of how simply skipping the origin stuff on the fourth try doesn't automatically confer a sense of dramatic urgency or comic-book wonder. Sometimes it's just a franchise in a hurry to get to the next step.
Director: Matt Shakman Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer Starring: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson Release Date: July 25, 2025
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