Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

The Fantastic Four’s big screen iterations have long been a joke. Even as more outlandish characters successfully took their spandex from page to screen, no one could figure out how to make these super nerds cinematic. There’s no obvious reason for this. They’re no more ludicrous than a web-slinging teen or a bat-inspired millionaire with unresolved trauma. They’re just four astronauts who got various powers from cosmic rays, so they moved in together and occasionally saved the world.

Okay, they’re a little hokey, especially with their art deco, retro-futuristic aesthetic that feels like it walked out of Disney’s Tomorrowland. But superhero films are an expansive genre now, where goofy lightness has a well-established place, and their move under the MCU’s tutelage puts them in a machine that can handle any flavor of superhero. Even with all this in its favor, though, The Fantastic Four: First Steps still feels like a risk, and you can feel the hesitation throughout its relatively brief runtime.

This is a remarkably scaled-back introduction for the MCU, taking you through a single encounter with one of the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Galactus. He’s a destroyer of worlds type, coming to consume Earth and everyone on it. There’s no complication to his plan. He’s so powerful he simply shows up and eats. The Fantastic Four and the audience know precisely what he’s going to do at all times, and they know what they have to do to save themselves.

To introduce you to the heroes’ personal sides, two of the members, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), are about to have a kid. The happy news is announced at the beginning of the film, and the rest of the group, Sue’s brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Reed’s friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), are ecstatic. In a refreshing turn, this doesn’t exclude Sue from their adventures. Reed modifies her space suit so she can confront Galactus with the rest of them. Unfortunately, Galactus locks onto the child as his successor.

The bones of First Steps are good, setting itself up with both a worldwide and personal threat. If you aren’t looking too closely, you may mistake those bones for the final product. They keep everything on the rails, but the film never does more than limp along its route.

For a relatively lighthearted MCU film, this has a remarkable lack of fun. Director Matt Shakman doesn’t commit to the film’s off-kilter elements, leaving it all feeling half-baked and thrown together. The excellent production design nails the retro-futuristic vibe, even incorporating so many shades of blue that the heroes’ gaudy costumes don’t stick out. But within this distinctive feature is a soul-sucking lack of characterization and events, stranding the actors and the viewers in a story that lacks proper plot beats.

Let’s deal with Galactus first. He’s so powerful that the Fantastic Four can’t fight him. He sends his messenger, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), to announce his intent, and they struggle to even handle her. They are thoroughly outmatched, which means we barely see their superpowers at all. Johnny Storm does his Human Torch thing to fly around some, but this doesn’t help them much and the film never seems to know what to do with everyone else. Grimm, who was turned into a strong guy with a rocky exterior, lifts a couple cars. Sue sometimes turns them invisible when they need to escape. And Reed, well, his stretchiness is so unhelpful the film doesn’t find any meaningful reason to include it. What the foursome can do to combat Galactus is trick him. They’re all smart, after all, especially Reed. But the film doesn’t even revel in that. The few times he’s shown working through a problem he’s either laughed at or his audience falls asleep. As if the film expects its audience to have the same reaction to intellectuals being intellectual, it fast forwards through the team solving the problem and simply has them state the solutions. Which would be fine if they could combat Galactus in any other way. But they can’t. Outwitting him is the only active way they can fight him, so without seeing them work through the problem, they don’t really have anything to do. It’s like a boxing match that ends after one punch. Great, there’s a winner, but where’s the actual fight?

Which may lead you to believe that the film fills its runtime with deep dives into the superheroes as people. But again, no. In the same way the film states their intellect without showing it in action, the film mistakes telling you facts about the four heroes for giving them personalities that influence their actions. Sue is the most egregious of the misses. Having a pregnant superhero should be rad, but they make that her only trait in the movie. They say she’s a great negotiator, so obviously they send her to negotiate with Galactus or the Silver Surfer, right? Nope. She also doesn’t show more of a predilection for peaceful resolution than her counterparts. She isn’t even positioned as the de facto spokesperson for the group. All of these would be logical ways she would operate within the group given what we are told about her, but she and the rest of the Fantastic Four aren’t truly differentiated beyond their surface facts. Sue’s greatest contribution is as fierce mother, which would be fun if she was allowed to be a complete person outside of that.

Nothing about the Fantastic Four’s battle with Galactus is solved by their unique superpowers or even their more standard human skills. It remains far too generic, setting the new superheroes down a familiar path and never letting them meander. This is supposed to introduce us to the Fantastic Four as part of the MCU, but it’s more apt to leave them forgotten in the expansive universe.

Release: In theaters now
Director: Matt Shakman
Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn