Review: ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ toddles in the right direction
2025 / Dir. Matt Shakman
☆ 3/5
The long-awaited entrance of Marvel’s “first family,” the Fantastic Four, into the MCU attempts to revive the Marvel cinematic brand, which has become homework thanks to overstuffing fans with less engaging movie and TV characters and the lack of a clear, exciting throughline after the end of the “Infinity Saga.” It does that and will likely bring fans back in anticipation of new Avengers movies, but with mixed results.
First Steps wisely takes place on an alternate Earth that presents a fresh start, where you only need to have a vague idea of who the Fantastic Four are from either the comics or the few other failed film franchises. Starting years after they gained their powers—this is not an origin story—the Fantastic Four’s existence has transformed society into a better world, with nations coming together to end war and hunger and create an actual Utopian society.
The alternate universe scenario contributes to First Steps’ best feature: its art direction. The group lives in a ‘60s-ish retrofuturistic society where cars fly and families gather together to eat jello mold dinners. The film has a purposeful, handmade quality, with each scene on earth filled with impeccable mid-century modern furniture and architecture. They even built a puppet-animatronic H.E.R.B.I.E. robot instead of another CGI afterthought.
Clearly, much thought and care went into everything about this film—except its story and characters. It’s essentially a redo of 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer, switching out Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) having a baby for planning a wedding instead, which is interrupted by the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) heralding the coming of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a jumbo, goofy-looking robotic space god with no motivation other than an unexplained hunger to eat planets and wanting the baby to be his successor or something. His lack of anything defining is literally explained away as that he’s so old that it would take decades to understand him.
Coming in under two hours and the first MCU entrant in some time to not feel bloated, The Fantastic Four’s plot is so lean that it eschews character arcs nearly entirely, and the movie doesn’t seem to know what to do between its big sequences to the point where it’s kind of boring. Initially, Reed’s anxiety over being a father seems to be the driving arc, but it doesn’t go anywhere other than to set up the baby-as-McGuffin needed to get Galactus to destroy Times Square. Sue is a mom, The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has a crush on a teacher, and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) is tasked with deciphering the Silver Surfer’s language by listening to metallic gold records. Then the Galactus “thing” attacks the city, we finally get a couple of minutes of the team using their powers as a team, and that’s it.
Without an origin story plot, First Steps needed to tell us who this version of the Fantastic Four is, yet it gave us crumbs. The cast’s great chemistry helps to overcome their shallow characterization and still come across as a lived-in family, even if we don’t get to see much of their life together beyond a couple of brief dinners in their immaculately crafted kitchen.
If you are a fan of Marvel movies but have fallen off the wagon, this may be the one to get you back into theaters. Certainly, seeing the vibrant streets of its alternative world is a treat on the big screen, and nothing here is “bad” by any means. It just amounts to little more than very pretty window dressing.
Watch if you like: Pedro Pascal=Daddy, following mid-century modern furniture resellers on Instagram, and clobbering giant space gods.