The new Fantastic Four movie came out this weekend, and both Luis Paez-Pumar and Lauren Theisen went to theaters to see it. Here are four thoughts that they shared about the reboot of Marvel’s first family.
1. This is yet another superhero blockbuster, but it’s nice that it’s more about space explorers than crime fighters.
Luis: The thing I’ve always liked about the Fantastic Four, as a comic book entity, is that it’s cosmic. Unlike, say, Spider-Man, who is a street-level hero first and foremost, the team of Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben are shaped and altered by space. Their powers come from a cosmic storm. They’re astronauts. And, most relevantly to First Steps, their antagonist is a giant space god who eats planets. The general throughline for all Fantastic Four stories is one of regular, if exceptional, humans who get turned into superheroes by the mysteries of space. A movie on the team has to get space right. Thankfully, First Steps shines brightest when the foursome leaves behind their Earth.
At first, I was worried that this would not be the case. Similarly to Superman earlier this month, First Steps avoids doing a full-on origin scene for the Fantastic Four. Instead, it runs through their beginnings in a monologue by a TV show host on a program celebrating the four-year anniversary of the “doomed” space flight that gave this Earth—828, different from the main MCU continuity on Earth-616—its mightiest heroes. We hear the cosmic storm happening but don’t see it, which is fine. Everyone likely knows the broad strokes of this origin, and this gives the movie, already packed to the brim at a brisk 114 minutes, time to explore its actual story. But I was going to be bummed if we didn’t get some cool space scenes to make up for this lack. I shouldn’t have worried.
After the threat of Galactus arrives via the Silver Surfer and her announcement that Earth-828 is set to be eaten by the big hungry lad, the team decides to go to Galactus in order to study him and potentially negotiate their planet’s survival. What follows is a hallucinogenic space journey that involves faster-than-light travel, a destroyed miscellaneous planet, Galactus’s giant ship, the Silver Surfer riding the waves of a wormhole, and finally a chase through a neutron star that is among the coolest depictions of space I’ve seen. It’s very Interstellar, and while I didn’t love that movie, there’s no denying that Christopher Nolan captured the awesome power of space. First Steps does the same, and I loved it as much as I was let down when the climax shifted back to Earth.
The movie makes it explicit that the scale and stakes that follow the Fantastic Four are galactic, and the contrast between the vastness of space and intimacy of the family is what produces the biggest thrills. First Steps feels like the first MCU movie to portray Jack Kirby, the team’s creator and Marvel’s most psychedelic force, and his interests and preoccupations right. Comparing First Steps and its take on space with, say, Eternals, the drab 2021 adaptation of Kirby’s colorful and frankly bizarre cosmology, feels almost unfair in the new movie’s favor. I walked out mostly with warm feelings in large part because this is a true ode to Marvel’s resident cosmic weirdo.
Lauren: I never saw Eternals, so I was mostly comparing this Fantastic Four with the version I read about in the reprints of 1960s comics that I loved as a kid. The scale of Kirby’s imagination, set off by the down-to-earth domesticity of the group’s personalities, made an infinite universe fit within the confines of a comic book. Whenever the artist took a full page to fully realize the depths of some fictional dimension discovered by a kooky machine of Reed’s, he made unforgettable images that stood way apart from the more typical comic-book panels that need to tell a comprehensible story of a fight scene.
There’s a two-fold challenge to making a two-hour Fantastic Four movie. For one, the family dynamic is more suited to episodic TV, and it’s hard to establish, develop, and resolve four characters in such a short time. By skipping the origin story, I do think this rendition does its best to fix that problem, even though every character (except maybe Sue) still ends up a bit shortchanged on attention. The other issue, though, is that there isn’t all that much clobberin’ time in the best FF tales, because, like you said Luis, they’re more astronauts than vigilantes. The movie does understand this difference, most notably in its sheer lack of Ben Grimm punching things, and I agree that it stands out in the space sequence at the midpoint. In this part, the goal is basically to learn about Galactus and get out alive, and after fifty billion of these superhero movies, I appreciate the relative lack of violence to define a group that prides itself on thinking more than fighting. Still, I would have loved to have seen a little more Kirby influence in the design of Galactus’s lair in particular, which on screen is a kind of fiery dark hell instead of a more colorful, pop-art pastiche. I get that these movies try to avoid camp at all costs, still shrinking from the memory of Batman & Robin, but I think the space imagery could have benefited from even more of the psychedelic influence.
2. It’s more frustrating than ever that everyone on screen is behaving like a monk.
Lauren: The lack of sex scenes in modern movies has been talked about to death, but it’s still kind of startling to see Fantastic Four represent a new level of chastity in mainstream film. Reed and Sue are a married couple who scarcely show any physical affection. Johnny gets to talk about being turned on by Silver Surfer, and it’s lightly implied that he’s a womanizer, but Joseph Quinn gets nary a smooch. And even though the movie brought in Natasha Lyonne as an obvious love interest for Ebon Moss-Bachrach, their characters don’t do anything more intimate than “be nice to each other in public,” almost as if her role was drastically cut down at the last minute.
I’m not saying that there should have been a fantastic foursome in this kids movie. Please don’t put that in the newspaper. It’s just strange to me that a story emphasizing the power of love and family over destruction and violence seems so afraid to have its characters show any of that love in ways beyond self-sacrifice and speeches. It makes the folks in this story all feel a little lonelier, a little more isolated, than an ideal super-family should be.
Luis: The MCU has always failed to show any form of physical intimacy or sexual tension. The closest we ever got was the damn Hulk and Black Widow, and that was more strange than romantic. So I wasn’t surprised at the chaste nature of First Steps, but it’s still disappointing. I’m not saying Quinn should have been sleeping with a new woman every ten minutes, but there are barely even any hugs! I wasn’t keeping track, but I feel safe in saying Reed and Sue share maybe four kisses in the whole movie. It’s just boring that these movies haven’t figured out how to do love, never mind sex. Like you said, Lauren it is a kids movie, regardless of what people may want from these, but even kids movies can show some form of romantic love. While the familial connections do shine through, the plot would not have fundamentally changed if Reed and Sue were coworkers rather than husband and wife.
It’s disappointing, because there are ways to portray real human emotions in these fake CGI romps, but Marvel is so scared by sexuality that any attempt to throw in sex usually come down to humor, like Johnny swooning over Silver Surfer in the same way a preteen might. Saying “sexy” and “hot” does not make for a real portrayal of human sexuality, and Marvel has never breached that barrier, save for one mildly risque sex scene in Eternals. I'm not surprised, only disappointed that these superpowered astronauts don’t even make out with each other.
3. Thank God for a superhero movie with a story that actually stands on its own.
Luis: I think it’s safe to say that the MCU would not have been as successful as it is if it hadn’t started as a slowly pieced-together puzzle that eventually revealed an epic confrontation with Thanos. The start of the MCU was focused on getting the Avengers together, and it succeeded financially if not creatively. (I find that the early MCU movies are hurt most by distance and the scale of what the project became). But what really hooked the imaginations of so many people is the idea that a 20-movie set-up would lead into such a massive conclusion in the form of the two-part Infinity War/Endgame gambit. However one might have felt about the individual quality of every movie leading up to that one-two punch, there’s no denying that the MCU drove itself forward with the power of an interconnected story.
Since Endgame, Marvel has been much more convoluted and scattered. The MCU and its Kevin Feige-spearheaded brain trust clearly attempted to pull the same trick again, taking superheroes who were not household names and making them vital parts of its plans as it heads into a second two-parter in 2026’s Doomsday and 2027’s Secret Wars. It hasn’t worked. Call it superhero fatigue, or blame the quality of the movies in this Multiverse Saga, or blame the idea of the multiverse itself, which makes everything feel weightless and confusing, but this second era of the MCU has been a disaster, and the effort of connecting these threads feels more desperate than savvy.
Where First Steps succeeds is by getting back to the original formula. Since the movie is set in a different Earth, and a different universe, it can just explore the Fantastic Four without having to nod (too much, at least) toward the bigger overarching storyline. This relative freedom lets everything from the central relationships to the Galactus threat to even a fun appearance by Paul Walter Hauser breathe and grow. While I do have problems with the structure of the movie, particularly in its third act, First Steps is able to spend time on each of the four heroes to develop them into characters people might care about once the cast balloons in Doomsday. Well, except for Ben Grimm, whose scenes appear to have been mostly cut; he’s mainly there to remind you that Moss-Bachrach is a delightful presence.
Lauren: I hate to say it, but I might be getting back into superhero movies. Before this year, the last one I’d watched was the Spider-Man cameo-fest that came out in 2021. But I was talked into the idea that Thunderbolts was good (yeah, I guess), and my long-standing love for Superman and the FF got me out to see both of their stories. There’s still a pretty hard ceiling on how emotionally affecting these boardroom-produced IP showcases can really be when compared to the genuinely unique visions of of Sam Raimi or Christopher Nolan. But making these products work as movies without any prerequisite viewing is a step in the right direction. What a relief it was, watching FF and slowly learning that all the Marvel movies I missed didn’t matter in this universe, that all I had to do was lock onto the team named in the title. It’s too bad, then, that we already know their next experience will absorb the Fantastic Four into another empty-out-the-toy-box beat-’em-up. In this movie, set in a universe where Earth lacks any other superpowered heroes, the Fantastic Four make a compelling focal point. In the ones to come, they’ll be like five percent of the screen amid a bunch of lasers and booms.
4. We liked it, but we can’t help but focus on the flaws.
Lauren: As someone who had at least six volumes of The Essential Fantastic Four in her childhood bedroom, it’s going to be impossible for me to hate a movie that brings them to life as long as it’s competently made. And unlike the last two movies about this team (I still think the very first one with Jessica Alba and Chris Evans is fine enough), this one is! The structure of the story makes sense. The characters fit together. A bit of CGI messiness aside, there’s nothing I would call particularly stupid. And the introduction of a baby to the typical superhero action flick freshens up the room at least a bit.
But I think I speak for both of us, Luis, when I say that we really wanted to love this movie and came away only liking it. There are just too many parts where I can see a flattened ambition, or a lack of new thinking, that keep it from becoming any more than the heavily caveated “better than the average Marvel movie.” The third-act fight is pretty plain. There’s not enough time for either Reed or Johnny in particular to show off the kind of quirks that would endear them to audiences. And Sue, though she gets the most to do of anyone, feels so unwaveringly steely and tough that I can’t help but think that the all-male quartet of screenwriters were terrified of giving her any vulnerable qualities, as if that would make the movie somehow anti-feminist.
What First Steps ultimately did was help me rediscover an excitement for the Fantastic Four that had laid dormant in me for a long time. But I have little hunger for exploring that excitement through additional MCU installments. Revisiting the Jonathan Hickman run on the comics should serve me just fine.
Luis: I’ve said so many nice things about First Steps that I now have to say, for transparency’s sake, that I didn’t love the movie. I thought it was aggressively fine as a full feature, and that it had a lot of problems that I am perhaps more inclined to forgive just by virtue of it being maybe the second- or third-best MCU movie since 2019’s Endgame. That’s more an indictment of the state of mainstream superhero movies, though, and First Steps has the inverse problem of Thunderbolts, a movie I am referencing again because I think it’s the best cape movie released this year. In Thunderbolts, a scattered and by-the-numbers introduction gives away to an earnestly moving climax that explores mental illness and trauma in a way that no superhero movie should be able to, and it works! Really! [Lauren's Note: Nah.] I’ve now seen Thunderbolts twice, and I am blown away by how the entire production managed to turn its climax inward and provide something actually affecting.
First Steps, on the other hand, climaxes with a formulaic “we must defeat the Big Bad” action scene, full of CGI (admittedly very good CGI, maybe the best in Marvel’s history) and big epic moments meant to elicit big epic reactions. It’s a bit boring, really. Galactus arrives on Earth, and he’s roughly skyscraper height, which feels small given his comic history. His powers amount to “being big” and a small bit of telekinesis. All the citizens of New York City have been evacuated and play no part in the fight. There are some nice character-building moments, but it’s hard for Marvel movies to get away from their innate Marvel movieness. Though First Steps looks better for most of its duration than any MCU outing, it can’t help but devolve in its finale.
There are other problems here. I keep mentioning The Thing in asides, and that’s because the movie mostly treats him as an aside. Vanessa Kirby has a lot of lifting to do, as Sue ends up being the most important member of the movie, but she’s only just fine and delivers a truly terrible American accent. Quinn, on the other hand, is completely miscast, or perhaps mis-scripted. He’s supposed to be charming and wily but instead comes off as wooden and dull, even when he’s bouncing off Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer, a masterwork of voice acting and motion capture as far as these movies go. Quinn brings down every scene he’s in, and it’s not really his fault. Even in a movie as mediocre as Gladiator II, he popped off the screen, but he’s not given any material here to chew on. All he gets is the aforementioned chaste lusting for the Silver Surfer. How many times can one man say “sexy” without ever sounding sexy or charismatic? (Pedro Pascal, however, does a, ahem, fantastic job of embodying how much of an asshole Reed Richards can be.)
Even with those flaws, I think First Steps is a success simply because it is not a flop. With this and Thunderbolts, the MCU has seemingly course corrected after the debacles of this Multiverse Saga, just in time for Doomsday next year. That movie already seems like it’ll be a shambles, at least if all of the production rumors and the Robert Downey Jr. of it all are to be believed, so this might just be a short reprieve before superhero movies get back to their now-regular slop. But Marvel would be smart, whether in this period or whatever comes next—hey, the X-Men should be here soon!—to follow along with First Steps and its focus on more insular storytelling. These movies were never cinematic achievements, but they were fun popcorn fare because they didn’t feel like homework. As the MCU has expanded to include more TV than anyone could possibly want to watch, a return to a basic formula would do it a universe of good. At the very least, though, I hope that the MCU keeps exploring space in the vein of First Steps. I’ll put up with a lot of bullshit to see some more neutron stars.
