Directed by: Matt Shakman
Distributed by: Walt Disney Studios
Written by Anna Harrison
70/100
Finally, after years of misunderstandings, misfires, and misery, it’s happened: Marvel has made a good movie.
Oh, sorry, I mean a good Fantastic Four movie. Right.
Really, both statements are true. The Fantastic Four have had a rocky road on the big screen, from Roger Corman’s ill-fated 1994 version to whatever Josh Trank was doing in 2015; the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too—barring this year’s “Thunderbolts*”—has been floundering for some time, taking all the wrong lessons from “Avengers: Endgame” and opting for self-references instead of unimportant things like character and story. How, then, did “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” break the curse, even if temporarily, of both its titular team and the greater Marvel universe as a whole?
Well, to start with, director Matt Shakman neatly avoids the crushing weight of Marvel’s interconnectedness by having its story take place in another universe, Earth-828, as opposed to the Earth-616 of most MCU films so far. Freed from the shackles of any characters, aesthetics, or plots that came before, the fourth Fantastic Four film lets Marvel’s First Family shine all on their own—and shine they do. Mostly.
Wisely, Shakman opts not to rehash the Fantastic Four’s origin story, introducing us to a team that already functions like a well-oiled machine: there’s de facto leader Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), a genius with extreme elasticity; his wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who can turn invisible and generate force fields; Sue’s brother, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), who likes to burst into flames; and all-around good guy Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), whose rocky exterior belies a heart of gold. We never see their ill-fated trip to space that gave them their superpowers, and neither floundering attempts at team-building nor growing pains with their new powers come across our screens; that’s been done and redone and done again, and, as this is the thirty-seventh entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’ve seen it all before. Instead of learning how to accept yourself and love your team members for the millionth time, we are plopped down into an established and cozy family dynamic among the four, though soon enough their domestic problems are magnified to become planet-wide upon the arrival of the godlike planet-eater Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald, Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner).
A trip to space to confront Galactus before he can consume Earth-828 ends poorly—though it provides ample opportunity for cinematographer Jess Hall to show off the most exciting visuals in a long, long time for the MCU. Sue, it turns out, is pregnant, and Galactus will spare the planet if he gets her son. The moral dilemma in question—what is the life of one infant worth when weighed against billions?—is certainly among the thornier dilemmas that the MCU has grappled with, though we are given only hints at the darker implications. Reed, statistician and logician, has one stellar moment where he wavers, but the film never engages more deeply than a surface-level reading. It’s perhaps too much to expect of Marvel, but why tease us with complexity and then settle for a more straightforward morality?
Then again, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” races along at such a breakneck pace that there is hardly room for anything other than plot, plot, plot all the time. Johnny and Reed get their moments of grace (Johnny with Shalla-Bal and Reed with his son) but Sue and especially Ben are underserved. Again there are tantalizing moments: Sue reflecting on being the first pregnant woman in space, Ben watching an old video of himself before he was transformed into the Thing, but neither amount to much.
Luckily, the look of the movie, the score from Michael Giacchino, and most of the performances (Kirby spends most of the time mogging the camera, though I probably would too if I looked like that) do a lot of heavy lifting to distract from the weaker aspects. The ’60s-inspired retrofuturism and bright color palette make Earth-828 far more interesting to look at than most Marvel movies with their consistently dull and lifeless shots, and the sheer size and awesomeness of Galactus took my breath away. In fact, the whole thing looked so much better than the usual Marvel fare that the swap of Matt Shakman for the Russo brothers in the gray-tinged mid-credits scene that teases “Avengers: Doomsday” becomes obvious.
And that brings up the most glaring issue with the film: it is impossible to view these MCU movies in a vacuum. Even better entries like this and “Thunderbolts*” are colored by the missteps that came before them, and that mid-credits scene promises a return to the sludge that we have grown accustomed to. Instead of heralding something exciting and new, that teaser promises a return to “gotcha” moments and the presumptive abandonment of the innovation (even if it’s “innovation” in quotes) that made these last two movies so good—so why should we keep on watching? Maybe Galactus should have just taken the Russo brothers, then we’d be better off.
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Trailer
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