is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, you could see flashes of the studio’s plan to further expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After years of Marvel Studios building up the Avengers, the Fox deal put the company in a position to start telling stories about the characters who ushered in the modern superhero movie frenzy, like Blade and the X-Men. But it was a little odd to hear that Marvel also planned to make the Fantastic Four a major part of the MCU’s future.
Even though the Fantastic Four have always been prominent in Marvel’s comics, the characters — created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee — had never translated well to the big screen. Fox’s first two takes on the super family from director Tim Story were fun in the so-bad-they’re-sorta-good sense, while Josh Trank’s 2015 reboot was a messy case study in how uninteresting the Fantastic Four could be when stories about them try to downplay the fact that, compared to many of Marvel’s other heroes, they’re a little hokey.
Hollywood’s long-standing obsession with presenting superheroes as grimdark figures was at odds with the Fantastic Four’s roots in the colorful, whizbang silver age of comics — which is what makes The Fantastic Four: First Steps so refreshing. The new movie is actually kind of a blast and a promising sign that Marvel is shaking some of its bad moviemaking habits.
As meandering and largely uninspired as the MCU’s multiversal project has been, First Steps does a fantastic job presenting a reality that looks and feels truly different from what Marvel has been putting on the big screen. The story isn’t all that much to write home about. But its core quartet of performances are solid and its visuals are stunning, which might be enough to catapult it to box office success.
Set on Earth-828 (a nod to Jack Kirby’s birthday), First Steps tells the familiar tale of how genius inventor Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), diplomat Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Sue’s younger brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and former astronaut Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) become their world’s most famous superheroes. On this Earth, everyone knows the story of how Reed and his team gained strange abilities after surviving a freak accident in space that bathed them in cosmic radiation. In New York City, where the Fantastic Four are based, it’s not uncommon to see Sue whipping up force fields to shield civilians from out-of-control subway cars, or Johnny using his pyrokinetic abilities to snuff out infernos that firefighters can’t stop. But the team’s status as global icons has a lot more to do with their popular cartoon and the fact that they have established something very close to world peace through their work at the Future Foundation — a philanthropic organization focused on education and technological innovation.
The moment First Steps starts breezing through the Fantastic Four’s backstory with a series of stylized newsreels, you can see the kitschy, retrofuturistic vibe that director Matt Shakman is going for. It’s the 1960s, and the Fantastic Four are very much their world’s answer to the Beatles and the Osmonds, in terms of their international fame. On the ground, you can clearly see the work that production designer Kasra Farahani and costume designer Alexandra Byrne put into making the film’s more grounded and practical elements feel period-specific. But up in the sky, you can also see signs of how Reed’s super science has jumpstarted the development of technologies like flying cars, true artificial intelligence, and reusable space rockets.
For understandable reasons, First Steps is going to draw a lot of comparisons to Disney and Pixar’s Incredibles movies — a franchise that obviously took a lot of aesthetic and narrative inspiration from Kirby and Lee’s comics. As was the case with The Incredibles, much of First Steps’ story revolves around how the arrival of a baby changes the team’s family dynamics. But the new Marvel feature charts a very different course as it introduces Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), an alien from a distant planet, who arrives on a silver surfboard and warns the Fantastic Four that their planet has been selected for destruction by her master, Galactus (Ralph Ineson).
As Johnny flames on to chase the SIlver Surfer into the upper stratosphere during one of First Steps‘ early (and very good) set pieces, the movie starts to echo some of the beats of 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer for reasons that can’t entirely be blamed on screenwriters Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer. The alien villains are core parts of the Fantastic Four’s comics mythos, and there aren’t all that many ways to riff on their whole deal. Galactus is a hungry space god who must eat planets to live, and he forces the Silver Surfer to find worlds suited to his cosmic tastes. Here, Galactus is a gargantuan humanoid travelling in a massive ship, and so getting to his meals takes a bit of time. And in the days leading up to Galactus’ arrival, the world descends into a justified panic while the Fantastic Four try to figure out how to defeat a being whose existence predates their universe.
Image: Marvel Studios
Much of what’s different about First Steps‘ take on its villains boils down to the way Shakman spends time depicting them in strange, fantastical environments out in space. Unlike many previous Marvel features that save their big, VFX-heavy set pieces for the final act, First Steps shifts into that gear much earlier with a visually stunning chase sequence that feels like a tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. You get the sense that Marvel made a point of giving its VFX teams ample time to really fine-tune their work and give it the kind of polish that can make projects like this gorgeous, even when they’re at their most ridiculous (complimentary). But as fun as those scenes are, there’s a stiffness to many of these characters’ interactions that makes the movie’s dramatic elements feel wooden and like a byproduct of shooting having begun before the script was fully fleshed out.
Though each of First Steps’ leads delivers a solid performance that feels informed by an understanding of their characters, their chemistry is just a smidge off — not so much as to make the film bad, but enough to leave it feeling a little undercooked. It’s the sort of issue that this crew can easily iron out as the Fantastic Four go on to become fixtures within the MCU, but the studio has also been teasing that the team’s next outing will pull them out of their chic reality for a big crossover event that will probably erase Earth-828 entirely.
As solid as First Steps is, it’s arriving as Marvel is trying to course correct its way out of a flop era, and it feels like this chunk of the multiverse might have benefitted from being able to exist on its own for a little while longer before being added to the mainline MCU stew. Marvel’s movies have been hurting for a new gravitational center, though, and these characters are well suited to become headliners as the studio pivots to Doom — so it makes sense they might take their first step into the MCU a little prematurely.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps also stars Matthew Wood, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, and Paul Walter Hauser. The film hits theaters on July 25th.