Movie Review – Fantastic Four, The: First Steps
Principal Cast : Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, Ralph Ineson, Matthew Wood.
Synopsis: Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, the Fantastic Four must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus and his enigmatic herald, the Silver Surfer.
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After a variety of ignominious big-screen attempts, Marvel Comics’ vaunted First Family are shuffled out once more in this fourth attempt to kickstart a franchise, now firmly under the control of Kevin Feige and his production henchmen at Marvel Studios. Previous feature films – from the unreleased 1994 Roger Corman-produced effort, through the Tim Story adaptations, to Josh Trank’s career-ending folly in 2015 – have all met with diminishing critical returns, if not outright box-office disappointment. So when Disney purchased 20th Century Fox and returned the IP to the MCU umbrella (alongside the Blade and X-Men properties, both still awaiting their own modern incarnations), fan anticipation was understandably high. Finally, Marvel had the opportunity to bring the comics’ most famous family to life on their own terms, doing justice to the characters and their long-standing legacy within comicdom. With WandaVision director Matt Shakman stepping up to the feature-film plate, Fantastic Four: First Steps serves not only as the opening salvo in the team’s MCU future, but as a full-scale reset of audience expectations for an infamously hard-to-get-right property.
Set against a retro-futurist 1960s backdrop, Fantastic Four: First Steps introduces brilliant scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), his wife and fellow researcher Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her impulsive younger brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Reed’s lifelong friend and pilot Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), whose lives are irrevocably altered following a catastrophic space mission that grants them extraordinary abilities. As the four struggle to adapt to their new identities as Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing, they are drawn together to confront an existential threat to Earth in the form of the planet-devouring cosmic entity Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his enigmatic herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner).
Part of the allure of First Steps, for me at least, was seeing how Feige and his creative team would introduce a long-time comics stalwart into the MCU well after the franchise had already found its footing. Ordinarily, an IP as foundational as the Fantastic Four would have been present from the MCU’s inception, if not occupying the narrative space initially filled by Tony Stark in Iron Man. Rights issues, however, have forced Feige and company to introduce them deep into the studio’s sixth innings. Cleverly, the ongoing multiverse conceit – a narrative device we’ve been living with since Endgame wrapped things up in 2019 – allows new and alternate characters to be sideloaded into the MCU with only minor script gymnastics.
In First Steps, the fact that Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben exist on an alternate, retro-styled Earth that resembles what America might have looked like had Steve Jobs been born in the 1960s is a knowing throwback to the team’s comic-book debut in 1961. How this version of the Fantastic Four will transition into the main MCU timeline ahead of Avengers: Doomsday later this year (following a brief tease in Thunderbolts) remains to be seen, but for the purposes of this film the world-building and stylised design work is absolutely… dare I say it, fantastic.
Galactus has been fumbled on the big screen before, but First Steps finally delivers something the MCU has struggled to achieve since the defeat of Thanos: an antagonist with a clear motivation and a genuine sense of threat. Ineson’s fully realised Galactus is no swirling cosmic cloud this time, but an imposing, terrifyingly tangible force bearing down on Earth-828, while his agent of doom, the Silver Surfer, is framed as a morally ambiguous figure within the wider conflict. Balancing this apocalyptic menace are the Fantastic Four’s own interpersonal squabbles, conflicts and personality clashes, all handled deftly by a screenplay that manages to serve multiple masters with surprising success.
On one hand, the film needs to satisfy long-time fans hungry for an adaptation that finally captures the iconic allure of the source material. On the other, it must function as contemporary blockbuster entertainment and sit comfortably within the broader MCU, despite existing largely apart from it. That First Steps juggles these competing demands and delivers something emotionally engaging, dramatically satisfying and broadly accessible – rising above standard MCU fare like Galactus looming over the Manhattan skyline – is no small achievement. Its box-office haul may fall short by half-a-billion-dollar expectations, but given how devalued the property had become through previous misfires, it places the franchise on far firmer footing moving forward.
Casting proves central to the film’s success. Pedro Pascal may well be the most overexposed franchise actor of the decade, thanks to The Mandalorian, The Last of Us and a steady run of blockbuster and indie appearances (Gladiator II, Wonder Woman 1984, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), but he’s rock-solid as Reed Richards. In the absence of Tony Stark post-Endgame, Reed emerges as a natural intellectual and moral successor within the MCU hierarchy. Vanessa Kirby is sexy, commanding, maternally ferocious and quietly powerful as Sue Storm, Reed’s wife and the mother of their son Franklin – a character comic readers will recognise as an immensely powerful reality-warping mutant, which bodes intriguingly for the MCU’s future. Kirby is an A-grade performer, and she asserts herself as the emotional core of the film even when surrounded by overwhelming CG spectacle. If First Steps has a heart and soul, it belongs to her.
Joseph Quinn (Gladiator II) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) provide strong supporting work as Johnny and Ben respectively, bickering like unruly children while Reed and Sue play the parental figures. Ben Grimm’s traditional anguish over his lost humanity – so central to Michael Chiklis’ portrayal in the Tim Story films – is largely set aside here in favour of a more affable, good-natured Thing. That emotional thread isn’t entirely absent, but it’s deemphasised, partly because this version of Earth appears far more accepting of physical difference than ours. Rounding out the ensemble is HERBIE, the family’s robotic assistant (voiced by Matthew Wood), a charming embodiment of the utopian AI future we once imagined. Somewhere between R2-D2 and Wall-E, HERBIE delivers several genuinely funny, tension-breaking moments that add warmth to the film.
Despite my growing wariness toward Marvel ensemble projects – Eternals was crushingly disappointing, while Thunderbolts felt like a placeholder in search of a story – I have no hesitation recommending Fantastic Four: First Steps as a strong, largely self-contained MCU entry. Setting the film in an alternate universe was a masterstroke, allowing Marvel’s First Family to establish themselves properly before inevitably being folded into larger Avengers-scale spectacles. The writing is terrific, the performances confident, and the production values predictably first-rate. In an MCU multiverse era that has often felt directionless and overcomplicated, Fantastic Four: First Steps is, reassuringly, a step in the right direction.
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