'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' Is Marvel on Fast-Forward
The film's biggest battle is against franchise fatigue.
I think time will be kind to The Fantastic Four: First Steps if only because when people come to it in the months and years ahead, it won’t be the third new Marvel movie in six months. The studio formerly managed a three-films-per-year output, but that was before they had to crank out TV shows in addition to their movies. Watching Marvel’s latest, the film feels like it’s aware of how exhausted audiences have become on superhero fare. So it speeds forward with a charming, retrofuturism aesthetic and a nice story about family and protecting the future. It’s a shame that we’re not allowed to spend a little more time with Marvel’s “First Family.”
Set on Earth-828 (so outside the universe where most other Marvel movies take place), the Fantastic Four have been the planet’s protectors for the past four years. Their mission to space encountered cosmic anomalies that altered their molecules, endowing them with superpowers. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) can now stretch his body, but his real superpower is his genius intellect. He’s supported by his brilliant wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who can turn invisible and create forcefields, her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) who can fly and engulf his body in flames, and his best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who became super-strong, but whose body was permanently changed into orange-ish rocks. They’re managing pretty well until the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) comes down from the heavens to tell them that her boss, Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a cosmic god, is coming to eat their planet. This problem gets worse when they learn Galactus will spare the Earth if Reed and Sue give up their newborn child to take Galactus’ place as devourer of worlds (and really, you’re trying to stop kids from putting everything in their mouths at that age).
Similar to this past year’s Thunderbolts*, The Fantastic Four benefits from knowing exactly what it wants to be about and how to express it. This is not just another team of misfit heroes, but a family. They inhabit this bizarre place in Earth-828 where they’re superheroes, celebrities, philanthropists, and world leaders, but through the lens of a 60s-style retrofuturistic optimism, that all works fine. Director Matt Shakman does a terrific job of immediately grounding us into a Marvel universe that’s different from any we’ve seen so far, and these characters don’t feel like retreads of other heroes we’ve met. Reed, in particular, is a great addition because while the MCU has no shortage of genius-level superheroes, Reed is the first thus far who’s driven by guilt and regret rather than needing to learn humility like Tony Stark or Stephen Strange. The overall dynamic of the team is great, and the sparring between them feels like it comes from family rather than coworkers.
What’s troubling here is that for all the effort of establishing this new aesthetic and jumping right into the lives of the Fantastic Four (the origin story is quickly handled in the prologue), the movie also seems set on speeding through its plot as if this is all merely precursor to next summer’s Avengers: Doomsday (Avengers movies: where the real money is made). I know it’s weird to advocate for superhero movies being longer, but at only an hour and 45 minutes (plus 10 minutes of credits including two brief scenes), it feels like we’re only skimming the surface here. None of the characters get an arc or are transformed by the journey. It’s all about problem-solving the arrival of Galactus and protecting the baby. I’m not going to hold up Thunderbolts* as some cinematic revolution, but at least those heroes get past their bits of self-loathing to realize they don’t have to be villains. Because The Fantastic Four are already idealized, they have no place to go as individuals.
That’s not inherently wrong, but combined with the accelerated pacing, First Steps is so polished that you can only glide along the glossy exterior. The actors do their best with their thin character descriptions (some better than others; Pascal is fantastic while Quinn struggles with a character who should literally and figuratively smolder), and there are plenty of delightful touches around the margins such as The Thing growing a beard, the group’s robot butler H.E.R.B.I.E., or a small but important character played by Paul Walter Hauser. It’s like Marvel has set up a really fun party, but they’re already eyeing the clock because they have work in the morning.
The studio is well aware of the larger issues they’re facing (chief Kevin Feige even admitted in a recent interview that they let quantity surpass quality), and appears eager to maybe chuck the whole “Multiverse Saga” experiment in a bin to try and reset audience expectations. However, they can’t do that until they’ve wrapped everything up with next year’s Avengers: Doomsday and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars. They still want to make the individual movies shine, but there’s now an exterior battle against audiences who don't want to invest all their time in one ongoing franchise (I assume some of Superman’s success is that people don’t feel like they have to do homework before going to see it). While The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a nice, standalone tale thanks to taking place in a different universe, it’s a bit disappointing for that time to be so brief.
Again, none of that is really the fault of the movie, which, as a reintroduction to a team that never really caught on when it was under 20th Century Fox (yes, this is the fourth Fantastic Four movie in the past 20 years and second reboot), it’s a glowing success if only that it made me want more than the film was prepared to offer. That’s not a bad problem to have, and I hope that after all of the requisite Doctor Doom stuff goes down in the next couple of years, the studio won’t sit on its hands with these new characters like they have with so many Multiverse Saga figures like Shang-Chi, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, etc. The best way to make these stories feel like stories instead of assembly line products is to let us enjoy them rather than quickly moving them off to the side for the next shiny object.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in theaters on July 25th.
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