Fantastic Four: First Steps Gets Marvel’s First Family Right
Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby lead a charming, retro-styled MCU adventure that finally does justice to Marvel's original superhero team.
Don’t call it a comeback, they’ve been here for years. The superhero team of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm are already globally famous at the start of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, revered as protectors of the Earth.
The 37th film in the MCU franchise, First Steps isn’t structured as an origin story, even if technically that’s what it is. It’s a hit-the-ground-running story, so the group’s origins are baked into a video retrospective shown at a public event celebrating four years of the Fantastic Four guarding the planet.
The video tribute serves as a concise re-introduction to the four brave astronauts who rocketed into space and encountered an unforeseen cosmic storm, passing through which permanently altered the DNA of each one, endowing them with superpowers.
Since then, they’ve fought off monsters and mole men, and saved their hometown of New York City many times over, as shown in news footage also included in the video.
Within that brief, but exhilarating montage, director Matt Shakman — who also helmed all nine episodes of WandaVision — works in nods to supervillain foes Mole Man, the Mad Thinker, the Red Ghost, and Giganto, the mean, green subterranean terror who graced the cover of Fantastic Four #1 back in 1961.
Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were inspired by the space race, according to Shakman, who introduced the press screening I attended in the IMAX theater of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “We were trying to capture that spirit,” Shakman said. By the looks and feel of the film, they succeeded.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the first Marvel movie in a while to truly capture the gee-whiz spirit of classic Marvel comics. The nifty retro-futuristic styling goes a long way in that regard, with the movie set on an Earth of a different dimension than our own, where the ’60s city skyline is dominated by swooping towers, and dotted by flying cars.
The crisp, Jetsons-lite production design, flush with bold, optimistic blues, carries through to the costumes and even the props, like the Fantastic Four’s genial all-purpose robot sidekick H.E.R.B.I.E. (voiced by Matthew Wood).
The human cast charms, too, starting at the top with Pedro Pascal as team leader Reed, genius scientist and strategist, esteemed science instructor, and beloved husband to Sue, the level-headed diplomat of the team, rendered with calm authority by Vanessa Kirby.
The performers pair well as a married couple living their lives in the glare of fame, yet still grounded in their bond with one another. Reed and Sue’s chemistry is sexy yet wholesome, and solid on the field of combat, where they’re usually in sync as Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, combining her invisibility and force fields with his super-stretch abilities and tactical awareness.
Sue’s hot-headed brother, Johnny (“The Human Torch”) and Reed’s best friend, Ben (“The Thing”), portrayed by Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, complete the unit, though they’re confined by the script to sidekick roles. Human Torch and The Thing don’t face the moral dilemmas in this story that weigh compellingly on Sue and Reed.
The two barely have more lines and character traits than H.E.R.B.I.E., but Moss-Bachrach, particularly, and mostly through motion-capture, still delivers. The Bear Emmy-winner brings an endearing soulfulness to the kind-hearted rock pile, abetted by the effects team giving the computer-generated big guy a helping hand with a handsome beard.
The Thing’s beard alone outshines much of the Human Torch’s pyrotechnic special effects, if not Quinn’s performance. Quinn may not be the most fiery Johnny Storm we’ve seen onscreen, but, like Moss-Bachrach, he slots in credibly as a member of this unshakable fighting force, at its heart, a family.
But cast chemistry wasn’t what held back the previous, universally-maligned movie versions of the Fantastic Four. Usually, it was the ham-fisted storytelling, which flourishes here by, surprisingly, rehashing major plot points of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the least bad of the three Fantastic Four films produced by Fox between 2005 and 2015.
Yet again, the gleaming, mysterious Silver Surfer — this time, a woman, played also via mo-cap by Julia Garner — surfs down to Earth to herald the coming of her master, Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds.
In Rise of the Silver Surfer, Galactus was a bewilderingly conceived, totally underwhelming cloud of space gas. Appearing here as he appears in the comics, Galactus is a cosmic colossus balefully voiced by British actor Ralph Ineson, and, among the film’s most formidable achievements, his awesome size registers vividly onscreen, especially in IMAX and Marvel Studios’ wide-screen FantastiVision.
A tense, visually vibrant chase through a wormhole also looks fantastic, although, ultimately, this cosmic adventure runs short on real superhero action. Audiences don’t just want to see The Thing lift heavy objects — they want to see him clobbering the competition, literally, pounding villains into oblivion.
Ben Grimm trimming his stony stubble is amusing, but not the kind of close shave we’re paying to see. Although we won’t have to wait long to see the team again. According to the tag in one of two codas in the credits, fans will get their fill of further Fantastic action in Avengers: Doomsday, set for release in December 2026.
Fantastic Four: First Steps (★★★★☆) is rated PG-13 and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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