The Fantastic Four: First Steps

There’s a moment halfway through The Fantastic Four: First Steps when Reed Richards, having just been informed that a cosmic entity intends to devour the Earth unless he offers up his unborn child, stares blankly at a chalkboard covered in equations. He mutters, “This doesn’t make sense.” And you know what? He’s right.

For a movie that’s been sold as the vanguard of Marvel’s latest phase, a bright, retro-futurist rethink of its most foundational family, First Steps is curiously risk-averse. Matt Shakman’s reboot opens with promise: a breezy, visually luscious first act brimming with swinging-’60s cool, warm familial chemistry, and a surprising willingness to foreground emotional stakes over franchise building. But then the movie blinks. The further it moves from the wood-paneled utopia of Earth-828 and toward the usual third-act skybeam shenanigans, the more it loses the pulse of what made it exciting in the first place.

Set in a multiverse 1964 that’s equal parts Tomorrowland and Mad Men with monorails, First Steps wisely ditches yet another origin story. Reed (Pedro Pascal), Sue (Vanessa Kirby), Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Johnny (Joseph Quinn) have already acquired their powers, earned the world’s admiration, and become darlings of the nightly news. They live in a penthouse condo that looks like Don Draper’s dream bunker and pilot a spaceship so aerodynamic it could double as a concept car. Reed and Sue are also expecting their first child, just in time for a shimmering silver visitor (Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer) to arrive and inform them that her master, Galactus (a booming Ralph Ineson), wants to eat their planet. Unless, of course, they give him the baby.

It’s a suitably wild premise that plays like an intergalactic take on the trolley problem, save your child or save the world, and for a while, First Steps seems like it’s going to wrestle with that dilemma. Shakman even teases the moral vertigo of the setup with an eerie mid-film sequence where public opinion begins to turn against the Fantastic Four, the world unable to stomach the math of their decision. But then the movie does what so many Marvel films before it have done: it backpedals. What could’ve been a morally thorny pivot point is resolved with a speech. A rousing, well-acted speech, sure but a speech nonetheless.

That’s the rub. The cast is doing acrobatics to inject life into characters who feel increasingly hemmed in by their own movie. Pascal plays Reed like a man whose mind is always four steps ahead of his heart, a brilliant but emotionally constipated futurist who can’t compute the chaos of parenthood. Kirby, meanwhile, does everything she can to make Sue more than a womb with invisibility, even if the script continually sidelines her in favor of Reed’s angst. Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm, rendered with seamless CGI and a gentle melancholy, deserves more than the one-note loneliness the film assigns him. And Quinn’s Johnny? He’s all quip, no spark, a performance that feels somewhat burnt out by the MCU’s stale brand of irony. Quinn still has shinning moments but his performance, like the film, feels like it never quite clicks into rhythm.

Visually, First Steps is a blast. The Silver Surfer’s introduction is pure Kirby psychedelia, a chase sequence along the rim of a black hole that ranks among the franchise’s most dynamic action beats. The production design, all soft curves and candy-colored optimism, is practically a character in its own right. But none of that spectacle can disguise how quickly the movie runs out of ideas. By the time we reach the obligatory Galactus showdown, which is still visually impressive in a way Marvel films haven't been in a while, you can feel the oxygen leave the room.

What First Steps wants to say is clear: that even in the face of apocalyptic dread, family and faith in each other is worth the fight. But like its subtitle, the film never moves past its own tentative beginnings. It’s a first step in a better direction, yes. But not a confident one.

3/5