- calendar_today August 17, 2025
Fantastic Four is Fine – and That’s the Problem
Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps has a retro-cool look and feels for one of the publisher’s first superhero teams, and its cast members bring it well-seasoned charisma. Filled with charm, cheek, and more than a few strong performances—Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are delightful in the leads—the film never manages to hit its necessary dramatic beats.
The film’s producer, Kevin Feige, correctly called the film “a no-homework-required” adventure. Marvel’s films have become a moviegoer’s literacy test: Watch at your peril if you don’t know the ins and outs of the multiverse, where the various cameos and spin-offs are in the already-massive and continuing series of films, and when time loops and time travel get patched over. First Steps, however, takes place in a tidy, stand-alone story that reintroduces comic book characters Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm with zero need for backstory or references to the continuity of previous, less-well-regarded adaptations. It’s a Marvel film that feels like the ultimate no-strings-attached fling with a superhero property, one that’s happy with the simple pleasures—and, at times, disappointingly so.
The film’s action begins with a television talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss. Gatiss’s character also manages to give the requisite exposition on how the Fantastic Four became the Fantastic Four. Four years earlier, they went on a space mission where exposure to a radiation field altered their DNA. Reed (Pedro Pascal) learned to stretch his body into the elasticity of plastic or bubble gum. Sue (Vanessa Kirby) can make herself invisible and project force fields. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) is the Human Torch, and he can light his body aflame and fly. Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is The Thing, a giant humanoid covered in rock that never leaves his body.
The four also live together in what one assumes is a mid-century-modern space compound, replete with flying cars, chalkboard equations as décor, and a toddler-size robot helper named H.E.R.B.I.E. that’s vacuuming their floors. The world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps is pure retro-futurism: square television screens, no one has a smartphone, and interior design and architecture look like a trailer for a Dr. Seuss adventure. It’s a fusion of The Jetsons and Lost in Space with a Marvel comic flavor.
The throwback design has the film look like an updated comic book in moving pictures. Unfortunately, the plot has almost zero urgency. It also feels to be based around a word, and that word is family. All the members of the first family are so interwoven, from the tight romance between Reed and Sue, to the sibling camaraderie and arguments between Johnny and Ben, that the film’s real throughline is how this core group of characters is the glue holding everything together. The film makes this point repeatedly and makes it seem both dramatic and sweet when Sue discovers early in the film that she’s pregnant and Reed overreacts in protective panic. (In one sequence, Reed tells H.E.R.B.I.E. to baby-proof both their home and science lab.) Johnny and Ben get to be the adolescent siblings, trading insults and comic relief while salivating over their roles as about-to-be uncles.
Family drama is soon interrupted by a cosmic bully known as Galactus. A towering, armored humanoid with glowing eyes, Galactus is on a galactic path directly toward Earth to devour the planet, and before he gets here, he dispatches a silver-skinned herald (in motion capture, Julia Garner) to give the bad news to the people of Earth. The Silver Surfer arrives in a machine that glides with a sleek menace, but she’s quickly the object of curiosity (and, in Johnny’s case, lust).
Galactus, who is, you know, the size of a city block, remains elusive as the new members of the Fantastic Four give chase in space as they’re also being pummeled by the Silver Surfer’s light cannon. Meanwhile, Ben and Reed both seem to be having midlife crises as they contemplate the future of their family and species in rapid succession. The action is notably tame, even with Earth at stake, and the special effects don’t outgrow the old-fashioned bursts of light, fire trails, and stylized cartoon-like explosions. When Sue goes into labor while out on their high-stakes mission, it just feels surreal—birth and planetary annihilation at once, held together by colored-film visual effects.
Surrealism best characterizes the film, which is both earnest to a fault at times and flippant by design. There is no shortage of tender, touching moments of character growth—particularly in Reed, Sue, and Ben—but they can be overwhelmed by the muted pastels of a tone and style more reminiscent of kids’ Saturday morning cartoons than, well, the usual Marvel superhero fare. This doesn’t mean the film isn’t sometimes clever or not good to watch, but, for Marvel, the stakes never really rise to where you should care if one of its major film universes was coming to an end. For some viewers, this may be Marvel’s latest origin story’s strength. But for others, the Fantastic Four: First Steps will feel like a lovely (the color palette is a nice touch) but empty calorie snack.
