THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

The Fantastic Four: First Steps really is fantastic. Charming from start to finish, it’s a joyful mix of lively characters, amiable chemistry, retro-futuristic designs, and an earnest spirit that’s like a balm for a cynical soul.

That might sound grandiose for a film that perhaps had low expectations, given the bumpy ride Marvel’s “first family” has had to the big screen since debuting in Marvel Comics in the 1960s. Four films have preceded this one, the most recent, 2015’s Fantastic Four, tanking at the box office.

Yet where some of those films often veered into pathos that came across as silly, The Fantastic Four: First Steps cheerily embraces its comic-book roots. Imagine a live-action The Jetsons or The Incredibles, where its heroes sincerely protect the city from threats like a subterranean “Mole Man” trying to steal the Pan Am Building by tunneling beneath it.

Much like writer-director James Gunn’s Superman out this summer, The Fantastic Four: First Steps doesn’t get bogged down in an origin story. Instead, through news reels in “FantastiVision,” the film brings viewers up to speed about how astronauts Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal); his wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby); Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn); and friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) returned from a mission with altered DNA after exposure to cosmic energy.

Unlike The Incredibles, where its heroes had to hide, or earlier Fantastic Four films that regarded them as oddities, First Steps celebrates the four. New York City on this alternate Earth (Earth 828, a nod to co-creator Jack Kirby’s birthday) considers them beloved celebrities, neighbors, and trusted authorities, which the team treats with the respect and humor that deserves.

Their powers are extensions of their personalities. Reed can extend his limbs as much as his brilliant mind, reaching across his lab or writing equations on a chalkboard for a classroom or TV audience. (His stretchiness has been an iffy special effect in the past that the artists here render mostly believably.) The energetic Johnny bursts into flames at will, flies, and extinguishes blazes, zooming to aid overwhelmed firefighters.

Sue manipulates force fields and invisibility, thankfully without having to shed her clothes in the process (I’m looking at you, Fantastic Four of 2005). Here, she’s a natural diplomat, radiating integrity with nothing to hide. Ben as The Thing is a man of living rock, dependable and solid, yet easygoing enough to hoist a car over his head when the neighborhood kids want to see his strength.

The team lives in a high-rise with H.E.R.B.I.E. (voiced by longtime sound editor Matthew Wood), a robot helper often in the kitchen or in Reed’s lab. Their breezy heroics are cut short soon after Sue learns she’s pregnant, when a silver herald on a surfboard (Julia Garner, Wolf Man) announces that the world-eating Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson, Nosferatu) has decided this Earth will be next.

The film’s world-building is marvelous (no pun intended), thanks to production designer Kasra Farahani (Loki), as well as the art direction and set decoration, lending it an old-fashioned sensibility that matches its sweet sincerity. (Veteran composer Michael Giacchino brings some of his Incredibles flair to the pitch-perfect soundtrack.) Flying cars weave around Googie architecture and New York landmarks, zipping past a trove of detail in every storefront and commercial on picture-tube TVs. Teleporters in one scene give way to wired headsets in another. Reel-to-reel tapes spin inside the hovering H.E.R.B.I.E.’s head. Panels aboard the team’s spaceship resemble the tiny dots of Christmas lights as zoom at light speed after the silver surfer, who can phase through their hull like a ghost.

The film’s true superpower is its grounded, heartfelt tone. Director Matt Shakman (WandaVision) and the script by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer (with additional story credit to Kat Wood) lean into the source material’s wackier elements with an unironic touch that makes the performers and emotions shine.

Pascal (The Materialists), the internet’s favorite dad thanks to The Last of Us, conveys the worries of a super genius unable to ease up on himself for things he thinks he should’ve considered. He has a formidable partner in Kirby (Napoleon) as Sue, whose sheer force of will manifests in her powers as much as her guilelessness. Quinn (Warfare) portrays Johnny as not just a hothead but someone with the passion and smarts to unravel a problem, and Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) gives Ben a penetrating gaze and gentle gravitas.

The four look out for each other as a family—and consider the world as their family too. At a time when real headlines can be depressing, The Fantastic Four: First Steps celebrates thoughtfulness and empathy with a can-do attitude and sense of community that never goes out of style.