A nagging feeling begins to grow early on in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”: that rather than the first film in a shiny new franchise reboot of the superhero quartet, we have actually been plopped into a sequel. That’s both a strength and a drawback of the audacious approach taken by a movie that represents Marvel’s most earnest attempt at something daring in years, bumpy as it may be.
This new “Fantastic Four,” coming a decade after the doomed reboot of the forgettable mid-aughts originals, throws us right into the action, essentially skipping the team’s origin story and opting instead for a highlight-reel summary of how cosmic rays gave four astronauts superhuman powers and turned them into protectors of Earth-828, an alternate version of our world. That narrative evasion is no grave sin, and in fact, the immediacy with which the film immerses us into the tactile, fully formed retrofuturism of this world serves as its greatest delight.
But after the brief introduction to our ensemble and this alt-planet, the film, directed by Matt Shakman, locks quickly into the mode of a superhero family sitcom that partly defined the original comics: Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) as the signature superhero couple, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) as the playfully antagonistic third and fourth wheels. But the party is quickly broken up when the mysterious Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) arrives and declares that a planet-eating god named Galactus (Ralph Ineson) is on his way to destroy Earth, prompting the four to suddenly go into space to confront this new villain.
It all makes for an introduction whose pacing and tone operate as if on top of the pre-existing groundwork of a previous movie. We’re often left wondering who these four heroes are exactly and why we ought to believe in the emotional or comic resonance of them as a family. To help us buy in, the film mostly relies on the polish of this retro universe and its premium cast (who turn in uneven performances, save for Moss-Bachrach), along with one’s faint familiarity with the iconography of the heroes, to do the legwork.
But those pieces sometimes are sufficient to keep this a smooth-enough ride that can even be periodically thrilling. Most of all, there’s the accompanying relief that this Marvel movie has an interest in actually building a sensibility, aesthetically and thematically, that is entirely its own, without the invisible hand of an extended universe pulling its strings.
Notably, this is essentially a family drama disguising itself as a superhero film. “First Steps” opens with Sue finding out she’s pregnant and follows the family’s preparations and anxieties over the baby’s arrival. It soon leads to more than they’d bargained for: When the crew are face to face with Galactus, he sees a special power in Reed and Sue’s unborn child and proposes exchanging their baby for Earth’s survival.
That’s when Pascal’s Reed, who at first seems simply to be a cardboard cutout of the world’s most handsome, intelligent and unflappable gentleman, finally takes shape. Reed is indeed a paradigm of perfection, but what happens when the hero who can save all suddenly can’t predict or prevent everything when it comes to the ones he loves most?
“The more I look at you, the less I know. The less I know, the more scared I am,” Rex says at one point to his baby son. Galactus’s proposal — destroy the world or lose your child — is less a bargain than an analogy of parenthood: To have a child is to also suddenly know the fear of unimaginable loss, and what is that fear if not the idea of losing one’s entire world? In this way, “First Steps” is a superhero movie that understands that the gravest stakes are the most intimately human ones.
In other words, that leaves a lot of individually good material that can’t quite add up to something greater than its parts. These are the first steps for a refreshingly new direction for Marvel, even if they’re imperfect ones.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Rated PG-13 for violence and some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
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