Is Marvel Playing It Too Safe with The Fantastic Four?

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is beautiful, nostalgic, and great-looking. It embraces its mid-century retro aesthetic (without being afraid to be campy) and delivers top-notch performances (particularly from Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach) with a sense of fun that’s easily its most endearing quality. But while it’s a likable film, it’s one that never actually ramps up the stakes or suspense to become truly exciting.

Producer Kevin Feige was right to call the film “a no-homework-required” Marvel entry. Fans coming to First Steps fresh, either for lack of time or willpower, won’t feel lost; there’s little mention of the multiverse, let alone Doctor Doom’s Funky Realm or now-canonical past appearances, such as last year’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Director Jon Watts also keeps the film fairly simple in terms of narrative: This is just an introduction to Reed Richards (Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm (Moss-Bachrach), with minimal retcons or continuity hang-ups. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a Marvel reboot with the baggage of previous adaptations left behind. At times, the film’s content to just simple—and, on occasion, even too simple.

Watts frames the Fantastic Four’s origin story as a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss, who also provides a quick exposition dump: Four years earlier, Richards, Storm, Storm, and Grimm were on a space mission when they were exposed to radiation that changed their DNA. Reed developed the power to stretch his body; Sue can become invisible and conjure force fields; Johnny now has the power to become the Human Torch, allowing him to fly and shoot flames; and Ben is permanently turned into The Thing, an enormous, rock-covered musclehead.

At some point, the quartet moved in together and is shown now to be living in what amounts to a mid-century modern chic space compound, with flying cars and helicopters, chalkboard equations, and a toddler-sized robot with arms and legs named H.E.R.B.I.E. who cleans and cooks for them. One moment, Sue is in her room helping Reed work out in his lab, when Johnny and Ben have to change their clothing back into their Fantastic Four costumes after sparring in a living room filled with vintage knick-knacks. The world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps is full of retro-futurism: square television sets, people smoking in the streets without repercussions, and, most tellingly, a lack of any visible modern technology like smartphones. In the film’s depiction of the year 1964, when Marvel published the Fantastic Four’s first appearance in Fantastic Four #1, The Jetsons, Lost in Space, and a Marvel comic all got together and had a baby.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is fun to look at, but it’s less fun to watch in terms of pacing and stakes. On the latter point, the biggest throughline of the film is family: The four lead characters are tight-knit, with Reed and Sue’s relationship serving as a microcosm for the close-knit (sometimes too close for comfort) nature of the group. Sue reveals to Reed in the film’s first act that she’s pregnant, and he is at once equal parts anxious and adorable; in one scene, he has H.E.R.B.I.E. baby-proof their home (only to instruct him to remove the safety measures in their shared science lab). Johnny and Ben act like siblings, providing comic relief and some quasi-uncle training in the film’s most endearing moments.

But before they can spend much time bonding as a family, the world (or in this case, the universe) has to be saved. Galactus, a large armored being with glowing red eyes, has set his sights on Earth as his next meal, and before he arrives, he sends the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner in motion-capture, making her Marvel debut) to warn that his herald has arrived. As the name suggests, the Silver Surfer rides a futuristic surfboard as she materializes in the Great Hall of the Baxter Building, providing some sleek menace—and, more interestingly, obsession (read: lust)—from Johnny. The Fantastic Four give chase through space and dodge the Silver Surfer’s attacks, but as far as Marvel action goes, it’s all pretty tame. Explosions and attack sequences are as stylized as the film’s retro aesthetic: streaks of light, bursts of flames, etc. The Fantastic Four’s final stand in the film’s climax, with Sue going into labor as the Fantastic Four chase Galactus off the planet, is appropriately goofy. The idea of planet-devouring and childbirth taking place during the same space mission is so absurd that it doesn’t register as tension or stakes.

Which is a decent summary of First Steps as a whole: It’s earnest, but can feel buried beneath a pastel-colored cloud. Watts is never one to shy away from sincerity, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with a kid-friendly adventure story with sincere drama and some impressive VFX. The problem is that the film never builds or sustains suspense, not even when the fate of the planet is at stake. This isn’t Avengers: Infinity War.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps, by design, is a likable film. It’s one that’s very accessible to newcomers, feels reverent to its source material without being enslaved by past adaptations, and is extremely heartfelt. But it also lacks any of the emotional or plot crescendos or wall-to-wall thrills that make Marvel’s best movies so dynamic. If you’re in the mood for something lighter and more whimsical than world-ending stakes, The Fantastic Four: First Steps might be the Marvel movie for you. Otherwise, it’s a Marvel movie that’s pulp-colored cotton candy: tasty, but not nearly as satisfying as it seems.