Producer: Kevin Feige Director: Matt Shakman Screenplay: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Ralph Ineson, Julia Garner, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, Sarah Nyles and Mark Gatiss Distributor: Walt Disney Studios
Grade: C+
Matt Shakman’s “First Steps” is easily the best movie yet featuring the four Marvel Comics astronauts transformed by cosmic forces into a disparate quartet of superheroes—Reed Richards, a fellow who can stretch his body like a rubber band; Sue Storm, his wife, who can turn on invisibility and generate powerful force fields; her brother Johnny, who can fly and set his body aflame; and Ben Grimm, whose skin has calcified into rock and possesses super strength. They come to be known individually as Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, The Human Torch and The Thing, respectively, and collectively as The Fantastic Four.
But calling it the best is faint praise indeed when one considers its antecedents. An unreleased 1994 feature, generally associated with Roger Corman though he was only an executive producer, was hobbled by a miniscule budget. (You can find it on YouTube.) Two films directed by Tim Story for Twentieth Century Fox in 2005 (“Fantastic Four”) and 2007 (“Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”) were puerile, and Josh Trank’s attempted reboot “Fantastic Four” (2015) a numbing bore. The franchise, if one can call it that, had nowhere to go but up.
So it’s a triumph of sorts that Shakman (whose only previous feature was 2014’s mediocre “Fargo” clone “Cut Bank,” though he made a mark with Disney+’s “WandaVision”) and his writers—appropriately enough, four of them—have made a movie that’s not an embarrassment and will probably please fans of one of Marvel’s staple properties. It has an agreeable cast—Pedro Pascal as Reed/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue/Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny/The Torch and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben/The Thing—and they make the characters a likable if rather unexciting bunch, even in their neon blue outfits. But it has the misfortune of following on the heels of James Gunn’s “Superman,” which is superior in every respect. And even apart from that comparison, it’s at best mildly entertaining, deteriorating badly in the second half.
One of the strengths is that it’s framed as a period piece, set in what looks like a late 1950s-early 1960s version of America, on a planet called Earth 828. That allows kitschy fun in Kasra Farahani’s production design, Alexandra Byrne’s costumes and Jille Azis’s set decoration—the playful result has some of the plasticky gloss of movies of that period.
But it also leads to a tendency to showcase these elements to excess. Despite the fact that the movie is happily economical in length—it runs less than two hours, including the usual endless closing credits and the obligatory Marvel added scenes (the second just a shout-out to the old animated TV series)—there are just too many scenes of crowds dressed up in period finery applauding the heroes in the city square or at the launching pad of their rocket. (Nor should one ignore the efforts of the makeup and hairdressing departments in these sequences.) When you’ve put so much time and energy into crafting the visual elements, there’s an understandable inclination to show them off whenever possible, which gets tiresome after a while.
And those crowds, given the story into which they’re inserted, aren’t always adoring. “First Steps” begins with a brief recap of the FF’s origin story—not as short as the opening captions of “Superman,” which set the stage for that movie in seconds, but then the FF aren’t as well known to everybody as the Man of Steel—and a montage of the quartet’s heroic acts. But then the comic-book-inspired plot kicks in with the arrival of the Silver Surfer (here a female played by a shimmering Julia Garner), who announces the imminent arrival of her master Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a planet-devouring giant whose plans for this earth are not friendly. (The motive behind the Surfer’s service to the brute is eventually revealed in a flashback as economical as the FF’s origin.)
The FF immediately suit up—even Sue, though given her advanced state of pregnancy that doesn’t seem very wise—and blast off to negotiate with Galactus on his huge and, given the length of time it takes for him to reach earth, apparently slow spacecraft. The negotiations are going nowhere until Galactus spies the unborn boy in Sue’s womb and, seeing the child’s powers as the offspring of two metahumans, offers to spare earth if they turn the infant over to him to become his successor. (Presumably planet-eating has led to indigestion.) The heroes refuse, of course, and escape in their ship, using super-speed and invisibility to just evade the Surfer’s clutches.
Back on earth, they find their admirers nonplussed by their refusal to turn over baby Franklin (Ada Scott, though must of “his” footage looks very CGI) to save everybody else. They turn against the FF just as earthlings turned against Superman in Gunn’s film. But while it takes much effort and lots of help from friends for the Kryptonian to evade Luthor’s plan for his death, Sue disarms the now-hostile crowd with a stirring speech about motherhood while her ever-brilliant husband devises a scheme to save earth by moving the planet into a different solar system—an idea even more ludicrous than the turning-back-time-by-reversing-the-earth’s-rotation business of the 1978 “Superman.”
Anyway, the scheme is undercut even after all the nations of the world unite in an energy-saving drive by the simple expedient of Surfer’s destruction of most of the speedily-built but electricity-hungry towers necessary to implement it. This forces an alternative plan—to send Galactus into a black hole when he comes to earth to take Franklin. But that requires inducing him to enter a particular zone, which proves a difficult task: much destruction and many last-minute interventions from all the squad members, especially Sue (as well as an outsider who repents bad choices) occur before the film ends in one of the corniest clichés prevalent in popcorn movies nowadays, superhero and otherwise—the coming-back-from-the-dead scene.
This big finale is meant to be impressive, of course, but it comes off instead as silly, largely because in an excess of fidelity to the visuals of the comics, Galactus is portrayed as something akin to a humungous statue of some ancient Mesoamerican god; seeing this goofy-looking giant trample on bits of a model urban landscape, toppling over buildings and swiping away whatever fire the Torch emits and the cars and trucks the Thing tosses at him has more than a whiff of Godzilla about it, and not in a good way. But hey, all’s well that ends well, and in a credits postscript set a few years later, an older Franklin appears destined to play a part in the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday” movie.
“First Steps” doesn’t give its stars much characterization to deal with, but they do what they can. Pascal is all furrowed brow, worried both about becoming a father and then dealing with having become one while constantly filling huge blackboards with unintelligible equations trying to figure out how to save earth. Both Wilson and Moss-Bachrach are given limp asides to deepen Johnny and Ben, the former in attempts to cajole Garner’s impassive but conflicted Surfer to change sides and the latter in visits to his old Hebrew school, where he bonds not just with the students but with their teacher Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne). Kirby gets both an extended birthing scene under trying circumstances and a final mother-against-the-beast confrontation that shows her absolute determination to save her child at all costs. But the characters remain obstinately underdeveloped, and poor Ineson is even more poorly treated, reduced to more booming, sepulchral voice than performance.
As to the supporting cast, Lyonne is ebullient, but Sarah Niles makes little impression as the director of Reed’s foundation, while Mark Gatiss is simply annoying as the host of a TV show devoted, it seems, to promoting the FF. Despite having miniscule time onscreen, however, Paul Walter Hauser aces his scenes as Mole Man, a subterranean ruler Reed is able to enlist as an ally in the crunch, and younger fans will respond to H.E.R.B.I.E. (voiced by Matthew Wood), a cute housekeeping robot whose likeness will probably be filling happy meals and toy shelves before long. It’s pleasant to note that Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood and Michael Bailey Smith, the stars of the 1994 movie, have cameos in this one, though they’re of the blink-and-you’ll miss-them variety.
Shakman and cinematographer Jess Hall have gone to considerable lengths to give “First Steps” the look of a comic book brought to life, and the effort, complete with occasional graphics, pays off; the slight cheesiness of the effects (VFX supervised by Scott Stokdyk, SFX by Alistair Williams) adds to that tone, which is further bolstered by the lickety-split editing of Nona Khodai and Tim Roche and a typically boisterous score by Michael Giachhino.
As a result “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is more engaging than many of the MCU’s recent efforts, and its comic-booky feel and obvious fan service should be welcome to devotees; those viewers who prefer not to do homework wading through all the movies and TV spinoffs that make up the larger franchise in order to understand innumerable allusions will, meanwhile, be gratified by its basically stand-alone quality.
But while Shakman has managed to rescue the foursome from their dismal earlier big-screen adaptations, his success is only relative: the movie ends up as a colorful, visually imaginative but ultimately pretty bland entry in the superhero genre.