‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Review: Marvel Trips Over Itself

As might be inferred from its still-awkward subtitle, Matt Shakman’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is a story about the mortal terror — and the profound thrill — of walking into the unknown. Here, in a movie that promises to push the Marvel Cinematic Universe out of its comfort zone before quickly retreating into a tired version of the same old schtick, only the terror shines through.  

It’s the terror of a Hollywood film executive who’s desperate to rejuvenate his sprawling mega-franchise, but deeply afraid of messing with the formula. It’s also — for the best part of Shakman’s film — the terror of a brilliant scientist who’s dying to have a child with his wife, but petrified at the premise of an experiment that he doesn’t have the power to control.

While Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards can extend his limbs into any shape imaginable (a radiation-induced talent that “First Steps” appears to forget about for appropriately long stretches of time), his sideburns turn grayer at the thought of living with his heart outside of his body. How do you rattle an invincible genius who can wiggle out of any problem with just a blackboard and some chalk? Give him a problem that no formula can solve. 

And that’s exactly what “First Steps” does with its opening act. The Fantastic Four have already established themselves as the most beloved family on Earth (well, their Earth) by the time we meet them — a shortcut that Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer’s script will pay for down the road. Winsomely portrayed by Pedro Pascal as a worried egghead who’s shelled inside his own thoughts, Reed may not be the most outspoken member of the superteam (that distinction belongs to Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm, even if his flame is dulled to death in this film), but the fact that he’s basically Tony Stark, Albert Einstein, and Bill Nye all rolled into one is still enough to make him the de facto frontman. 

Things are a bit shakier behind closed doors. When his wife reveals that she’s pregnant after several years of trying and giving up, it’s Reed who struggles to wrap his head around the known unknowns of what becoming a parent might entail. (Sue Storm is played by Vanessa Kirby, who finds any number of invisible nuances in a one-note part that largely reduces her to “baby” in the same way that Ken’s entire identity was “beach.”) Reed fights to make the retro-futuristic dimension of Earth-828 a place where it’s safe for people to raise a child, but he understands his world too well to account for all of its variables; he can invent a teleportation device without breaking a sweat, but delegates the task of building a crib to his helper robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (whose “Star Wars”-worthy design is somewhat wasted on beep-boop comic relief). 

In other words, Mister Fantastic is scared. As scared to have his first kid as Joel Miller was to lose his second one. And Pascal’s performance is so raw and refreshing because the actor isn’t afraid to lead with that fear. And for a while, the film around him isn’t either. Indeed, the initial chapters of “First Steps” are attuned to Reed’s all too relatable neurosis in a way that makes it seem like the MCU is about to grow by leaps and bounds. Creating life in the face of an existential crisis requires a greater degree of magical thinking than Reed’s brain was built to process, and when a naked metal Julia Garner surfs into Times Square and heralds the imminent arrival of the world-devouring space giant Galactus (Ralph Ineson), the news is like comeuppance for having the gall to bring something beautiful into a multiverse of gods and monsters.

“First Steps” might take place in a bizarro 1960s that’s suspended between RKO and “The Jetsons,” but its parental anxieties are ripped straight from our 21st century; Galactus’ threat to “Eat Reed’s planet slowly while his son watches” is no different or more personal than what I hear every time a fascist opens their mouth on TV. Finally, it would seem, we’re in for a Marvel movie with relatable human stakes. A Marvel movie in which a sequel doesn’t feel like the only thing that’s at risk. A Marvel movie in which saving the universe will require its characters to confront — and overcome — their mega-franchise’s stultifying fear of change. 

Spoiler alert: We’re not.

“First Steps” may have the good sense to sidestep — or at least speed through — the characters’ hyper-familiar origin story, but it still feels like a movie we’ve seen 1,000 times before. In fairness, that movie has seldom looked this good. Superhero films thrive on a vivid sense of time and place, and Shakman’s crew has an absolute field day with the mid-century modernism of Earth-828, every design choice of which radiates the modular optimism of a world that believes in itself. 

Imagine Don Draper trying to sell you a five-cent comic book: This New York City is the kind of place where anything’s possible and life moves forward at the speed of a buoyant montage. Flying cars and nifty monorails zip between Bertrand Goldberg-inspired towers above ground, while Paul Walter Hauser’s scene-stealing Mole Man rules over a subterranean paradise below. The skies are Pan-Am blue instead of CGI gray, and each living room comes with its own Lloyd fireplace. From its delightful props (e.g. a baby monitor shaped like an old tube TV) to its turtleneck costumes, “First Steps” is the only MCU entry this side of “Wakanda Forever” that feels like it actually wants to be looked at — not just watched. 

Alas, “First Steps” loses its footing when it launches into space, loses the benefit of its scenery, and forces our attention on the plug-and-play jizz whizz at its core. The sky’s the limit until the Fantastic Four leave Earth’s atmosphere, at which point they immediately bump into the same low ceiling that makes all of the biggest Marvel movies feel like they have nowhere to grow. 

Galactus is quite a large boy, but the spectacle of his size — which Shakman can hardly contain in a single frame — isn’t the only thing that makes the characters feel small. On the contrary, they shrink a bit more with every weightless action sequence and recycled joke, as the friction between Reed and Sue is subsumed into the stuff of garden variety special effects and “that’s all we get?” lore (Galactus wants to eat the Earth because he’s very hungry, and the Silver Surfer is somehow even less nuanced). 

Absent the visual dynamism of Earth-828, we can’t help but notice that Johnny was barely a character to begin with. Pivoting away from his legacy as a red-hot womanizer, the film tries to paint the Human Torch as a dilettante with something to prove, but it never really settles on what that something should be. (Making it appear as if Johnny is burning himself alive is just another one of the many things this movie is afraid of, and so it settles for a cartoonish fire effect that feels just a few degrees shy of the characters from “Elemental.”) 

His cool uncle schtick is shared with flaky rock creature Ben Grimm (Eben Moss-Bachrach), who looks great, and brings a faint trace of upper-crust sophistication to a hero known for clobberin’ anything that gets in his way, but leans way too hard on the vague loneliness that he sees in his own reflection. Ben is the strongest of the Fantastic Four, and yet even he struggles to carry the sort of smirking banter that hasn’t been fresh since the first “Avengers” (nothing suffocates the MCU like its sense of humor, which makes it all the more refreshing to see Hauser tunnel a new path towards the Mole Man’s punchlines). Instead of an emotional arc, Ben has a crush on a Hebrew school teacher played by Natasha Lyonne; if only the sight of The Thing wearing a tallit were the strangest thing I’ve had to process as a Jew over the last few years. 

The Fantastic Four do eventually return to Earth-828 for the second half of the story, but at that point this film is so consumed by the usual song-and-dance — big stuff coming from above, the heroes have to zip around to stop it — that the fear of the unknown starts to feel less like a theme for “First Steps” to to explore than an explanation for why it completely fails to do that. It doesn’t help that Galactus is every bit as laughable as he is large (he was so much scarier and more compelling as a giant cloud in 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”), or that Shakman is too afraid of how silly his characters’ superpowers look in live-action to have any fun with them, which is a problem “The Incredibles” solved too well, and with too much comic ingenuity, for this movie to simply try and ignore. 

“Family is about fighting for something bigger than yourself,” Sue insists. But as “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again. 

Grade: C

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures will release “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” in theaters on Friday, July 25.

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