Though it may sound a little like damning with faint praise, it is earnestly perhaps the most impressive achievement of new Fantastic Four reboot First Steps that it manages to truly feel like a jumping on point. This is the 37th cinematic entry into the MCU but requires you to have seen precisely zero of its predecessors, escaping the multiverse clag of its wider franchise and managing to feel fresh and light in a way that Marvel has very much struggled with lately. Though it’s far from perfect, First Steps really does feel like it’s what Marvel needs right now, before next year is dominated by Spider-Man and multiversal nostalgia-bait Avengers – it’s an antidote to superhero fatigue.
Helping immensely with that sense of unburdened-ness is the fact that First Steps takes us away from the mainline MCU reality. Instead, we’re in a whole new universe, one in which the Fantastic Four are the only superheroes in the world, renowned and beloved everywhere but especially so in their home city of New York, which is a retro-futurist ‘60s kitsch playground straight out of the early Jack Kirby comics. Outside of the obvious aesthetic pleasures of Mad Men-meets-The Jetsons, this new world allows director Matt Shakman to really focus in on Marvel’s First Family without distractions.
The dialogue here is pretty generic but still sells the warmth and history and ease of a functional family unit, brought to life by a quartet of jolly and fun performances. Pedro Pascal’s leader Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic balances genius with genuine vulnerability, Vanessa Kirby is the powerhouse and political brains of the operation as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, and Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach bring both heart and comic relief as Johnny Storm/Human Torch and Ben Grimm/The Thing. Though it’s not a high bar to clear, these four are instantly the definitive cinematic takes on these characters.
With the ‘60s visuals, family-first vibes, and even the power sets of the characters (stretchy, invisibility + forcefields, ultra-strong), it’s hard to not think of The Incredibles during First Steps (very fittingly, given that Pixar’s super-family are a loving spoof of the OG F4 comics), right down to the super-baby. See, the real core of First Steps’s story is Reed and Sue having their first baby, Franklin, going through all the classic pregnancy and parenting panics while also being charge of saving the world, a task that gets a lot more difficult when their world is visited by a sleekly unstoppable metal alien.
This is the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), the herald of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a giant alien god older than the universe itself who has an endless hunger that can only be sated by eating entire planets. Next on his list is Earth, drawn there not just to munch down on our presumably very tasty world (he skips Mars entirely), but to kidnap Reed and Sue’s baby, Franklin, who has been born imbued with infinite cosmic powers, which Galactus wants to harness to free himself from his hunger.
So, yeah, First Steps is all a bit too busy for its sub-two-hour runtime (pretty short, as far as these things go), with the opening 20 minutes pretty much playing out in broad strokes and montages to get everything set up. It means that it can’t quite build up to any truly affecting emotional crescendos (there’s no moment here to match, say, the Pa Kent conversation in James Gunn’s recent Superman) but, once all the ducks are in a row, the pacing of the next 100 minutes is some of the best of any recent superhero movies. Even though it involves a billions-of-years old space giant, an all-powerful baby, and a wonderful robot called Herbie whose brain is a cassette player, the plot feels streamlined, the action scenes purposeful, the family dynamics and chemistry just as active in a fight as in a dinner table chat.
While I overall preferred Thunderbolts as my MCU of choice for 2025, First Steps feels much more important to the Marvel project. It’s the kind of film to win back exhausted old fans and (for the first time in a *while*) to earn entirely new ones. Shakman has been granted a sense of aesthetic and storytelling freedom that Marvel previously reserved exclusively for James Gunn’s Guardians and while First Steps isn’t on the level of thattrilogy, it does have the same winning blend of heartfelt earnestness, refreshingly self-contained drama, and plenty of lovable cosmic weirdos.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 