Marvel’s Fantastic Four Falls Short of Fantastic

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a good-looking, lighthearted, and playful attempt at rebooting the company’s first superhero group. Beautifully shot and nicely acted (particularly by Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the movie embraces its shiny retro-glamour, yet never quite cranks up the suspense or stakes to make it matter.

Produced by Kevin Feige, the Fantastic Four: First Steps lives up to the way he described it ahead of release: “a no-homework-required” Marvel entry. In other words, it’s a good movie if you’re looking for something that doesn’t require you to be familiar with how every major character is connected to every other major character across two and a half decades of Marvel properties (plus various multiverses and cameos and spin-offs, and sometimes just alternate spellings). If you also don’t need to know who the Fantastic Four are and where they came from, First Steps is for you. This version of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm reintroduces them with a clean slate—and often gets too cute with that blank canvas.

In the opening scenes, a talk show host named Mark Gatiss (yes, the Sherlock star) summarizes how these four people became the Fantastic Four. Four years ago, Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben went on a space mission that got them radiation exposure, changing their DNA. Reed (Pedro Pascal) can stretch his arms and legs like elastic. Sue (Vanessa Kirby) can go invisible and project force fields around her. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) can burn like a torch and fly. Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) turned all rock and muscle and became The Thing.

Now living in some retro-futuristic-looking joint that resembles a mid-century modern space compound (complete with flying cars, chalkboard equations, and a toddler-sized robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. that cleans up their house for them), the film’s worldbuilding is completely devoted to its gleaming retro-futurism. Square television screens. No smartphones or internet. It’s a 1960s TV show come to life, and the deliberate square edges of the period’s design aesthetic also inform how the film approaches its superheroes. Consider these visuals: a hero whose new superpower is pregnancy; a sidekick robot that also acts as a cuddly toy; lava-flow arms and whips of flame.

The movie is content to be a dinky little sandbox of retro science-fiction, and that choice is fine—and frequently delightful—but not conducive to a plot that matters. The emotional core of the story is the family unit between the four leads. Sue finds out early in the film that she is pregnant, and Reed reacts to the news with a jittery but lovable anxiety. He asks H.E.R.B.I.E. to install babyproof latches not only in their house but in their science lab, too. Sue and Johnny also get the sibling bickering back-and-forth, with plenty of younger-brother comedy from Quinn. Moss-Bachrach’s Ben is gruffer but just as gentle at heart, as he and Johnny both relish the idea of being new uncles.

Sue and Reed’s domestic bliss does not last for long. A gigantic armored space being with glowing red eyes is headed toward Earth with a mouth agape and, one assumes, some intergalactic appetite. Galactus is the planet-eater in question, but before he can chow down, he sends his herald, a glowing, silver-skinned woman, to Earth with the bad news. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, in motion capture) streaks in on her groovy board with a whispered menace, but Johnny quickly finds her pretty enough to both want to and not to capture.

The action isn’t quite as featherweight as the romantic subplot, however. As Reed and the other heroes blast off in pursuit of Galactus and swerve away from the Surfer’s attacks, the action is suffused with soft-edged starbursts, wispish flame, and waving explosions that recall the older comic books on which the film is based. Sue gets to her destination and is shockingly in labor, which is the film’s climax if you don’t count the planet-devouring finale. Surreal as it is to picture babies being born and worlds being swallowed in space, the presentation is washed out and, again, more pretty than perilous.

That’s the strange thing about this movie, which often feels sincere enough that it ends up sounding silly. There are moments where you care about the characters—about this one particular version of these superheroes—but the pastel palette swallows the volume on the drama. The stakes never feel high, even as the planet itself is at stake. It’s not cosmic adventure, it’s Saturday morning cartoon fun.

In all, Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a well-shot, well-acted, light-hearted fun of a superhero movie. But with so many of Marvel’s best films driven by urgency and suspense, this one just doesn’t land with that kind of intensity. It’s more a slice-of-family-superhero-life than a Hollywood blockbuster, and that might be just what you’re in the mood for. If not, well, it’s a cute wrapper for a mostly-junk surprise.