The Fantastic Four: First Steps review: 'a blast'
With its 1960s retro feel and deft set up, the new Fantastic Four film is an entertaining slice of sci-fi melodrama, writes Alistair Harkness
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12A) ★★★★
Every Marvel movie these days seems to inspire a referendum on all Marvel movies, so with The Fantastic Four: First Steps the studio has smartly gone back to the drawing board, leaning into Jack Kirby’s original iteration of the titular superhero family in a big way to eliminate the convolutions of the 36-film-deep Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In other words, it’s set in a completely different timeline from the previous films, one that resembles Earth – specifically 1960s New York – but doesn’t have the likes of Captain America running around forcing viewers to try to remember which bit of mythology lines up with which plot point (the timeline is actually announced as Earth 828, which comic book aficionados will know is a reference to Kirby’s birthday and the name he gave this parallel universe in the comics). If that already sounds confusing, though, just know that the film stands on its own two feet as it deftly sketches out the backstory for Marvel’s first superhero team and, in the process, ends up feeling like the first Fantastic Four film that actually understands the characters (there have been four previous attempts, including a never released Roger Corman cheapie).
Fuelled by the optimism of the 1960s moon shot, the film’s opening salvo, for instance, is a sparky bit of superhero myth-making that quickly explains the astronauts-hit-by-radiation origins of the Fantastic Four’s superpowers while a montage of news-clips – beautifully rendered in the kind of fuzzy 16mm film stock style familiar from countless NASA documentaries from the time – shows how quickly Dr Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and their friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) have embraced their respective superhero alter-egos as the elastic Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the fiery Human Torch and the rock-like Thing, to become protectors of the people.
Like DC’s recent Superman reboot, it doesn’t waste time explaining every aspect of their transformation either; instead it makes sly use of the the actual 1960s Fantastic Four cartoon show to provide a neat contrast between their idealised public image and their more complicated private lives, upping the personal stakes by having Reed and Sue realise they’re going to have a baby. This is the film’s plot kicker. Secretly worried their unborn child will have genetic anomalies they won’t be able to control, their parental anxieties are exacerbated by the arrival of classic Fantastic Four villain the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) and the imminent threat posed by the planet-gobbling villain Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) when he takes an undue interest in the super-baby growing in Sue’s womb.
What follows is an entertaining slice of sci-fi melodrama as the Fantastic Four find their public image tarnished when the interstellar birth of Reed and Sue’s child puts the earth in danger. It all gets pretty goofy – unintentionally so during the aforementioned zero-gravity birth scene – but Kirby and Pascal have the chops to ground their characters just enough to make their heightened dilemmas resonate, and Quinn and Moss-Bachrach (so great in The Bear) inject enough charisma to ensure that the Human Torch and the Thing are a blast. For the first time on film, the Fantastic Four have the right stuff.
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