Perhaps it is just the ravages of living in this present timeline, but this summer it seems as though all of us are just ready for some good-hearted, brightly-lit escapism (see: Superman). The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the latest installment in the sprawling 20-year epic that is Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, couldn’t be timelier. There have been a *few* previous attempts to bring Marvel’s “first family” to the big screen with varyingly debatable levels of quality. It puts a big ol’ nerdy smile on my face to declare Hollywood finally got it just right. Chef’s kiss. At first you don’t succeed, try again … try again … try again.
Director Matt Shakman, working from a kitchen’s sink script (seriously, there are like 83 writers on this thing … which normally is a huge red flag), delivers a tightly paced, deeply immersive experience. In order to offer a self-contained fresh start (don’t worry, you don’t need to have watch 412 previous films and tv episodes to know what’s going on), the film is set on a “parallel earth” (because that’s now a thing) where mid-century futurist chic rules the day. From an art/production design perspective, the film is sumptuous. Saarinen wept.
I think most of us take for granted the degree of difficulty to pull off a convincing world, with its own unique visual language, that feels both familiar and exotic at the same time (see: Star Wars, Black Panther, Lord of the Rings). This film deserves all the Oscars for this design feat. Eye candy galore. And the distinctive look is aided and abetted by composer Michael Giacchino’s evocative, percolating score – one of his best yet!
Blessedly, the creative spark doesn’t end there. As fanciful as the setting appears, the movie is grounded in its own humanity, but not lazily gritty and dark and heavy (sorry, not sorry, Zack Snyder). The stakes are real and impactful – our intrepid heroes do have to save humanity from a globe-eating giant named Galactus (because it is a summer blockbuster after all), but the saving isn’t just for saving’s sake. Shakman leans into the longstanding familial dynamic among team leader Reed Richards (an arch, brilliant, befuddled, debonair Pedro Pascal), his spouse Sue Storm (a luminous, stately Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny Storm (a wry, spritely, slightly haunted Joseph Quinn), and honorary uncle Ben Grimm (a warm, big-hearted, anguished Ebon Moss-Bachrach). We care about the fate of the world because we care about them. Their joys and fears are our joys and fears – this is as much a dramedy about the ties that bind as it is about people who stretch and flame on and turn invisible and clobber, while rocking some very natty Spandex couture.
(Say this about producer Kevin Feige and the Marvel machine: they know how to cast a film.)
Deftly, the film skips through any origin-retelling and jumps four years into our heroes’ nascent world-saving careers. The film employs an Ed Sullivan-style chat show as a narrative device to catch up anyone who somehow doesn’t already know that our quartet got bombarded by “cosmic rays” on a space voyage and thereby developed their strange and wondrous abilities. We get a greatest hits overview of all their victories, vanquishing no end of fever dream silver age villains (Red Ghost! The Wizard! Giganto! Mole Man!), and we are quickly apprised of how beloved The Fantastic Four have become, bringing world peace and utopia, with their good-natured wisdom and heroics. (As an aside, it’s also interesting in this present moment that both Fantastic Four and Superman depict worlds where noble heroes save us from our darker impulses and from our free-wheeling animosity for “the other.”)
Into this blissful global existence, a shiny metallic herald arrives on a boogie board. We’ve seen the Silver Surfer onscreen before, but Julia Garner brings a world-weary gravitas we haven’t yet observed in such a tragically drawn character (a plot point which I won’t spoil here). She ominously advises this Jetsons-esque planet’s inhabitants to “get their affairs in order” because the big, purple Cuisinart named Galactus (a frighteningly detached and unrelenting Ralph Ineson) is on his way to gobble them up.
As a galactic hail Mary, the Four pursue the Surfer back to Galactus’ home base to, well, attempt to talk him out of it. That … doesn’t go well, and he demands Sue’s unborn child in trade for potentially sparing Earth. Understandably, Reed and Sue are, like, “Nope!” and high tail it back home to divine a different hail Mary altogether. Beyond that, I’ll let you see for yourself how the plot resolves itself, but as “comic book-y” as it all sounds, the wrap up is believable, accessible, and affirming.
Scene stealer alert! Paul Walker Hauser has what amounts to a glorified cameo as another longstanding Marvel villain Mole Man (yes, you read that correctly), and he is utterly brilliant, lovable, infuriating, and iconic in his screen time. We can only hope that there is an alternate Hollwood in the space/time continuum where the filmmakers were brave and silly enough to dump Galactus and focus the entire film on Mole Man’s love/hate relationship with the Fantastic Four. Hauser’s scenes crackle with unpredictability and comic sparkle – and not in what has become that clichéd Marvel “bro humor” way, but the kind of elegant comedy that spins from altogether relatable jealousy and misdirected tension. “Johnny, don’t be mad. I didn’t dress you.” – a quip from Hauser that is far funnier onscreen than it reads here, both from the context of the scene and from Hauser’s delivery, dripping with pointed sarcasm.
If I have any quibble (and I really don’t), the film sands down the rougher extremes of Reed, Johnny, and Ben. Kirby’s Sue is perfection – she nails the emotional high wire act of being an alpha-level matriarch who carries the weight of worlds both immense and confined on her shoulders. “I will not sacrifice my child for this world, and I will NOT sacrifice this world for my child” she observes in a powerful speech to, well, every resident of our Big Blue Marble.
Pascal is a fabulous presence, and one of his innate gifts is imbuing morally ambiguous characters with a compelling lovability. The script fights him a bit on this here, not giving him quite enough opportunity for us to worry that Reed’s pursuit of scientific truth (and quite frankly hero worship) might lead him to throw everyone over for victory. That said, it is quite chilling at the Four’s Sunday family dinner when he calmly intones that potentially sacrificing his only child is “Mathematical. Ethical. Available.”
Similarly, Ben and Johnny are missing some of the emotional extremes that make their characters more interesting in print: for Ben, a sense of outsider loss and insecurity from existing as a lumbering pile of orange rocks, and, for Johnny, the mammoth chip on his shoulder that he isn’t the brainiest member of the group, offsetting that with reckless daredevilry. Again, these are minor character nuances, the absence of which doesn’t detract at all from what Shakman delivers, and perhaps we will see more of this in future installments … of which I hope there are many!
The future foundation is bright again for the MCU.
