- calendar_today August 17, 2025
From Cosmic Storms to Parenthood: A Family-Centered Marvel Tale
Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a shiny, nostalgic reimagining of the publisher’s first superhero team. It’s an easy movie to sit back and enjoy, with plenty of colorful performances from a talented cast—particularly Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach—and a knowing embrace of its cartoonish ’60s nostalgia. But even as it never lets up its almost irrepressible style, First Steps rarely builds up a head of steam.
Marvel producer Kevin Feige was not exaggerating when he called First Steps “a no-homework-required” Marvel movie. With an ever-expanding line of sequels, prequels, multiversal side stories, cameos, spinoffs, and esoteric Easter eggs, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become complicated. As much as it can be fun and rewarding to keep up, sometimes you just want to watch a Marvel movie you can plug into. Enter First Steps, a single-hero-team origin story that has no business understanding the past travails of the Fantastic Four in previous live-action incarnations. It’s happily simple—and, more often than not, a little too simple.
The story takes a meta approach, opening with an appearance by the four heroes on a chat show hosted by Mark Gatiss. In a breezy monologue, Gatiss summarizes how Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm became the Fantastic Four. In the brief montage Gatiss shows, the Fantastic Four are shown on a mission to deep space to research cosmic energy when their rocket is hit by the mysterious energy, which leaks into their craft. The quartet’s DNA is changed: Reed, played with a thoughtful dose of dry humor by Pedro Pascal, develops the power to stretch his limbs and body like a rubber band. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue can turn invisible and blast out concussive force fields. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny can ignite himself and fly, while Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben is forever transformed into The Thing, a hulking giant covered in volcanic rock and muscle.
Home, for the quartet, is a big, open house that looks like it was designed as a mid-century-modern space compound, filled with flying cars, chalkboard equations, and a cute toddler-sized robot butler named H.E.R.B.I.E. to help out around the house. First Steps is a total, gleeful ode to retro-futurism: square television sets, no phones, and remarkably optimistic in its use of gaudy colors and shapes. It feels like a cartoon come to life, or at least the love child of The Jetsons and Lost in Space, complete with a big ’80s soundtrack to back it all up.
The problem is, it’s a little like Lost in Space: gorgeous and lush to look at, but without much urgency to the plot. The most consistent through-line in First Steps is the idea of family, and the unusually tight-knit bond the four leads have. Sue, Kirby’s superhero wife to Reed, is pregnant by the first act, and she and Reed’s anxieties over the whole thing are palpable in their way. In one memorable sequence, Reed has H.E.R.B.I.E. find the baby gates in the house and then jet off to their science lab to start baby-proofing the place. Meanwhile, the less-responsible Johnny and Ben bicker over the new parental responsibilities like cartoonish big siblings, while both are excited at the prospect of being uncles.
But this domestic moment is quickly interrupted by cosmic business as usual. Galactus, an intergalactic behemoth encased in heavy armor and glowing red eyes, is on a collision course with Earth, and his mission is to eat the planet. Before he arrives, though, he sends a herald—a thin-skinned humanoid called the Silver Surfer in the comics, played in motion capture by Julia Garner—to deliver the news. The Silver Surfer, an androgynous teen with glowing skin and slicked-back hair, skids into the movie with promise, though the script all too quickly has Johnny mooning after her in front of everyone else.
As the Fantastic Four track Galactus to his space dimension and fend off increasingly annoying attempts from the Silver Surfer, the visuals never completely break from the initial retro style. Every explosion and moment of action is communicated through bursts of light, flame trails, and artful dollops of vivid color. The build-up to the film’s climax—a metaphorical team-up sequence where Sue is forced to give birth on the rocket during the fight—never quite seems to gain traction as a sequence of danger. One moment, a baby is being born; the next, the Earth is dying in the literal distance. It’s as jarring as it sounds: birth and mass planetary destruction coexisting in the middle of a paletized version of outer space.
The disconnect between the film’s earnestness and silliness can be read as its tone, for better and for worse. There’s some raw emotion to be found, though it’s often swamped by a sense of soft-focus pastel colors. The film often takes on a children’s adventure story quality: almost no stakes at all, even when Earth’s future is literally in doubt. That’s not a recipe for an action movie or even a thriller. First Steps may come off as one of Marvel’s most cheerful live-action films to date, but it’s often almost too light in its touches to be effective.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is pleasant and well-acted, if a little too breezy to carry all the plot points and emotional beats it aims for. It’s as earnest as a children’s cartoon, with a higher production value and big-name talent to back it up. But it’s also quite, well, empty when all is said and done. It’s just not a very exciting Marvel movie.
