Ten years ago (almost to the day), I wrote a primer on the Fantastic Four, and it remains the geekiest article I’ve written on this blog (with the possible and debatable exception of my review for the 2017 Power Rangers film). Going back and reading it now, it’s depressing how little has changed and how accurate the rundown still is. Of course, it certainly helped that the 2015 reboot bombed as we all knew it would and left no trace behind.

The sad truth is that for the past thirty years, the Fantastic Four movies were made for one exclusive purpose: To keep the rights away from Marvel. Those films weren’t made to make money, they weren’t made to keep the fans happy, and they weren’t made to leave any kind of cultural impact. Hell, the original ’94 film was never even made to be released.

(Side note: I recently saw a bootleg of the ’94 attempt and found it to be underrated. With another screenplay draft and a reasonable budget, it could’ve been a solid superhero movie by genre standards of the time.)

But now that Marvel finally does have the rights back, the stakes couldn’t be more different. It bears repeating that with the sole exceptions of Namor and Captain America, everything we know and love about Marvel came after the Fantastic Four. Without the Fantastic Four, there would be no Marvel — hell, there wouldn’t even be a Stan Lee or a Jack Kirby.

This team is a foundational pillar of the company, and Marvel’s 21st-century multimedia campaign of global domination has always been undercut by simmering spite because Marvel didn’t have the film rights to their First Family. At least Spider-Man and the X-Men were making money and promoting the Marvel brand by way of good-to-decent films — with F4, it’s only been one humiliating flop after another with ten years’ downtime in between. Things got so bad that Marvel went and shot themselves in the foot by canceling their own F4 comics, purposely devaluing one of their most historic and influential brands.

For the past thirty years, the fans — and the Marvel execs, no doubt — have seethed in frustration with the insistence that Kevin Feige and his MCU crew could do a better job than the idiots at Fox and Constantin. Well, now Marvel is back in the driver’s seat and they have to actually prove it. And their chance came at a highly sensitive time.

Marvel Studios has been under a harsh microscope since their historic accomplishment with Avengers: Endgame, and it seems like the world is wondering what the MCU is still doing here. Does the megafranchise have any kind of viable direction? Can Feige and his team make a billion-dollar crowd-pleaser like the mainstream media still unrealistically expects them to make every time?

There’s a lot of pressure on this one to deliver, especially after the ho-hum reception for Captain America: Brave New World, the underwhelming box office returns for Thunderbolts* (not like that film was ever built to be a billion-dollar four-quadrant crowd-pleaser…), not to mention the past thirty years of humiliating third-party F4 adaptations.

Right off the bat, a title card for The Fantastic Four: First Steps helpfully informs us that we lay our scene on Earth-828. So the MCU iteration of F4 does indeed originate from an alternate timeline separate from the mainline Earth-19999. Very likely, that goes for the RDJ portrayal of Dr. Doom as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This movie makes a bold move by opening up four years after the Four got their powers. The origin story and first few years are dispensed by way of an extensive montage, complete with numerous classic F4 villains on the board. We even get a recreation of the cover for the first F4 comic.

The upshot is that we open with the Fantastic Four as a cohesive superhero team. They’ve already got their powers, Reed and Sue (respectively played by Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby) are already happily married, they’re already a highly beloved and respected superhero team (in fact, they appear to be the only superheroes in this timeline), and they’ve already made a global impact in terms of scientific achievements and heroic feats.

Simply put, it’s like the movie is a sequel to a film that was never made. I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, we’ve already seen three separate depictions of their origin story, and each one stunk. As such, I can understand the logic in skipping past the story we’ve already seen and getting to the story we all want on the screen. (I call it “The Patton Oswalt Principle“.)

On the other hand, while it certainly helps trim the screentime to skip right on past so much history, there are unavoidable drawbacks. A key example concerns Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser), monarch of the underground kingdom of Subterrania. We clearly see that Mole Man started out as an F4 supervillain, but he’s since become a kind of friendly rival. It feels like a payoff to a whole ton of setup we never got to see. Much as I appreciate skipping over the whole origin, it might’ve been fun to see more of F4 fighting Mole Man and brokering a peace agreement with Subterrania because this whole arc feels lifeless if all of that is told rather than shown.

But my favorite case in point is the FTL craft hanging out in orbit. Seriously, FTL travel exists in this universe. How does it work? What fuels it? Is there any kind of interstellar colonization or trade in this universe? Never explained! There’s just a great big FTL engine floating around free and clear for the Four to use and we’re not supposed to ask any questions about it.

Uh… no. No, I’ve got questions. Tons of them.

Another problem is that picking up after so much has already happened, it looks like our individual heroes have already moved past most of their iconic hangups. The most prominent case in point is Ben “Thing” Grimm, here played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. In the past depictions, Ben was constantly depressed because of his malformed appearance and his inability to peacefully coexist with other people. That was a central part of his arc with Alicia Masters, a blind woman who came to love him.

None of that is here. Ben doesn’t seem to have much of any problem walking down the streets of NYC, no more than any other celebrity. And his love interest this time is a perfectly ordinary and able-bodied woman, a tragically unremarkable waste of Natasha Lyonne’s comedic talent and unique screen presence. There’s nothing the least bit interesting about this potential romance, and Lyonne has zero chemistry acting opposite a CGI character.

That said, it’s worth noting that after so many years, we’ve finally got a Jewish actor playing arguably the most iconic Jewish character in the Marvel canon. There’s even a brief scene of Ben going to temple in the third act. That’s nice.

Even so, the filmmakers cut out such a huge part of Ben’s character without much of any clue what to replace it with, and Moss-Bachrach is stuck filling the gap with his own pure charisma. Johnny “Human Torch” Storm (here played by Joseph Quinn) has a similar problem. I get that the filmmakers wanted to make Johnny less of a brash womanizing jerk, and I respect that. Unfortunately, we’re still left with a Johnny Storm who’s an irreverent loudmouth with an incessant need for attention.

The womanizing is baked so deeply into the character that he keeps coming back around to that despite all efforts to the contrary. For instance, the filmmakers try to highlight how Johnny is in fact a top-notch astronaut and a brilliant scientific mind. All well and good. So he uses this top-notch intellect to translate so many alien transmissions and that’s done in service of… wait for it… a half-baked romance arc. With an alien character who keeps getting reduced to an object of Johnny’s sexual attention whenever she’s brought up.

That would be Shalla-Bal, this film’s iteration of the Silver Surfer, here played by Julia Garner. As one might expect, the Surfer is a tragic character press-ganged into serving as the herald for Galactus (Ralph Ineson). Luckily, this iteration of Galactus is a distinctly humanoid character visibly and tragically suffering from the curse of his own insatiable hunger for planets. But then the film throws a curveball: Franklin Richards.

(Side note: Sorry, but there’s no mention of the Ultimate Nullifier as a solution to Galactus. Break my heart.)

Those who know the comics will be amply familiar with Franklin Richards as (arguably) the most absurdly overpowered individual in the Marvel canon. His arrival on the big screen has long been a hotly debated/expected possibility, and the film literally opens with the news that Sue Storm is pregnant. So naturally, the baby becomes the center of attention throughout the entire running time, as babies typically do.

Galactus is convinced that Franklin holds cosmic powers — despite all available evidence to the contrary — and so Franklin becomes the MacGuffin that keeps the plot moving. On another level, Franklin ties the team together with the recurring theme of family. And for all my complaints about sidelining the personal trauma of the individual members, making this an ensemble film with a focus on the team as a whole was probably the right move.

Even then, Reed Richards and Sue Storm get a lot of room to grow and develop as individuals. Of course it makes sense that with a plot so heavily focused on a baby, the parents should get the lion’s share of screen time and development. That aside, Reed has always been an arrogant scientific genius, so insufferably confident in his own logic that he can’t see anything else. And now he’s up against a cosmic terror that science may not be able to explain or defeat. Reed is stuck trying to balance his godlike intellect with his existential terror, and Pascal makes it fascinating to watch.

As for Sue, she gets a showstopping monologue that firmly establishes her as the matriarch of the MCU. All superpowers aside, the film repeatedly shows that it’s intelligence and empathy — properly applied — that saves the day. Reed provides the intelligence and creativity, while Sue provides the empathy and solidarity. Together, they rally the rest of their family and the rest of the world, inspiring the courage and sacrifice and teamwork necessary to save the world. Sure, the execution is implausible, but it’s nonetheless heartwarming in a way that could only be done in superhero cinema.

I might even say that this film gets the job done far better than some other superhero films that tried something similar and pathetically failed. (Looking at you, WW84.)

That said, it’s not like the action was subpar. Quite the contrary, the opening monologue has some neat action set pieces, there’s a cool chase sequence at the halfway point that makes extensive and novel use of all the characters’ individual and collective talents, and the climax is deftly crafted. Even so, it’s worth pointing out that we see exactly how far Mr. Fantastic can stretch, and his full range is sadly underwhelming.

Overall, the presentation is beautiful. I love the retro-futurist aesthetic, with a palpable love for the Space Race era. Of course it certainly helps to have Michael Giacchino and his bombastic score. But probably the most important factor is H.E.R.B.I.E., the robot butler who perfectly embodies the whole “Jetsons” aesthetic philosophy in a helpful and endearing CGI character.

As for the post-credits material, all we really get is a fleeting glimpse of Dr. Doom. Even so, it’s worth staying all the way through the credits for the heartfelt tribute to Jack Kirby, plus the sweet acknowledgement to director Matt Shakman’s late mother. There’s also a sweet dedication to Marvel Studios producer Jamie Christopher, who passed away in 2023.

Overall, I don’t know that The Fantastic Four: First Steps did everything the filmmakers wanted, but the final result did everything they needed. There’s definitely a sense of trying to cram three or four hours of material into a two-hour runtime, and it’s clearly obvious that huge chunks got cut in the editing room. (Seriously, there are ADR lines pointing to the giant gaping hole where John Malkovich used to be.) A lot of characters — even some of the leads — get short shrift, and a lot of jokes go on for too long. In other words, so much material had been shot and the filmmakers were trying to keep as much as they could, pacing and tone be damned.

All of that said, we still got a movie that works as a fun and uplifting superhero romp. I can respect a movie that cautions against depending on heroes to save us from everything, while also depicting heroes as an inspirational catalyst to bring people together into something greater. Even better, while we get no shortage of CGI spectacle, it’s repeatedly demonstrated that what really makes F4 special are their heads and their hearts.

All-around, it’s a good, solid, enjoyable, heartfelt superhero movie. Sure, the world-building has some serious problems, but it’s not like the franchise will be in this world for much longer anyway. I’m happy to sign off on this one.