The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

PG-13.  When I vent about how every live action summer blockbusters is automatically PG-13, I'm talking about The Fantastic Four: First Steps.  I mean, Superman totally needed to be PG-13.  I get it.  But we took our entire family, ages 2 to 13, and outside of a stray curse word, the movie is incredibly tame.  And that's including the fact that the bad guy wants to eat a planet and steal a baby.  Do you know how the Bond movies influened the Bourne movies and the new Bond movies are influenced by Bourne?  The same thing is true with this and The Incredibles.  This movie is as tame as The Incredibles.

DIRECTOR: Matt Shakman

Oh, I'm so glad the MPA section got a blue background for being approved for most audiences because I would be bummed it if was red.  By the way, if I can knock this blog out in a reasonable amount of time, a good deal of stress will be taken off of my plate.  I'm not going to turn a bunch of heads with this blog.   What you'll probably get is what you get from a lot of my Marvel blogs:  I'm going to go way too deep into comic book lore, often really stressing how the core themes are more important than the dirty details.  But the big takeaway is --and I'm totally stealing from the Internet --genre nerds are eating well this summer.

There was something almost a little depressing about The Fantastic Four: First Steps being in the shadow of Superman.  I mean, I'm still raving to people about how good Superman was.  And I'm going to give points to the Internet for the first time, but I think that people seemed to get that it wasn't a competition this time.  There's always that expectation that there can only be one amazing superhero movie of the summer.  Instead, it seemed like a lot of people were rooting for both of these movies to succeed (which kind of stresses my point that superhero fatigue is more about people thinking it's cool to hate on superhero movies).  But I was glad to see the fandoms out there agreeing that two good superhero movies, back-to-back, was actually a great thing.  And I'll tell you, while Superman is always going to hold a special place in my heart, First Steps is one of those special Marvel movies.  It's honestly top tier and I'm feeling a little awkward repeating that phrase so many times.

My buddy Bob said years ago, way before First Steps was in production, that Marvel should make Fantastic Four set in the '50s or '60s.  As cool as an idea as I thought that was, I rolled my eyes at him pretty hard.  I mean, we have a pretty well explored MCU at this point.  You'd think that someone would have mentioned the Baxter Building and that canon of silver aged heroes at this point.  But I'm actually going to high-five the notion of the Multiversal Saga right now because it allowed us to get the Fantastic Four movie that we've been begging for since we've first saw the OG one (the one that came out).  On top of that, it's borderline the same story as Rise of the Silver Surfer.  I mean, that's a pretty moot point.  It's one of the quintessential Fantastic Four stories and it is the most deserving of a feature length film.  It's just so funny that it took this long to get it really right.

Now, I'm going to be dogging on the 2000s Fantastic Four movies quite a bit. But I do feel that I have to explicitly state that I actually really dig those movies.  From almost any metric, those movies aren't great.  It didn't mean that I didn't like them.  What I will go to bat for is that those movies had heart and an understanding of the characters, which is enough to keep me hooked.  I'll also say that those movies walked so this movie could run.  I'm not talking about Fant4stic Four.  That movie was rough.  And it apparently came out long enough ago that I didn't write a blog on it.  (The evil part of me is thinking when I can schedule a rewatch, which is bound to go down as a hate watch and I don't care for that instinct.) But if it wasn't for the 2000s Fantastic Four movies, I don't know if we would be allowed the same shorthand into the universe as we got with this movie.

Both Superman and Fantastic Four kind of get that.  The new Spider-Man movies also kind of get that.  The origin movie, as nice as it is, can never really reach the heights of having a world well-lived in.  I don't know how First Steps really pulled off giving us a whole new world parallel to the MCU that needed no explanation, but it was refreshing.  I like the idea that, within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, that the world feels really lived in.  And props to Shakman and his team, he takes some swings about how influential the Fantastic Four are in this world.   I mean, Sue Storm is borderline the most important person on the planet.  There were even some little notes of utopia going on, which probably could lead to some dark stuff if I'm being honest.  But all that meant that we were seeing the Fantastic Four at the top of their games.  How nice was that?  Instead of having that constant growing pain stuff that we got from the early pages of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four comics, we had a well-honed machine similar to the stuff we have today.  And because we've been through the trenches with other Fantastic Four movies, that well-honed machine felt well-earned.

(Note:  I did not finish in time.  My family came home and then I did a million things.  Here's my attempt to maintain the tone of what I was writing earlier.) 

But I need to go back to the '50s and '60s aesthetic that makes this movie special.  Retro-futurism is fun and absolutely matches the Fantastic Four.  I can't deny that it just works with these characters and differentiates the movie from the many MANY other Marvel movies that came out before this. But this isn't retro-futurism in isolation.  The thing that gave this movie so much soul was that it was vocally and explicitly a love letter to Jack Kirby.  I do miss those Stan Lee cameos.  Part of me feels like the complaints about the MCU started once Stan passed away.  But having a Jack Kirby and Stan Lee quasi-cameo?  That was exactly what the movie was about.  I can't say that I've always been in the Jack Kirby fandom.  He's great.  He's objectively one the most talented comic book creators of all time.  But his stuff got weird.  

But it's Kirby's run on Fantastic Four that brought us Galactus.  And I'm going to say that Galactus and this specific story illustrates the genius of Jack Kirby.  It's not like comic books have shied away from plots to destroy the world.  It's the fodder of pulp storytelling.  But Kirby took the idea of a world-destroyer and reminded us about the importance of finding hope in the hopeless.  There's a big purple guy with a goofy helmet and nothing is going to touch him.  You have the world's smartest man and his family all offering to stop this guy and they don't have answers.  So where do they turn?  They turn to their strengths and cooperation.  Now, the movie actually has a better answer for how to defeat Galactus over the comics' kinda / sorta stupid answer of an Ultimate Nullifier.  But what the movie gets right is that it is how you have to sort of believe that you can do that.

Now, the reason that this movie works, besides getting every beat right, is that it allows characters to be the best versions of themselves.  I'm going to give Sue her due.  Sue is the powerhouse of this movie and she absolutely needs a round of applause for how she was portrayed by Vanessa Kirby.  I'm a little nervous to do the following, because I don't want to make this movie about the patriarch of the family from the male perspective.  But I do want to give so much credit to Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.  I was one of those people who completely wanted John Krasinski and Emily Blunt to be Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman.  When Multiverse of Madness showed me that Reed Richards, I begged for more.  But Pascal gave this character nuance.  He's still the obsessed guy, but he's trying to play it cool at times.  He's a loving father and he is often at odds with his worse nature.  Immediately, I saw what he was shooting for in this movie.

And then we have Ben and Johnny.  I love these guys.  I have always loved these guys.  The reason that the Fantastic Four are fun are because of these two knuckleheads.  Do I wish that Ebon Moss-Bachrach had a little bit more to do?  Yeah.  But that's only because of comparison.  The stuff he had in the movie is absolute gold.  Reminding audiences that The Thing is Jewish and a neighborhood hero on Yancy Street?  Perfect.  That stuff with Natasha Lyonne (whom I aware is not Alicia Masters and am weirdly cool with)?  Perfect.  He's an amazing uncle.  The thing that surprised me, though, was Johnny Storm.

It's hard to play Johnny beyond the one note.  I'm not throwing shade at Chris Evans.  That dude is charismatic as can be and I loved his Johnny Storm.  But Joseph Quinn's Johnny Storm?  Yeah, he's a bit intellectually buffed up.  But I also love the idea that we don't have to divorce charming from intellect.  This dude was a space pilot.  He lives in the Baxter Building.  The Fantastic Four has always been so STEM heavy, the notion that someone could be brilliant in the humanities and that helps the world is also pretty lovely.  Sure, it's a bit of a stretch to think that he can descipher and speak an alien language given time.  But also, it's the Fantastic Four.  Let Johnny do something incredible.  (Also note:  One of my few complaints about the movie is that I have no idea how much time is passing.  The same movie is in theaters the entire time.  But Ben also grows a bananas beard?)

My wife didn't care for Silver Surfer, even if we're huge Ozark fans.  Okay.  I disagree, but I also really like the other Silver Surfer played by Doug Jones.  That's okay.  Silver Surfer was a tank in this movie and I dug it.  Also, and this seems completely surface level reading of the film, it was nice having that parallel of motherhood between Shalla-Bal and Sue Storm, especially when it came to the end of the film.  Because, as I tend to get distracted when writing, this is a story from Sue's perspective.  

How much of this movie was about motherhood and the value of life is the core of Sue's character.  Sure, if you want to dumb it down, the movie is a trolley problem.  But it also reminds us that life is sacred and that problems aren't black-and-white arguments.  Galactus asks for Franklin Richards in exchange for the planet.  The easy answer is, "Give the purple alien the baby."  But she would have been a monster had she done that.  Instead, they tried everything.  They were about to move the planet somewhere else and we had this mother remind people of the value of every human person so much so that they moved past their worst natures and banded together to fix the planet.  (Again, a good summer for human decency movies.)  So when she shoves Galactus into the wormhole, it's the mother lifting the car off of the baby.  It's absurd, but also so inherently human that it makes an amazing scene.

Also, was it so hard to get a comics accurate Galactus?  We have been dancing around this for far too long.

The movie was incredible.  Incredible.  It doesn't matter if I thought that Superman was a better movie.  This was a great time.  This is one of those Marvel movies that I'll watch again and again because it just gets it.  I honestly wish I owned it right now because now I feel like watching it again.