- calendar_today August 17, 2025
Welcome to the ’60s Again: Marvel’s New Old Fantastic Four
Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps has style, sweetness, and nostalgia galore. It’s a visually arresting retread of the publisher’s first superhero team, anchored by several strong performances (particularly Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach). But despite its winks to 1960s-era pop culture, the movie never really manages to dial up the tension or heart to make it stick.
Producer Kevin Feige called the film a “no-homework-required” entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he’s not wrong. In the crowded halls of the MCU, it’s nice to stumble across a Marvel film that doesn’t require a working knowledge of the X-Verse or count down to the next cameo or prequel. First Steps is a mostly standalone tale that reintroduces the adventures of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm without getting lost in the previous movies’ continuity. As far as this film is concerned, the story is simple—and, at times, a little too simple.
A brief prologue on a talk show (hosted by Mark Gatiss) establishes a lot of ground here. Four years ago, the team went on a space mission where they were irradiated and had their DNA altered. Reed (Pedro Pascal) gained the power to stretch his limbs and body like taffy. Sue (Vanessa Kirby) can turn invisible and project force fields from her hands. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) can now light up and fly. And Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is The Thing: a rocky hulk with superhuman strength.
The foursome now resides together in a compound that looks like it was plucked from a retrofuturistic mid-century design magazine. There are flying cars. A family chalkboard with equations on one side and a grocery list on the other. Giant robot appliances like the toddler-sized H.E.R.B.I.E. keep house. The world of First Steps is the MCU version of Mad Men: square TVs, no cell phones, a throwback ‘60s optimism rendered in textures that are soft as baby food. A quaint mashup of The Jetsons and Lost in Space crossed with Marvel comics.
The problem with that aesthetic is how it bleeds into the plotting, which feels thin. The film’s central conceit is, well, family. More specifically, the close-knit family dynamic among the four leads. Sue gets pregnant at the start of the film (it’s the kid-pregnancy-comic-book trope Marvel can never seem to shake). And Reed is less than thrilled to hear the news. In one of the movie’s best sequences, he has H.E.R.B.I.E. babyproof both their home and their science lab in comically efficient detail. Johnny and Ben chime in on cue, sibling-style, with wisecracks and comic relief while looking forward to their roles as family men.
Except that the family time is cut short, thanks to a familiar cosmic menace. Galactus, a hulking armored man in glowing goggles, is coming for Earth. He means to devour the planet, apparently for its life-giving energy. Before he gets there, he sends an emissary, a herald with silver skin, to give the dreaded news. Played in motion capture by Julia Garner, the Silver Surfer comes in on the titular surfboard with eerie menace (only to quickly become the object of every man’s lust and Johnny’s, in particular).
Galactus and the Surfer are on a collision course with Earth. So, naturally, the heroes must stop him. But the action is surprisingly tame. As the foursome chases Galactus around the galaxy while evading the Surfer, they trade wits and banter as the mayhem ensues. The effects here match the visual aesthetic, with blasts of light that are more flares of color than hard edges, a comic-book trail of flame in Johnny’s flight, and stylized, otherworldly explosions. Sue, of course, goes into labor with the baby in the middle of the adventure. If the visual style of the film is anything to go by, her water breaking during the climax felt less like a gasp-inducing emergency than a trippy hallucination. It’s an odd (but oddly endearing) contrast: Birth and planetary annihilation both taking place under an oddly whimsical space-age color palette.
It’s an encapsulation of the film’s tone: genuine, but undercut by a retro pastel filter. There are some earnest moments to First Steps, but they’re frequently subsumed by its lighter touch. The stakes are never, ever very high, even when we’re on the brink of losing the planet. It’s more kids’ adventure movie than an edge-of-your-seat superheroic action film.
In the end, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a nice-looking, well-acted journey that never really amps up to the MCU’s big dramatic swings. It’s family-friendly, nostalgic, and earnest—just not very thrilling. If you’re looking for something lighter than an end-of-the-world showdown, it might be your cup of tea. If you want a bit more fire with your Marvel superheroics, it might not cut it.
