Whimsy Over Weight: The Lighter Side of Marvel

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a gussied-up, can’t-help-but-watch-it romp. It’s a beautifully rendered trip back to the ’60s. Marvel is filled with top-shelf actors (including Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and some solid production value. But it also never picks up much steam. No matter how likable or hip it is, First Steps never amps up to make you worry or care in an emergency.

Marvel producer Kevin Feige is right to call the film “a no-homework-required” Marvel experience. Marvel’s cinematic universe is too dense with all its movies and shows, real-time events, cameos, and multiverses. The studio had to pause the continuity of its major films for a while because the cross-pollination got too complicated. So it’s a relief to encounter a Marvel story that can be entered without knowledge or care about the entire franchise. The Fantastic Four: First Steps reboots these characters without much need to know the continuity of previous attempts. The Marvel Cinematic Universe practically had no hand in this film at all. It’s also okay with that, and at times, that’s too much.

Four years ago, they got on a space rocket. After an encounter with cosmic radiation, all four experienced physical mutations that changed their DNA. Reed (Pedro Pascal) can stretch his limbs like an elastic band. Sue (Vanessa Kirby) can render herself invisible and make force fields by projecting her hands. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) is the Human Torch and can set himself on fire and fly. And Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has changed into a larger, rock-skinned form with prodigious strength. He’s now The Thing. Forever.

Their current home base is a retro-futuristic high-rise where they all live. Flying cars cruise the city. Formulaic sci-fi equations are on chalkboards everywhere. The walls are all exposed brick and wood paneling. A toddler-sized robot assistant named H.E.R.B.I.E. can be summoned from a terminal in their living room to help fold laundry or fetch groceries. First Steps is more than content to be retro-futuristic in the square-screen-television-with-no-smartphones sense of the word. Its production design and visual aesthetic are about the glow-in-the-dark optimism of the era in which it was set. Where it succeeds is in making the world feel like The Jetsons and Lost in Space had a baby with a Marvel comic.

The drawback is that nothing much happens. The theme of the movie is family. The film is about these four people and their close bonds with each other. Sue is pregnant, and the first thing she tells Reed in the movie is that she’s ready for motherhood. He, in turn, is equal parts anxious and adorable, going to H.E.R.B.I.E. for advice about raising a child. The little robot dutifully starts baby-proofing not only their home but the floor-to-ceiling glass and metal of their shared science lab. Johnny and Ben provide standard-issue little-brother ribbing to their well-meaning but older sibling counterparts. The thing is, we get it. They all know and accept that they’re going to be parents or uncles soon, and they are ready. They also don’t let up for a minute. No crisis comes for a while.

Enter Galactus. The four see an intergalactic rumbling on a scanner and must track a big and angry cosmic cloud of energy through space to try to stop it. Galactus (voiced by Greg Capullo) is a glowing, armored mass with red and white lightning-patterned fur. He has orb-like eyes that emit bolts of light and has the body of an extraterrestrial wrestler or warrior. Before he makes his entrance, Galactus sends a hero to tell the FF the bad news. A silver-skinned woman (Julia Garner in motion capture) appears in their living room on a wave of electricity. The Silver Surfer is Galactus’ herald and his emissary in a fight. Surfer is sleek and formidable, but she also gets a lot of attention—and notice—from Johnny, who finds her a little too irresistible.

Action-wise, Galactus and The Silver Surfer’s threats to Earth are no worse than mid-level. First Steps does a nice job of making the heroes’ rocketing after Galactus in a space chase or dodging attacks from The Silver Surfer in a training center visually cool. The film drops overmatched heroes into various sci-fi time-honored jams. There are swooping arcs of light. Jet flames trail behind the baddies, and earthbound cars have all kinds of exploding decorations. But this remains very much in line with the retro style. It’s almost too cool to be very exciting.

The climax isn’t very stressful or coherent either. Sue goes into labor. Yes, into actual labor while rocketing across the galaxy. Sue and the others hunker down in the engine room and try to steer the ship home, but she’s also squeezing the Great Egg of Doom out of her midsection. It’s disorienting. Sue bouncing around her high-rise apartment in abdominal distress is no less strange than watching Reed project his hands in animated X-ray flashes. Yet here we are.

The film doesn’t provide easy or clear answers, but then again, it doesn’t have to. The tone is a soupçon of honest, coming-of-age feeling. It’s as if there’s a weightier story underneath the cosmic tripe, but at times you can’t be sure. The same retro-futuristic pastel palette that washes over the film subsumes it. It’s too easy to wonder if you should care about, say, the end of the Earth when Reed’s fetching crosshairs are in another character’s birth canal. It’s an indie adventure picture, not a superhero blockbuster.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is well-acted and fun. But at times, the pleasures are skin deep. There’s sincerity here, too, but we’ve seen better and more urgent at Marvel.