Fantastic Four Reboot with Pedro Pascal – What Works, What Doesn’t

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an attractive, fun throwback to the studio’s first superhero team. The film is loaded with good performances (particularly from Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and its throwback aesthetic hits the retro button with gusto. But for all its lovable fan-service panache, it never quite amps up the suspense or stakes to make it feel special.

Marvel producer Kevin Feige was right to call the film “a no-homework-required” Marvel movie. In a cinematic universe that can be increasingly overdetermined by its complexity, it’s nice to see a Marvel film that is so refreshingly blissfully unaware of its place in the labyrinthine Infinity Multiverse. Does it help to know that the 2005 Fantastic Four movie exists or that the Space Stone from Thor 2 once orbited this planet? No, and, thankfully, it doesn’t matter. First Steps reintroduces Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm without all that continuity malarkey. The movie is simple and low-stakes, and sometimes, to its detriment, too simple.

In what turns out to be a post-credits teaser, the film opens with a Mark Gatiss-hosted talk show. Gatiss, playing a version of himself, acts as both the audience surrogate and also-narrator of the film. In the first minutes, he summarizes how our Fantastic Four became the Fantastic Four. Four years ago, an experimental space mission exposed Richards, Storm, Storm, and Grimm to alien radiation that changed their DNA. As played by Pedro Pascal, Reed Richards is thoughtful and bemused by the freak accident that gave him elastic body powers. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue can become invisible and create force fields with her hands. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny has been transformed into the Human Torch and can create and fly on his flame aura. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm is permanently mutated into The Thing: a mountain of muscle and granite under his rock-crusted hide.

They now live together in a hippie-happy commune-cum-mid-century-modern space compound. Ben and Sue have the family-style living arrangement of an atomic age rocket ship: floating cars, chalkboard equations, and a little robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. popping in and out to make breakfast and vacuum the rug. The world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps feels like pure retro-futurism: square televisions, no cell phones, and an optimism that’s so wholesome it’s like a cartoon. Imagine The Jetsons and Lost in Space tearing through the pages of a Marvel comic.

It’s an aesthetic that matches a plot that doesn’t have much of a sense of urgency. The movie is really about family, particularly the family unit of the four leads. Sue discovers she is pregnant not long after the movie begins, and Reed’s mix of anxiety and affection is played beautifully (and a little bit hammy). In one great bit, Reed tasks H.E.R.B.I.E. with baby-proofing not just their home but their science lab. Johnny and Ben, meanwhile, have all the comedic sibling squabbling of a younger brother to an older sister. Both guys are big softies at heart, clearly ready to step up and become uncles.

Of course, the first family moment can’t last. Something is coming for Earth, and it’s massive and angry. Galactus, an armored behemoth with lights for eyes, is en route to the planet for one meal: Earth. Before he arrives, however, he’ll send a harbinger to prepare the way. The herald, a woman with silver skin played in motion capture by Julia Garner, glides into Earth’s atmosphere, glower on full display. The Silver Surfer enters with more cool than the Arctic Circle, but she doesn’t stick around long. Johnny gets way too infatuated with her (and also, easily distracted), so the Surfer can’t maintain her villain-of-the-week stance for too long.

Galactus and the Surfer do signal some decent action, but it’s all relatively tame. In their chase through the galaxy and away from the Surfer’s blade, all the attacks look appropriately retro-chic. Light beams from laser guns, Johnny and Ben fly on flame-tipped waves, and some of the bigger blasts are so cartoonish, they’d be at home in The Tick. When Sue goes into labor at the climax of the movie, it’s more surreal than nail-biting. There’s something almost absurd in the intersection of the stakes of a baby coming out one end and an entire planet being vaporized on the other. Imagine, if you will, a retro baby shower with the color palette of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It’s an extension of the film’s sincerity-couched-in-silliness approach. There’s a real beating heart at the center of the film, but it often gets swallowed up by the soft-focus pastels of the visual effects. The Fantastic Four: First Steps rarely feels high stakes, even as the end of the world approaches. It’s much more of a children’s adventure story than an edge-of-your-seat superhero saga.

In the end, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is nice, it’s solid, and it’s well-acted, but a little bit light. It has the easy accessibility of most Marvel movies, but the retro aesthetic and feel mean it likely won’t have much forward momentum. It’s a good reminder, in other words, that Marvel can put out superhero movies without creating an IP war. For those who enjoy the movie’s lighter side, First Steps is likely just right. For those who were hoping for a little more re-entry heat, it’s still going to land a little softly.