Crew
Director – Matt Shakman, Screenplay – John Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson & Ian Springer, Story –Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, Ian Springer & Kat Wood, Based on the Marvel Comic-Book Created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee, Producer – Kevin Feige, Photography – Jess Hall, Music – Michael Giacchino, Visual Effects Supervisor – Scott Stokdyk, Visual Effects/Animation – Barnstorm VFX, Capital T, Digital Domain (Supervisor – Jan Philip Cramer, Animation Supervisor – Frankie Stellato), Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Daniele Bigi, Animation Supervisor – Kiel Figgins), Rise | Visual Effects Studios (Supervisor – Sebastian Lauer), Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor – Theo Bialek, Animation Supervisor – Julius Kwan) & Weta FX Ltd (Supervisor – Phillip Leonhardt, Animation Supervisor – Paul Story), Visual Effects – Base FX (Supervisors – Chris Morley, Jared Sandrew & Xu Li), Cantina Creative, Framestore (Supervisor – Robert Allman, Animation Supervisor – Max Solomon), Lola VFX & SDFX Studios, Animation – Titmouse, Special Effects Supervisor – Alistair Williams, Prosthetics Designer – Barrie Gower, Production Design – Kasra Farahani. Production Company – Marvel Studios.
Cast
Pedro Pascal (Reed Richard/Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch), Julia Garner (The Silver Surfer/Shalla-Bal), Ralph Ineson (Galactus), Natasha Lyonne (Rachel Rozman), Paul Walter Hauser (Harvey Elder/Mole Man), Matthew Wood (Voice of H.E.R.B.I.E.), Sarah Niles (Lynne Nichols), Mark Gatiss (Ted Gilbert)
Plot
On Earth 828, scientist Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, pilot Ben Grimm and Sue’s brother Johnny have returned from a space expedition exposed to radiation that has caused them to develop superpowers. They act as a team, The Fantastic Four, fighting various menaces. Sue now announces that she is pregnant. At the same time, the Earth is the visited by an alien all in silver metal who rides a surfboard, who acts as a herald to announces Galactus who is coming to devour the Earth. Reed is able to trace the path of The Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four set forth on a space expedition to confront Galactus. Galactus grants an audience and announces the price of sparing Earth – it wants Sue’s child. They refuse, considering the price too high. Back on Earth, they receive public castigation for not paying that price, while placing all effort into finding another means to prevent Galactus’s imminent destruction of the Earth.
Marvel’s The Fantastic Four, created by Stan Lee and the great Jack Kirby, appeared in 1961. Lee had been inspired to create his own comic-book team after the success had by DC’s team-up Justice League of America. The Fantastic Four have been at the forefront of Marvel ever since where they earned the nickname ‘Marvel’s First Family.’ Their comic-book alone has served to introduce a number of other big name Marvel characters including Sub-Mariner, Ant Man, Black Panther and the Silver Surfer.
The Fantastic Four have had an uneven history on screen. There were several animated tv series The Fantastic Four (1967) from Hanna-Barbera and The Fantastic Four (1978) from DePatrie-Freling and the more successful The Fantastic Four (1994-6). In live-action, there was the abortive Roger Corman produced The Fantastic Four (1994), which has an interesting story in that it was produced to maintain copyright but never intended to be released. There is a documentary charting what happened with Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four (2015).
The era of Marvel on the big screen brought us 20th Century Fox’s live-action film Fantastic Four (2005) and its sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007). I thought the first of these to be reasonable, but they don’t have a terribly good reputation among the swathe of Marvel films. In trying to compete against the MCU, 20th Century Fox rebooted the characters in Fantastic Four (2015), although this was widely regarded as a disaster due to studio interference.
With the purchase of 20th Century Fox by Disney in 2019, this brought the copyright to the Fantastic Four back under the same roof as The MCU. The Fantastic 4: First Steps is the full introduction of The Fantastic Four to the MCU. Their appearance has been teased earlier in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) where we saw John Krasinski as an alternate timeline version of Reed Richards.
The Fantastic 4: First Steps comes from Matt Shakman who started out as an actor but has been working as a director in episodic tv since the early 2000s, having been most associated with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-12). He had made one film previously with Cut Bank (2014). He was given the assignment here after his work on the MCU tv series Wandavision (2021).
As I have been saying for some time now, I have the feeling that peak MCU is past us. Much of what has been produced in the 2020s, since about the time of Captain Marvel (2019), has felt made by autopilot, as though a product was being exploited and it matters not to Kevin Feige and associates whether it is any good or not. Not to mention with most of the Marvel big hitters having been covered before, The MCU is now left picking over the C-lister nobodies – The Fantastic Four are one of the few big names left.
As The Fantastic 4: First Steps opens, there is something wonderfully buzzy and exciting about Matt Shakman’s creation of an Alternate History world of the multiverse based around the original 1960s vision of the comic-book. The interior decorations are all 1960s Space Age modernist furniture, everyone in the street is impeccably outfitted in beehives and 1960s appropriate costuming and period vehicles. It’s a wonderful work of Retro Science-Fiction. One of the appealing touches is seeing the Fantastic Four go into action in the Fantasticar, a vehicle that all the other films discarded. Another delight is the incorporation of the robot H.E.R.B.I.E., which was introduced in the 1978 tv series and seems perfectly at home here, designed with a magnetic tape drive for a face. We also get the inclusion of some of the Four’s classic nemeses – the Mole Man and the Red Ghost and his army of apes.
This promises great things. On the other hand, as The Fantastic 4: First Steps went on, I failed to be enthused about many aspects. One of these is the casting. Pedro Pascal feels like a celebrity that has started to hit over-exposure that is well in excess of doing anything that is standout. He’s an okay Reed Richards but never quite seems to be the heroic or brilliant scientist that Reed is meant to be. Personally, I would have preferred either Ioan Gruffud or Miles Teller in the role. Same to be said for Vanessa Kirby, who seems a far too skinny and neurasthenic a Sue. Give me Chris Evans as Johnny any day – an albinoid Joseph Quinn seems to be little more than a handsome face who never comes to life. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is an okay Ben Grimm, although I far preferred Michael Chiklis, while for some reason the character’s rock-like features have been extended to give Ben a beard, which makes him look like he has a prehensile jaw.
For baffling reasons, the iconic character of The Silver Surfer, who has always been Norrin Radd, has been rewritten as a female Silver Surfer. Shalla Bal was introduced as Norrin Rad’s girlfriend in 1968 and has always been a supporting character apart from a couple of ‘What If? storylines where she becomes the Silver Surfer instead of Norrin. I am mystified as to why she ends up inheriting the role here, except perhaps for the 2020s push to give women more equal time on screen. Even so, the design of the character with narrow face and shoulder-length hair feels flat. Crucially though, the film gives The Silver Surfer hardly anything to do. In the original comics appearance, The Fantastic Four persuaded The Silver Surfer to betray Galactus for which he was exiled to Earth, becoming a regular part of Marvel canon. I fail to feel enthused about the prospect of this Silver Surfer getting a standalone film.
Apart from a great introduction and setting for The Fantastic Four, the plot itself is fairly generic. I couldn’t help but thinking that the scenes where the Fantastic Four board their spaceship and head off to confront Galactus, travelling inside his core to confront him and the nail-biting countdown as Galactus nears Earth and its imminent destruction was basically a rehash of the plot of Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979).
It also feels as though the scenes with the Fantastic Four fleeing from the Silver Surfer through a wormhole and trying to cause her to crash into the core of a neutron star are ones that would not be untoward in any of the modern incarnations of Star Wars. Matt Shakman is drawing too much on Star Wars action tropes when it comes to directing these scenes and they emerge as uninspired. The superheroic battle up against Galactus is okay for this sort of film but ultimately fairly average. But then I had just seen Superman (2025) and Thunderbolts* (2025) in the last few months prior to this and it feels like they do all of this city-destroying superheroic mass destruction with far more exciting regard.
Trailer here