By far the cleverest thing about Marvel’s newest Fantastic Four film is the retro-futurist sensibility found both in its look and overall mood. The flying-saucer building motifs, the curved edges, the robot assistants and jet cars that populate the colorful Fantastic Four: First Steps aren’t just neat little design elements; they also reflect the easygoing air of utopian consensus that’s been built into the plot. In this world, when a scientist tells the planet’s citizens to immediately start conserving energy, they do so. In this world, humanity unites instantly against existential threats. In this world, the age of space exploration never ended. The setting is “Earth-828,” but it really looks more like a nostalgic vision of the ’60s without any of the inconveniences of the real ’60s (and certainly none of those of our current era). Both the right and the left should love it; some in the audience will probably mistake it for the real thing.
By the time we meet them, the Fantastic Four are already a beloved center of power in this world; a family of astronauts whose DNA was altered four years ago by a cosmic storm that turned them into superheroes, they are now basically benevolent dictator-protectors of a planet that seems incapable of division and strife. Kids, construction workers, cops, firefighters, ice-cream vendors all salute them. Gone are the politicians and opportunistic businessmen who love to grandstand against the X-Men or Superman. Diplomats hang on their every word. And when the skies open up and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) glides into Times Square to announce that Earth has been marked for consumption by the planet-eating pre–Planck epoch pseudo-god Galactus (Ralph Ineson), the world looks to our superhumans to go up into space and investigate further.
That aforementioned consensus does get scuffed a bit when Galactus offers to not eat Earth in exchange for the soon-to-be-born son of Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby). The parents understandably say no, and when they return to Earth and inform the citizenry that they did so — well, the Earthlings, they are upset. Don’t get too excited, however, by a blockbuster tackling the age-old ethical dilemma of the trolley problem; it’s mostly just lip service, and the situation resolves itself with rather convenient haste, as soon as the kind, caring Mr. Fantastic assures humanity that the Fantastic Four will protect them. These superhero movies, even the good ones, have a frustrating tendency to pull back just as they’re getting interesting. First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.
Still, the film demonstrates an admirable patience with its characters, and it gives solid actors like Pascal and Kirby moments of soft-spoken intimacy that can feel fresh in this type of movie. With his queasy calm and those pleading eyes, Pascal makes a compellingly anxious scientist, gaming out every possible catastrophe that can befall his new child and doing everything he can to safeguard against that. Richards’s concern extends to humanity at large as well; he sets up an elaborate system to monitor every criminal organization in New York City. (“You babyproofed the world?” was a line that got a good laugh out of me.)
The performers seem less sure-footed when it comes to the parts where they must wave their arms and pretend to do superhero things; their faces never seem to match the physical ordeals they’re going through. (Meanwhile, the one actor who seems genuinely well-suited for the operatic bravado of a superhero flick, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, plays the Thing — which means that we’re getting mostly just his voice beneath a mountain of CGI and motion capture. The physical presence of such an energetic performer could have added a lot to this movie.)
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Thankfully, First Steps’s action scenes are well-staged on a technical level, which actually represents a departure from the bland junkiness of recent Marvel fare. The picture gives us a weird hybrid: Director Matt Shakman clearly wants to blend the cartoonish implausibility of superhero movies with what appears to be an earnest desire to indulge in space-voyage theatrics. The results are occasionally adorable: This is a film in which our heroes have to rattle around in a spaceship, Interstellar style, to travel through a wormhole, while other characters can traverse the far reaches of the universe with a surfboard.
But again, this also goes only so far. Galactus looks impressively … galactic, with his giant horns and his booming voice and an enormous ship that appears to screw its way through planets (all presented with well-rendered effects that look amazingly huge on an IMAX screen), so that we can’t help but wonder how the good guys will ever defeat this thing. Which makes what ensues feel a bit dispiriting and anticlimactic, neither clever nor grand enough to match the scale of the threat that’s been established, maybe because the overall superhero project requires that nothing ever be truly destroyed or concluded, that the movies ultimately just exist to pass the batons to each other.
The truth is that we’re living in Marvel’s world, even now. The studio has spent so much money and time over the past decade-plus reshaping the movie industry that the wobbling pillars of its enterprise can sometimes feel like an existential threat to the entire medium. I recently had to rewatch some of this February’s Captain America: Brave New World and realized, in the cold hard light of day, what a woefully inept, inert film it was. I disliked it when it came out, but is it possible I was too kind? In truth, even the cynical critic is a little terrified of what will happen if and when the superhero industry finally collapses.
In that context, Fantastic Four: First Steps feels like a brief reprieve. It’s wildly uneven, but it’s also light and unencumbered by backstory and unnecessary lore; it doesn’t require homework, either before or after. Setting it in a half-imagined past avoids all the baggage Marvel movies come with nowadays, here at the ass end of Phase Five or whatever. It likely won’t last. The Fantastic Four, we are assured, will return in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, and there will inevitably be some timeline-shifting that occurs then. But for now, we can bask in this movie’s elegant, cathode-ray chic and not have to think too hard about anything else, confident in the colorful delusion that studio executives, much like our benevolent superheroes, have our best interests at heart.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
