It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that any superhero film aiming for groundedness, grittiness or — shudder — real-world relevance fails in the attempt. In fact, any and all efforts to bridge the distance between the superhero world and ours simply serves to shine a searchlight into the yawning chasm that stretches between us.
Groundedness has always been the wrong target, a mug's game, whether your main character spends the film leaping tall buildings in a single bound, web-slinging between them, or brooding in their shadows dressed like a cross between a nocturnal mammal and a goth trapeze artist.
No, it's a willing suspension of disbelief that's the true aim. Happily, The Fantastic Four: First Steps uses bright, retina-sizzling, retro-futurist visuals, waste-no-time plotting and fully committed performances to put disbelief into a deep, dreamless cryosleep for the whole of its under-two-hour(!) runtime. It leaves groundedness sulking glumly on the ground where it belongs to embrace the soaring appeal of superhero cinema with a commitment to exactly the kind of cosmic-level escapism we desperately need right now, as the real world has never proven more escape-worthy.
Retro-future, perfect
Welcome, friends, to July 2025, the Summer of the Sunny Superhero. A few weeks back, James Gunn's Superman took a power-washer to the DC Universe, dissolving the thick layers of brown grime and gray gunk that had accreted over the years, to reveal the bold primary colors its heroes were originally painted in.
Something similar is going on in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, as that subtitle implies. The world of this film isn't the familiar corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe where heroes trade punched-up quips about pop-culture properties while squabbling with each other and fighting their inner demons. (Earlier this year, Thunderbolts* closed the previous chapter of the MCU with a villain so wincingly emo he could manage a Hot Topic; dude literally sent heroes into shame-spirals by trapping them inside their guiltiest memories.)
The Earth of this film is an alternate one on which the Space Age never ended. It's a bright, sun-dazzled, '60s-styled, mid-century modern world of flying cars and household robots and pillbox hats and trilbys and car-fins. Much of the film takes place in and around a disquietingly tidy Manhattan, where skyscrapers swoop and soar around a Times Square that boasts giant cathode-ray televisions instead of billboards.
Which is to say: The vibe, and most especially the production design, is lifted straight out of 1960s Fantastic Four comics — an opening montage references several of the team's early adventures, bringing the cover of Fantastic Four #1 to glorious, cheesy life, while a breathless newscaster extolls the kind of victories that only happen in Silver Age comics ("They defeated the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes!").
No apologies
And that's what's truly new and bracingly refreshing, here — this enthusiastic doubling down on the comic book source material in all its whimsical, cheery, wide-eyed wonder. Previous Fantastic Four films (like most superhero cinema of the past decade) felt the need to hold the goofier, more childlike elements of the comics at a distance in pursuit of a grounded quality that would, in their minds, appeal to non-comics-reading adults.
But what if — both this movie and Superman ask — such performative nose-holding was always a dumb idea? What if a film could faithfully capture and reproduce the sense of joy and promise and the pure feats of imagination that the comics have always afforded readers, instead of apologizing for them and laboring to come up with comics-adjacent stories and characters that were more cool, more relevant, more believable?
What if — by way of example — a film were to introduce a cosmic villain like Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, who in the comics is a fearsome giant in a purple knee-length skirt and an utterly ridiculous tunic-fork helmet, and actually commit to the damn bit, already? Makers of 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer famously chickened out. Oh, they were only too happy to establish Galactus as a global threat to raise that film's stakes, but ended up depicting him as a kind of (checks notes) … irritable … space … (checks notes again) … cloud?
In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, O.G. Galactus is well and truly in the house, replete with tuning-fork headgear (he's dialed back the iconic purple for an outfit made of charcoal-colored machine parts, but the skirt still hits him at exactly the right place on the thigh). And he looks, well … fantastic, whether sitting on his massive throne upbraiding the staff (his herald on a flying surfboard, played by an electroplated Julia Garner), snarling at humanity in actor Ralph Ineson's rumbling basso-profundo ("Clever insects!"), or gallumphing slowly but determinedly through lower Manhattan, crushing empty city buses under his mammoth boots, like the most noble, haughty, nattily dressed kaiju you've ever seen. Imagine if Godzilla spoke the Queen's English and had a stick up his butt. That.
Four on the floor
In the face of such implacable evil, we have our titular super-team, whose origin story, thankfully, gets efficiently hand-waved away in that aforementioned opening montage. There's Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), a brilliant scientist with a rubberized body. There's his wife Sue (Vanessa Kirby), who can make herself invisible and cast force fields. There's Sue's hotheaded brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), who can turn into flame and fly. And there's Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a humanoid lump of super-strong orange rock. (The team's individual super-powered codenames — Mister Fantastic, The Invisible Girl, The Human Torch and The Thing — never occur in the film's dialogue, but are featured prominently in the glowing in-film press coverage of the heroes, which seems fitting.)
The film chooses to render our doughty heroes' super-costumes as cerulean-blue rollneck sweaters, which is a puzzling choice both aesthetically and practically: knitwear seems literally ill-fitted to derring-do. Defending the Earth is a workout; who among us could save the world when they're both itchy and sweaty? Who would want to?
This is still a Hollywood movie, so dogged attempts are dutifully made to give all four main characters an emotional arc, with mixed results. Johnny gets to prove that he's more than just a blond himbo by bringing some linguistic skills to bear on the dilemma facing the world. Gruff Ben gets to display his softer side by haltingly flirting with a Hebrew-school teacher (a blink-and-you'll-miss-her Natasha Lyonne). Sue becomes a mother over the course of the film, and just when that threatens to define her character in a disappointingly regressive way, she gets to make an all-important argument about What Family Means(™) that, while perfectly effective within the reality of the film, would never in a million years convince absolutely anyone at all on this, our darker, fallen, less-evolved world. (See above, in re: Chasm, yawing and: Groundedness, irrelevancy of).
But this is Pedro Pascal's movie, as he manages to plumb layers within the character of our square-jawed, heroic team leader Reed Richards that previous actors haven't. His Reed is at once a hero determined to protect humanity, and a nerd whose brain churns ceaselessly through worst-case scenarios to help him do it. He's an optimistic catastrophist, and it's that complicated inner struggle that defines the film.
Well, that, plus the glorious visuals, which represent the key ingredient, the z-axis, to this film's appeal. They make this a movie to be freeze-framed and pored over. They so effectively construct a world outside and wholly distinct from our own that they single-handedly guarantee the film an extended shelf life.
Despite the fact that The Fantastic Four: First Steps shares so much aesthetic DNA with Superman, Gunn's film takes place in a recognizably contemporary timeframe. In 10 or 20 years, its look and feel (hairstyles, fashion, technology) will distance audiences from its events, its immediacy. It will become a milestone, a relic of its time.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps does an end-run around that process with a production design that ensconces it firmly outside of time. It's already a distant world — intentionally so — and it will remain exactly that forever. Decades from now, it will still invite us to escape into it, to delight in its larger-than-life characters, its intergalactic battles and its heart-stirring moments of heroism — and, yes, in its benign, winning, blessed goofiness.
Copyright 2025 NPR
