Marvel’s Space-Age Reboot Channels Jetsons, Not Avengers

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a retro-styled, breezy, mostly breezy reboot of the company’s first family. Filled with decent performances—Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are both highlights—and a supercharged sense of style, First Steps doesn’t so much aim for superhero thrills as let the tension dissipate in a puff of colorful smoke. It’s an attractive set of choices, and it works better than it has any right to. But for a film named First Steps, it never quite earns that sense of momentum that comes with the epic Fantastic Four saga.

Producer Kevin Feige wasn’t kidding when he said this was “a no-homework-required Marvel movie.” After a cinematic universe filled with increasingly obtuse language about multiverses and crossovers, it’s nice to watch a Marvel movie that doesn’t expect you to recognize a cameo or a spin-off. First Steps even has the courage of its continuity-free convictions, allowing the characters to be reintroduced without the decades of tangled reboot history that previous adaptations fell prey to. First Steps has no interest in that stuff. And it’s mostly fine with being so shallow—and sometimes, a little too fine.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens with a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss, who gamely provides a little exposition as to how his family became the Fantastic Four. (Spoiler alert: it involved a space mission four years ago that led to them getting irradiated, mutating their DNA, and giving Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, the ability to stretch his body like taffy.) Sue (Vanessa Kirby) can turn invisible and project force fields around her. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) becomes the Human Torch, able to light himself on fire and fly. Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) turns into The Thing, a permanently deformed giant with rocky skin and the strength of a Greek hero. They all live together in a house that looks like a mid-century modern take on a NASA space compound, with flying cars, chalkboard equations on the wall, and a pint-sized robot called H.E.R.B.I.E. who helps out with the chores. If you’ve seen a 1960s TV show set in the future, or maybe picked up a Marvel comic before 2010, you’ve seen the world of Fantastic Four: First Steps.

For all its winning visual design, the movie never generates a sense of urgency. The overriding theme is family, and a certain kind of old-fashioned family closeness, as the foursome operates as a unit both at home and on their space adventures. Sue, whom we learn right at the start of the film, is pregnant. Reed is appropriately freaked out, and the scene where he has H.E.R.B.I.E. both baby-proof his house and the secret science lab is both touching and funny. Johnny and Ben function as a sort of younger sibling bickering act, providing most of the comic relief. There’s a sense that they, too, are keenly aware that they are about to be family men in the form of uncles.

That peace doesn’t last long. Galactus, a large, hulking, armored figure with glowing red eyes, is on his way to Earth and on his way to eating it, along with the planets he’s visited before. Galactus, being a huge thing with long devouring tendrils, is played in motion capture by Barry Keoghan, who can be glimpsed through one shot behind the digital wrapper. Before he arrives, Galactus sends the Silver Surfer ahead as a herald. The Surfer, played by Julia Garner in mocap, skates into the action with a sleek menace, but she quickly becomes an object of lust (if not love) for Johnny.

Oddly, though, there’s never much sense of real peril. As Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben track Galactus down in space, they get ambushed by the Silver Surfer and her weapons of mass illumination. The visuals are appropriate to the retro-futurist setting: blasts of energy, bright flame trails, and cartoonishly choreographed fight moves. Everything is as pastel-colored as the comic book it’s based on. Sue going into labor during a climactic battle is less a harrowing moment than a surreal one, in which her screaming while giving birth is somehow not any more alarming than the fact that the Earth is about to be eaten. It’s an oddly dissonant image, one half birth, one half apocalyptic end of days, but both somehow muted by the soft-focus colors.

It’s a pretty good metaphor for the film’s tone as a whole. There’s an earnestness to it, but it’s all overpowered by the mellow sweetness of it all. The stakes rarely feel like they’re anywhere close to being real. Fantastic Four: First Steps is more kids’ adventure book than a high-stakes superhero blockbuster.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps ends up being a pleasant, well-acted, ultimately disposable film that’s willing to lower the stakes in favor of cheeky good times. It’s breezy, family-friendly, and light on its feet. You don’t need to know or care about the Marvel Cinematic Universe to follow it or enjoy it, but you probably also won’t remember it when you’re done watching it.