The Fantastic Four: First Steps review – this Marvel reboot is an unspectacular drag
This retro-styled reboot of Marvel’s first family strands a talented cast in a 1960s world where nothing much of interest happens.
Fantastic 4: First Steps (PG)
114 minutes
In cinemas
Two stars
The superhero movie Fantastic Four: First Steps is the second reboot of this Marvel Comics franchise and it should be a case of three strikes and you’re out. The rival DC Comics reboot, Superman, in cinemas now, flies far higher and is much funnier.
Looking for the positives, a sequence that tells us how the Fantastic Four came to be is quite good.
Four American astronauts go into space and hit a cosmic storm that alters their DNA.
Their leader, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), can bend his body into any shape. His wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), can turn invisible and has other powers. Her brother, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), can become a human torch. Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), has skin made of orange rock.
As a boy, The Thing was my favourite of the four so I had hopes for him, especially as he’s played by Moss-Bachrach, best known as Cousin Richie in the ongoing television series The Bear. Unfortunately, The Thing is a combination of motion capture and CGI so the actor behind the rock doesn’t have much acting to do.
The same can be said of the rest of the stars in this movie directed by Matt Shakman, whose TV credits include Mad Men, Fargo, Game of Thrones and Succession, and written by a team of scriptwriters. They are good actors but they don’t have much to work with.
The setting is the 1960s and the scenes in outer space look more like the 60s TV show Lost in Space than Star Wars.
On Earth, there are similarities with the 60s animated TV series The Jetsons. Similarly, the villain, Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson), a giant planet-devouring humanoid, looks like something out of the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion movies of the 1950s.
I assume this is a deliberate decision to set the movie in the world of the comic books.
Fantastic Four #1 came out in 1961. But it’s an odd choice given the film is made for big-screen Imax cinemas. The action sequences are unspectacular.
The film opens with the news that Storm is pregnant. Everyone wonders whether the child will be born with superpowers. At the same time, Galactus, via his herald the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), announces that he intends to eat Earth.
This leads to the one point of tension in a lightweight movie. Galactus agrees he will spare Earth if Reed and Storm hand over their baby.
Galactus, for reasons unexplained, believes the baby is his successor and if he has him on board he can then retire from the business of devouring planets.
So we have the trolley problem dilemma: should one baby be sacrificed to save an entire planet?
Reed, a scientist, admits that doing so would be “mathematical, ethical and available”. His wife has other ideas. The American public are briefly agitated but this fizzles out.
That’s about it. The Fantastic Four with a baby versus Galactus and the Silver Surfer. The dialogue is weak, especially the attempts at humour. Nothing much of interest happens.
The superhero movie franchise has its ups and downs. This one is definitely on the downside.
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