The Fantastic Four: First Steps Is The Radical Reinvention The MCU Needs

Marvel’s cinematic and comic universes have always been in a kind of symbiotic relationship, but the balance of power between those two worlds has never truly been equitable. The comics provide nigh unlimited source material for the MCU to riff on and adapt — but rarely do those original artists get the credit they really deserve. Somewhere between Iron Man and Endgame, comic book movies stopped feeling like true homages to the art form. The MCU now takes liberties where none need apply, buckling under the weight of creative swings that only alienate diehard fans of the comics.

Now more than ever, it’s clear that something has to give — and not just for Marvel. Even its competitors at DC are reinventing themselves with veritable love letters to the stories (and, more importantly, the creators) that started it all. It effectively began with Superman, but where the DC film feels like a concerted overcorrection, stuffed to the gills with enough stuff to give birth to a new cinematic world, Marvel takes a subtler approach.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the franchise’s answer to years of excess. It’s Marvel’s defibrillator — the straightforward, no-fuss shock of life that won’t just revive a dying franchise, but bring it back to the foundations it’s long dismissed. The fingerprints of Jack “King” Kirby and John Byrne are all over this film, and with their contributions top of mind, writer-director Matt Shakman might have just truly saved a flailing MCU.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock during Fantastic Four’s omnipresent marketing campaign, this film is, crucially, about family. After all, the Fantastic Four were the first to check that box for Marvel, embodying the off-beat charm and dramatic dysfunction of any real-life brood. This iteration of the team is the fourth that’s been attempted on-screen, which gives Shakman — who co-wrote Fantastic Four alongside a trio of screenwriters — some leeway with their heroes’ journey. The film feels like the new #1 of a long-running comic: it doesn’t get bogged down with the “how” of the team’s origins; instead, it drops us into their world in medias res and brings us up to speed with breezy exposition.

By the time we meet the famous team, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) have already embarked on the fateful mission to space that altered their DNA and granted them powers. They’ve already worked out the kinks in a dynamic that anyone with previous knowledge of the team would dub endearingly dysfunctional. It’s the quiet moments that tell us what we need to know about this version of the Fantastic Four. We get a taste of Reed’s cautious, quiet intellect, and his fear and fascination with the unknown, when Sue presents him with a positive pregnancy test. Shakman makes a bold statement by opening the film with a scene from their marriage. It’s the first tell that this isn’t the kind of superhero movie Marvel is used to delivering. The second is undoubtedly the world the Fantastic Four protect, a retrofuturist haven where cars fly, robots cook and clean, and the leading voices in science and tech join hands to advance humanity further.

If there are gods on Earth-828, the Fantastic Four are the closest thing to them. They’re the only superpowered individuals around, and as such have shaped their world in their benevolent image. Reed’s science has elevated society in every way, while Sue is the face of the Future Foundation, a UN-esque coalition dedicated to solving the world’s toughest problems. Johnny is, well, Johnny: a playboy and model in the quaintest sense of the word. (Quinn takes best to the film’s ‘60s-ish setting, elevating jocky quips that would have fallen flat in anyone else’s hands.) And Ben is the gentle giant the neighborhood knows and loves, the glue that holds the team together. They’re each worshipped as leaders and as friends to the community... until a Silver Surfer descends from the skies to herald their demise.

Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner) represents the kind of entity no one on the team has ever encountered, the ravenous cosmic force known as Galactus (a formidable Ralph Ineson). The Four’s first meeting with the former is tinged with dread, and cinematographer Jess Hall captures the frenzy and weight of Shalla-Bal’s arrival — the claustrophobic feeling of the entire world watching — with the magic touch. But it pales in comparison to the team’s journey into space, where they meet Galactus and come face-to-face with their own insignificance. Fantastic Four understands scale like no Marvel film before it: Galactus is awe-inspiring and terrifying, his domain is rendered in the best visual effects this side of Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s also, blessedly, a simple villain with a straightforward plan. His innate hunger compels him to devour whole planets, the bigger the better — but Reed and Sue’s unborn child could finally allow him to rest.

So begins a race through space and against time to save the world. The team’s daring escape from Galactus’ lair takes the MCU even deeper into the cosmic realm, delivering the gasp-inducing visuals and heady science you’d sooner expect from a next-gen Star Trek film. Michael Giacchino’s operatic score only heightens the white-knuckle panic of these sequences. It’s all so stunning, so unlike Marvel’s typical offerings, that it’s easy to forgive the parts of Fantastic Four that succumb to the franchise’s typical trappings: its overreliance on the Volume, for example, or Reed and Sue’s baby, occasionally rendered with eerie CGI only a few steps above The Twilight Saga’s Renesmee. This film is not as visually consistent as it could be, and that may be one of its biggest weaknesses. But with a story that knows exactly what it wants to be, a story that goes all-out when it counts — and, most crucially, lives and dies as a tribute to Kirby’s Fantastic Four — it’s impossible not to root for.

Fantastic Four is a rare win for the MCU on nearly every level, and not only because it refuses to bite off more than it can chew. It also comes closest to regaining a dynamic that few Marvel movies actually seem interested in, that between heroes and the ordinary folk they’ve sworn to protect. The Fantastic Four are a family; their entire identity is wrapped up in that word. But it’s not just Franklin, the newest addition to their home, that warrants the privilege of protection — it’s the entire world. Just as Superman introduces a hero who saves everyone, including the squirrel in a nearby tree, Fantastic Four depicts a team that refuses to leave anyone behind. It’s the kind of reinvention that the MCU should have gotten a long time ago; the kind that, in hindsight, should have been the franchise’s foundation.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in theaters on July 25.