Considering this is the fourth big-screen adaptation of Marvel’s Fantastic Four comics to date – or fifth, if you count the unreleased 1994 Roger Corman version – First Steps turns out to be a surprisingly fitting subtitle. Because after spending the best part of a decade since Iron Man 3 blundering into the furniture, Marvel has finally learned how to put one foot in front of the other again – and in doing so, arrived at the studio’s funniest, most exciting, moving and complete film in more than 10 years.
Much like Warner Bros’ slightly superior new Superman reboot, the studio has cooked up a new approach that’s brightly in step with mid-2020s pop cinema trends. First Steps is earnest, colourful, upbeat – and asks its audience to bring nothing to the table beyond a willingness to be wowed. The fact that its tale of four unfashionably strait-laced comrades defending Earth from impending cosmic destruction largely takes place in a pointedly untopical (and richly imagined) Mad Men-era version of Manhattan doesn’t hurt in this regard.
Why do Pedro Pascal’s elastic-limbed Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby’s Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s rock-skinned Thing and Joseph Quinn’s fiery Human Torch make such a refreshingly human quartet of heroes? It’s partly because the casting allows all four to play to their strengths – and as the team’s steadfast matriarch, Kirby is especially good value – but also because the film keeps putting them into the sort of human spaces where human behaviour naturally occurs.
This iteration of the Fantastic Four spends less time in wormholes (though there is a fair bit of that, much of which owes a noticeable debt to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar) than in kitchens, bedrooms, familiar downtown streets and crowded family vehicles.
Reed Richards, Pascal’s science whizz, and his partner, Kirby’s Sue Storm, do resemble a real married couple, while all four leads’ scenes with Reed and Sue’s newborn son Franklin (whose impending arrival consumes much of the opening act) run on the sort of natural, found-in-the-moment chemistry which Marvel formerly seemed intent on stomping out.
The villains are necessarily more cosmically aloof: Julia Garner appears as the female Silver Surfer, while Ralph Ineson is Galactus, an otherworldly titan intent on devouring the Earth as part of his never-ending planetary bulking diet. The visual effects design here shows admirable faith in the original atomic-age aesthetic of Jack Kirby, the pioneering comics artist who co-created the Fantastic Four in 1961 with Stan Lee.
Yet even the antagonists’ CG carapaces allow through some lovely actorly touches: there is a low-level malignancy to the way Ineson’s Galactus pulls up a handful of soil on his arrival in New York and gives it an approving sniff.
There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance. Viewers who have failed to stay studiously abreast of the latest Disney+ hubbub – indeed, viewers who haven’t seen a Marvel movie before in their lives – will find just as much here to please them as the bingeing disciples.
It all makes you wish that Marvel had reached this point years ago – imagine if 2019’s Avengers: Endgame had been followed by this. Yet at least they’re here now, and the result is a very unusual sort of franchise instalment: one that feels every inch a one-off.
12A cert, 114 mins. Cinemas from Thursday 24th July