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Fantastic Four: First Steps -- a review

When I was a kid, I collected a series of action figures made from a company called Mego. They produced eight inch tall figures from several IPs back then, like Star Trek and the Planet of the Apes. They also produced superhero figures from DC and Marvel Comics, like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four. I received the Fantastic Four--all four figures--as a birthday gift from my mother one year. The interesting thing was, I never actually asked for them. I never even knew they had made figures of this superhero team, which I didn’t know that much about because I hadn’t read their comics. But I was still very grateful to have the F4 in my League of Superheroes.

Created by comic book legends Stan Lee & Jack Kirby back in the early 1960s, the Fantastic Four were known as Marvel’s First Family. They were a superhero team who were truly family. Reed Richards was the stretchy leader who was married to Sue Storm, who had the powers of invisibility and force fields. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was Sue’s little brother, and Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, was a close family friend. The foursome were imbued with their superpowers after taking a trip into outer space. After four films were made about them over the course of thirty years, the Fantastic Four came back home to Marvel, who produced Fantastic Four: First Steps.

The always good Pedro Pascal stars as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, the superb Vanessa Kirby (no relation to Jack Kirby) plays Sue Storm/The Invisible Girl, Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Ben Grimm/The Thing, and Joseph Quinn is the cocky Johnny Storm/Human Torch. The new film takes place on an alternate Earth, where the setting is a magical blend of the year 1964 with such retro-futuristic high tech such as big bubble buildings, flying cars, and space ports in the East River of Manhattan. The production design is simply wonderful here, calling forth a more innocent 1960s with a colorful superhero aesthetic that’s wrapped in a ‘can-do’ science fiction realm.

And along comes Galactus to spoil everything. The evil world-eater’s arrival is heralded by the Silver Surfer, played by the always great Julia Garner, who’s completely buried under silver CGI make up (save for one flashback origin scene, showing how she came to be the Silver Surfer). This isn’t the first movie to feature Galactus. 2007’s F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer had both Galactus and Silver Surfer, who was another CGI character that was voiced by Lawrence Fishburne. The Galactus in that movie turned out to be nothing more than a disappointing giant space cloud.

First Steps is infinitely better than the '07 version by having a more comics accurate Galactus who’s played by Ralph Ineson. Instead of going completely CGI, Ineson appears on screen in a physical Galactus costume that is sheer perfection. The scenes of Galactus stomping around NYC are vastly entertaining and scary in a fun Godzilla movie kind of way. This Galactus is a true, overwhelming threat for the Fantastic Four. And how they fight him makes for great viewing.

Overall, Fantastic Four: First Steps is far better than any of the previous F4 movies. Not only is it truer to the Fantastic Four comics of yore, First Steps is also a lot more imaginative, with the impressive cast and ’on-point’ writing easily engaging with us and making us care for this special family and their seemingly epic problems. Now that the F4 are a part of the merry Marvel movie machine factory, we’re being told at the end of the film to expect see them next in Avengers: Doomsday. And that's nice. Yet the F4 shine so very brightly in their own adventure here, that it's making me hope that there will be more stand-alone Fantastic Four films that are separate from the increasingly overcrowded MCU. --SF

Fantastic Four: First Steps is on Disney+. It's also out on physical media.
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