In the Flesh: Fantastic Four: First Steps

Every new Marvel movie has its wave of critics declaring it either a return to form or a brand new direction for the lumbering pop culture behemoth, and every new Marvel movie, without fail, is pretty much exactly like its predecessors. Fantastic Four: First Steps has a gloss of retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetics, a likeable core cast, and a tighter focus than most other films extruded by the Feige machine, but at its heart, it’s more of the same. From the muddy, poorly-blocked and paced CGI showdown with Galactus (Ralph Ineson) to the contrived and underdeveloped moral dilemma at the heart of the film, there is nothing here to warrant the wave of critical excitement with which Matt Shakman’s film has been met. That it comes out in the shadow of James Gunn’s genuinely vibrant and earnest Superman doesn’t do it any favors.

As with so many Marvel films, the biggest weak spot here is Ineson’s Galactus, a plodding and aesthetically pedestrian colossus rendered in sub-par CGI. Ineson’s spectacularly unique voice is muffled and distorted, his imposing physicality lost in the overdesigned mess of the world-eater’s armor. Galactus is hungry. Eating the Richards’ baby would allow him to stop being hungry. Another movie could make something out of that, simple as it is, but here we have no visual representation of his hunger, no sense of what his existence is like or why he might want to escape it. Julia Garner is a little more compelling as his emissary, the Silver Surfer, and her light-speed chase with the titular Fantastic Four which ends with her temporarily stuck at the edge of a black hole’s accretion disk is one of the movie’s few genuine visual pleasures, but it’s far from enough to carry the rest of the film.

Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss Bacharach, and Joseph Quinn make for a reasonably likeable ensemble, though Kirby’s Sue Storm is left underdeveloped and defined primarily in opposition to Pascal’s Reed Richards. None of the characters has much room to breathe, and when the film does touch on something interesting, such as Richards’ anxiety over his own capacity for utilitarian thought, it quickly flits past it on its way to another goofy 60s-era talk show segment or interminable slog of a murky, poorly-choreographed action scene. The closing sequence featuring an attempt to get Galactus onto a teleportation pad is particularly grueling in its plodding back-and-forth pacing, which winds up feeling more like a table read than an action scene. Why is Galactus eating planets? How does the Thing (Bacharach) feel about becoming living rock? Where is the rest of Johnny Storm’s personality? First Steps doesn’t have any answers, and nor does it appear interested in asking any questions.