THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Fantastic 4: First Steps, Walt Disney Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 24, 2025

Even in trying to tell a relatively simple story about a single team of superheroes, The Fantastic 4: First Steps reveals just how ungainly the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe has become. Here's a franchise so large and complicated, in terms of its assorted timelines and multiverse, that it's no longer all that easy to simply introduce a new superhero—let alone four of them.

The Fantastic Four, for example, couldn't just be introduced in the past of the current series, because that would raise far too many questions about where they've been and why no one has mentioned them this entire time. Thus, the solution for achieving some degree of simplicity in this movie is as convoluted as we've come to expect. See, the Fantastic Four have been around this entire time, but they've existed in another dimension.

Thankfully, that seemingly significant detail is just a throwaway one in director Matt Shakman's pseudo-origin tale. Sure, we've seen two previous iterations of this superhero team on the big screen before (The diminishing quality of those movies, as well as the lack of an official release of a low-budget version made in 1992, could have lead some to believe the team was cursed at the movies), so it's not as if they require an official introduction again. An introductory prologue, set up as a TV special about the four-year history of the team, gives a quick breakdown of each member, their relationships, their individual superpowers, and a recap of their adventures so far.

That recap looks like fun, which is again funny in terms of how the massive scale of this franchise has affected its ability to actually tell simple, straightforward, and, well, fun superhero stories. We've seen superheroes travel through space, alter time, and save half the universe from non-existence.

The Fantastic Four taking on a villain who wants to create a subterranean utopia for himself or another who employs an army of apes, apparently, isn't going to cut it. The good news is that the villain of this new version of the old superhero team is arguably the best part of the movie.

That's not great news, though, for married heroes Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), who stretches his body like rubber, and newly pregnant Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who can turn invisible and create vaguely defined bursts of energy, along with Sue's brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), who can immolate himself and fly, and Reed's best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Mos-Bachrach), whose own encounter with cosmic turbulence on the quartet's flight to space transformed his body into rock. They're so caught up in dealing with a potentially Earth-devouring threat that the team mostly goes through the motions of the plot, instead of offering much personality on their own.

Indeed, they don't really get to show off their superpowers much, apart from a couple of action sequences and some relatively subtle details, such as Reed stretching his arm to write on a distant corner of one of his oversized chalkboards. Some of this tale, with the movie's retro-futuristic aesthetic that looks like the 1960s with flying cars and robots, is more science fiction than superhero, and when that involves a trip across galaxies to find the planet-eating Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and a daring science experiment involving teleportation, it's neat in a way that a comic-book adventure probably should be.

That Galactus, the cosmic giant cursed from before the formation of the universe with an insatiable hunger, looms large in this story is, perhaps, unavoidable. The big—as in really, really big—guy looks as he did in the comics (as opposed to the cloud of dust, if memory serves, that he was in one the previous movies) and possesses a legitimate air of apocalyptic foreboding. The plot begins quickly with the arrival of Galactus' herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), in New York City, where she tells humanity to spend its remaining time saying the unspoken and staying close to loved ones. On their face, Galactus and the Silver Surfer are kind of goofy creations, but they're made so ominous here that it's easy to forget that.

Earth—or Earth 828, because of the aforementioned franchise convolutions—looks to be doomed, so the Fantastic Four step up to find, negotiate with, and, if necessary, somehow defeat Galactus. Their goal is complicated by the fact that Galactus believes Sue is pregnant with an all-powerful being who could sate his hunger, and it's not as if this superpowered family is going to give up one of their own, even if that would mean saving Earth from destruction.

Galactus overshadows—quite literally, when he finally does arrive, towering over the Statue of Liberty—everything and everyone else, however, including Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben. In addition to their respective powers, each one receives some broadly defining characteristic, namely Reed's pessimistic intellect, Sue's dedication to family, Ben's stoicism, and Johnny's habit of making jokes. Otherwise, they're so busy figuring out how to save the world that the movie simply doesn't have time for them to do or be anything else.

The Fantastic 4: First Steps becomes a clumsy and self-defeating attempt to introduce this franchise's new team of superheroes. Its refusal to settle on the simple scale, scope, and stakes of an origin story may pay off with the villain, but it undoes any chance to meet and get to know the heroes.

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