The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I put off watching this for a while. Unlike a lot of people, I was not in love with the retro-futuristic aesthetic. I've never been drawn to the Fantastic Four as characters. And I was rather put off by Marvel's decision to make this another friggin' timeline, dragging out the interminable slog that is the Multiverse saga that has been an all-around misfire. But yesterday, my kid had a friend over and we needed something to watch, and I thought of this. I was hoping for a surprise, but I was pretty sure all my assumptions would be proven correct ... and they were. There are some good ideas in the movie, mainly in the first act. I'm not the first person to make the observation that F4 employs a smart analogy about fear of the unknown into the overall narrative, starting with Reed Richards' (Pedro Pascal) paralyzing fear of becoming a parent. He is so in his own head with science and numbers, he wants to break down parenting to an equation, and he can't. When he breaks down later -- the first time we see him actually interact with the baby on his own -- and holds baby Franklin and confesses he's going to have to let go and just roll with the punches like every other parent, it hit me. Parenting isn't a science, and it sure as hell isn't an art form; it's a process, and you learn by doing. In that moment, he finally gets it. It's sweet. F4's biggest problem, though, is that it too shows the same fear Reed does about the unknown ... but unlike Reed, it runs to the safety of what it knows. As soon as the movie has to be an MCU movie, it makes a beeline for quips, portals, sky beams, and CGI slop. I'd say character development is dropped, but that would imply that anybody outside of Reed has a character; Sue Storm's (Vanessa Kirby) character, from the first frame, is "mom", Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) is ... plucky? And Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is ... present. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) is barely given anything, and all her character development is done in a massive exposition dump that brings the movie to a screeching halt, a thing this movie does on more than one occasion. All of these characters are there to facilitate the movie going through the motions of MCU Phase 1 movies, 15 years after Phase 1 ended. The explosions, the CGI-heavy blurs of buildings crumbling, the bad guy being (literally, here) larger than life and too inhuman to do practically, the "we have a solution" fake-out that blows in the heroes' faces, the last-minute solution, the hero pushing themselves too far and endangering themself to beat the big bad ... every familiar beat we've seen for almost 40 movies now is hit exactly when you know it will be. You've seen this movie before, because Marvel keeps making this movie. And what hurts is that this comes directly after Marvel showing they can make a movie with heart and character growth and intelligence that breaks the mold in a successful way, with Thunderbolts ... but because it didn't do Avengers-level money, we're never going to get that again. We've going to get grist for the mill, the same old content churned out like the chocolates on the conveyor belt in that Lucy episode. This isn't a bad movie. It's perfectly fine, but that's the issue: we've had "perfectly fine" be the standard for five years now. This was supposed to be the next step on righting the ship. This was supposed to help turn around the fortunes of the MCU from the creative malaise that has plagued it for half a decade. Perhaps most of all, Fantastic 4: First Steps This movie was supposed to be Marvel finally doing right by characters that had been done dirty by other studios on three different occasions. Instead, they did the brand dirty all over again in an all new way. They promised a bold new future, even teased it in the movie, and then shoved it in the same mold every other movie in the MCU lives in.