Practically from the moment when they were first introduced to the public in 1961, the Fantastic Four, the superhero quartet developed by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, have been among the most popular of all the characters published by Marvel Comics. However, unlike many of the other well-known entities from that particular stable, they have proven to be remarkably snakebit in their numerous attempts to achieve success on the big screen. The first attempt was a 1994 production that was launched by a producer who needed to make a recognizable FF film by a certain date or lose the rights—he hired Roger Corman to whip up an extremely low-budget film that would satisfy those legal requirements and which would be put up on a shelf and never be shown to the public, which came as a surprise to the cast and filmmakers. The result was a disaster, of course, but as those who saw it on the various bootlegs that have emerged over the years, it has a certain rag-tag spirit to it that almost made up for the laughably shoddy special effects.
A decade later, that big-budget version finally arrived with Fantastic Four featuring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis in the lead roles and while it did well enough at the box-office to inspire Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer two years later, neither one was particularly liked by critics or audiences. However, those previous efforts came across like the original Superman in comparison to the third attempt to launch a FF film franchise, 2015’s Fantastic Four, in which Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell embarrassed themselves in what would prove to be one of the biggest flops in the recent history of superhero cinema. Face it, the closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a successful FF project was when Pixar used them as an obvious inspiration for their Incredibles franchise.
Despite the seemingly cursed nature of the property in terms of cinematic adaptations, people have still been attracted to the idea of somehow making it work and with the rights having reverted back to Marvel following Disney’s purchase of Fox, who had owned them and was behind the previous three films, a few years ago, it was inevitable that someone would try again, leading to the latest attempt, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. I must confess that, despite my full knowledge of the dismal cinematic history of the characters and my general antipathy towards superhero-related films in general, I was actually kind of looking forward to this one. Part of this anticipation, I confess, was due to my belief that no one could possibly make a worse FF film than that last one, not even if they deliberately set out to do so, but the fact that the film, based on the trailers, was clearly going for a retro-futurist design approach that would stand in sharp aesthetic contrast to the anonymous green screen visual sludge that has served as the Marvel house style for too long now. While the resulting films may not reach the aforementioned heights of the Incredibles films, it is a marked improvement over all the previous official FF films and although it is a bit wobbly towards the end, it is a back-to-basics tale that should satisfy longtime fans and newcomers in more-or-less equal measure.
Set on Earth 828, a parallel universe version of Earth meant to suggest the Camelot period of the early 1960s (that still manages to work in some Little Caesars product placement), the film begins four years after brilliant physicist Reed Richards (Pablo Pascal), his equally brilliant wife Sue (Vanessa Kirby), her brilliant-but-hotheaded brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and brilliant-but-grumpy Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) journeyed into space and encounter a cosmic anomaly that gave them genetic mutations—Reed’s body was now elastic, Sue had the power of invisibility, Johnny could turn himself into a walking flame and Ben essentially became a super-strong rock—that they utilized to help thwart the forces of evil, becoming beloved celebrities in the process, nicknamed Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, Human Torch and The Thing. (Instead of going the origin story route yet again, the film wisely relegates this backstory to a witty news report in the early going not unlike the opening newsreel in Citizen Kane.) At this point, however, a bigger concern than thwarting the forces of evil and basking in their celebrity is the revelation that Sue is pregnant—although thrilled, Reed is concerned that that genetic mutations that he and Sue have undergone may affect the baby in some heretofore unknown way while Ben and Johnny, with the aid of adorable robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (a character that was developed for a Fantastic Four animated series that appeared in the 1970s when the makers were not allowed to use the Human Torch character for perhaps understandable reasons), go about prepping for the imminent arrival.
All that takes a back seat with the arrival of the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), who comes exactly as advertised and who is revealed to be the hype-person for the all-powerful intergalactic god known as Galactus (Ralph Ineson). Her message to the Four and to Earth as a whole is simple—Galactus is coming to literally consume the entire planet, as he has done with so many others throughout the galaxy, and there is literally nothing that anyone can possibly do other than to simply accept their fate. Our heroes think otherwise and they—yes, including the very pregnant Sue—blast off into space to find Galactus and try to find some way to save Earth from being completely destroyed. As it happens, Galactus is willing to make a deal that will spare Earth but when the price he asks in exchange proves to be too high, the group must hightail it back to Earth and figure out another way to save mankind, despite having fallen out of favor with a good chunk of mankind when Reed lets slip about that rejected offer.
There are many reasons why the previous screen iterations of The Fantastic Four (not counting the Corman production) didn’t work but it basically boiled down to two key factors. For one thing, they never quite managed to approximate the unique tone of the comic books, which blended together trippy narratives and witty dialogue along with all of the usual action beats—the ones from the mid-2000s were too aggressively silly for their own good while the other one was so unrelentingly dour that all the fun was sucked out of the material. Here, director Matt Shakman (making his feature debut, though he earned his Marvel bona fides by directing all the episodes of TV’s WandaVision) delivers a straightforward and energetic story in a clean and efficient manner that stresses personality over spectacle and which manages to retain a reasonably light and cheerful tone, even when the very existence of Earth itself is in jeopardy, that is a blessed relief in comparison to much of the recent MCU output. More significantly, at least for those of us who are not quite as invested in said output, it is nice to see one of these films that does not require you to have seen most of the previous movies and several television shows in order to fully understand what the hell is going on at any given time.
The other thing that First Steps gets right, and arguably the most important in the long run, is that it finally gets the dynamic between the main characters down. The previous films had any number of normally engaging actors portraying the Four but they never quite clicked as a unit—although the interactions between the characters was always one of the keys to its success, you never got any real sense of rapport in any of the earlier iterations. Here, the four actors have been given the chance to invest the characters with actual personalities and they play off of each other with such grace and humor that we actually become invested in them and their actions to such a degree that when the big action set pieces kick in, there are actual emotional underpinnings to them. All of the performances are good but to these eyes, the standouts are Garner, whose presence as a gender-flipped Silver Surfer may raise some nerd hackles but who makes the character into more than just an elaborate special effect, and Kirby, who not only proves to be the real center of the group but, between this film and her previous work in Pieces of a Woman, has pretty much cornered the market when it comes to dramatic on-screen childbirth scenes.
Perhaps inevitably, First Steps gets less interesting towards the end as it devolves into yet another massive battle in which buildings are toppled and things blow up real good—these scenes are staged with a certain finesse that is an improvement over the usual CGI sludge that we have been getting lately but they inevitably wind up feeling familiar. And yet, for the most part, the film is a marked improvement on most of the recent MCU offerings in that it has clearly been made by people who seem more interested in telling an interesting story with wit, style and personality than in executing yet another corporate-mandated element of an extended business plan. Alas, the obligatory end credit teasers suggest that the characters and their narrative will be shoehorned into the grand MCU scheme before too long. That is a bit of a bummer, I suppose, but here is hoping that the Fantastic Four will still be allowed to do their own thing from time to time as well. Now that Hollywood has finally cracked the formula of how to bring them to the big screen, it would be a shame to throw it away.