The Fantastic Four: First Steps // Film Review

My nerdy bit of recent movie trivia is that The Fantastic Four: First Steps went into production on the very same day Superman wrapped shooting. Doesn’t it show? 

The latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is probably the best F4 movie (or second after The Incredibles), but given the history of the franchise, this isn’t saying a great deal. The film suffers from the same late-MCU symptoms that have afflicted others of its ilk; it does unmistakably feel like a factory project, confined largely to standing sets where a handful of charismatic TV stars rattle off exposition and quips that feel at all times improvised (though not in the cute way). In this case particularly, The Fantastic Four: First Steps feels hastily sketched out, as if the script simply read “let’s do Galactus” and everything else came from that, quite possibly on set.

TF4: FS stars Hollywood’s present golden boy Pedro Pascal as stretchy genius Mister Fantastic, with  Vanessa Kirby (The Crown), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) and Ebon Moss Bachrach (The Bear) rounding out Stan Lee’s titular first family. Pascal gets a reasonable amount to work with here (albeit less than he would have liked, having already admitted to being instructed to reign in his trans-atlantic accent work), though it is Kirby who gets the script’s meatiest material. 

That is to say, meatiest relative to a story and scenario which are chronically lacking in substance and texture. The world of Earth-828 feels extremely underbaked, if not flatly dead. There is no sense of grounding to proceedings here, with most of the action beyond the trademark Baxter Building (which has no staff beyond the four leads, presumably for ease of working on a tight schedule) being left to our imaginations. There is some second-unit coverage of civilians on the streets below, but the gap between those images and Shakman’s more claustrophobic four-hander are positively cavernous.

It doesn’t help that all of this just feels so routine by now. The superhero fakeout death was the stuff of spoofs ten years ago, while the climatic ‘ethical dilemma’ has an inevitable magic fix and the civilians in Act 3 are “pre-saved” before Galactus (Ralph Ineson, doing his best) even shows up. For all the talk of a homecoming for ‘Marvel’s First Family’, this whole enterprise feels like little more than a cynical rush job to get a few extra action figures onto the board ahead of Shareholders: Doomsday, coming soon to a theatre near you.