While not the most ardently rabid fan, I did read Marvel comics as a child. Original US imports appeared rarely in British newsagents of the 60s and 70s and were often far too expensive for the budget of a pre-teen whose pocket money stretched to one Mars bar, a packet of crisps and a jubbly** per week. But the delicious thrill that there might be an affordable US import on the shelves of one of the ten or so newsagents I used to cycle to after school was too much to resist. A few years later, Marvel comics were reprinted in the UK by slicing and dicing its US originals and featuring several superheroes under one issue. The biggest and budget-conscious difference was that the UK versions were printed in black and white. And so it was inevitable that I was a fan of the Fantastic Four.

The quartet’s super powers, the result of that old canard ‘cosmic radiation’, were super strength (the Thing, Ben Grimm), elasticity (Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards), inflamed flyer (the Human Torch, Johnny Storm) and invisibility and force fields (Sue Storm). Now… Hands up who thinks Marvel should have sued Pixar to within an inch of their overdraft for The Incredibles? Four powers out of five characters? The baby could flame on in case you’re forgetting. Dash’s super speed, may have been pilfered from Marvel’s rival, DC, specifically the Flash. There have been four previous attempts to bring the FF to cinematic life and none stood out loud and proud. In a bold move, Marvel has confined their first official Phase 6 Fantastic Four film to an idealised 1960s setting on a different but parallel Earth, sneakily established by the subtitle ‘Earth 828’ at the start with no further explanation. Despite the overtly ‘comic book’ blue costumes, comic correct regardless, I am a little nervous going in. The ‘fake’ reviews offered by the pro-Disney chosen ‘influencers’ are carbon copies of Snow White’s fake reviews. The trailers have not convinced me so let’s see what Marvel have up their voluminous sleeves…

Well, The Fantastic Four: First Steps may not have hit the ball out of the park but as a Marvel movie, it resets the ‘experiments’ – as producer Kevin Fiege euphemistically called Marvel’s embarrassment of recent failures post-Endgame – to produce an enthusiastic and wildly different setting and context for superhero high jinks. No previous Marvel character or event exists in the alternate world of FF so tabula rasa, clean slate, blank page, and perhaps another synonym for starting from scratch. No one wants to be responsible for creating something cheesy (except perhaps for actual fermented curd manufacturers) but director Matt Shankar has taken the presentation and content of high cheese and made it likeable, identifiable, earnest, entertaining and in some rare moments, exhilarating. And yes, I am as surprised as you are.

I once edited a film whose first assembly ran at 2 hours plus for a broadcast commitment of a 48 minute run time. My first assembly had no fat on its bones and we were gutted to have had to cut an hour and 12 minutes of extraordinary footage from our first cut. There were tears. The producer and co-director had a stunning idea. Take all those sequences we had to cut out and select the best shots from them and cut them together as a montage to create a passage of time and growth for our animal characters. It was a brilliant idea which paid off. It also suggested to the audience that if we could ‘throw away’ these amazing behavioural shots into a montage, what gems awaited the viewers in the rest of the film? To this day, the producer/co-director still credits me with this idea. I love him to bits but it was his glorious idea. Well, that is what The Fantastic Four does in its first ten minutes. Via a talk show host’s introduction, we get the quartet’s origin story and about five or six adventures setting up their adversaries and abilities with a dazzling montage of superhero exploits. It comes as a well earned ‘Phew!’ as we then join the four for a sit down family meal.

The ensuing narrative is simple to describe. Sue is pregnant. Ominous storm clouds precede the arrival of the Silver Surfer, the herald of the giant alien planet-devouring Galactus. She (for it is a she) warns the people of Earth that they need to prepare for their planet’s destruction. Our heroes warp space following the surfer’s astral trail which leads them to Galactus and his obscenely huge space ship. Negotiations don’t go well and it’s no spoiler to note (it’s in the trailers and promo material) that Galactus agrees to spare Earth in exchange for the non-negotiable, the as yet unborn child of Reed and Sue, soon to be christened Franklin. How they deal with this ethical nightmare is not as smart as it could have been but the film’s sincerity keeps everything buoyant. Is it too much to ask Marvel to tone down the ultimate threat and that saving the world should cease being the go-to mission of our heroes? I’m reminded of comedian Tim Vine’s joke, both groan-inducing and yet still funny; “The butcher said to me "I bet you £50 you can't reach that meat hanging up there". I said, "No way, the steaks are too high.” The stakes, in almost all superhero films are consistently too high. The ethical dilemma of sacrificing children for the greater good was explored in much more depth and richness in the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood’s third season, ‘Children of Earth’. This was before writer Russell T. Davies’ all-in conversion to the Disneyfication of the last two series of Doctor Who.

The cast are top notch with a charming chemistry. The animation of Ben Grimm’s face is as subtle as I’ve seen in a digital character. There is a look he gives Sue at the dinner table and it’s barely an eyebrow movement but it asks the question, as he does seconds later, “Are you pregnant?” Despite the CG replacement, all his physicality and distinctive voice are well performed by The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, while something of a hot-headed teen in the comics, has grown up. His unabashed womanising has been replaced by a hardly surprising crush on the female Silver Surfer (Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal). A plan of his own devising is instrumental to her own character’s arc. Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman has a few stand out scenes with one in particular which made it very hard for me to swallow but she’s a beautiful actress with more than enough skill to inhabit her character and make us care. It’s nice to see Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles as Lynne Nichols, the CEO of the Future Foundation and Mark Gatiss as Ted Gilbert, the host of The Ted Gilbert Show, the opening and closing parenthesis of the entire film. And then of course there’s Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards who seems to have made his name by having his skull caved in… twice. He came to our attention in Game of Thrones and then, many years later, made a nasty game-inspired exit from The Last of Us. He’s a very likeable performer, perhaps not perfectly cast as a certified scientific genius. His superpower was wisely kept mostly under wraps until the denouement because frankly a man who stretches like rubber looks ridiculous even if it is photo-realistic. It’s just a quirk of timing, surely not planned, that there were three films starring the actor that were in the cinemas in the US when FF opened. I must also mention Ralph Ineson as Galactus. The actor wore all the armour and despite many CG enhancements, still imbues this gigantic and monstrous entity with purpose and threat.

Driving the movie with power, joy and a hint of (dare I say it) a ‘theme’ is Michael Giacchino’s pulsing score. There’s a choral element that works wonders and it really shouldn’t (the words ‘Fantastic Four’ are actually sung with an earnest innocence as if we still do that in 2025). It’s a throwback musical style but in today’s wall of sound environment, it’s almost subversive. The effects are - as usual - pretty much perfect and the retro 60s design is edible. I really didn’t think I’d go for the original comic book costumes but they’re all folded well into the mix. The Kip Thorn wormhole from Interstellar makes an appearance (I wonder if there were any raised eyebrows in the Chris Nolan camp) and it’s this scene of the Silver Surfer chasing our heroes through warped space that was the most exhilarating, something that shocked me in a good way.

If there’s a significant thorn in my paw, I will not mention the scene or characters by name but will give an all too revealing metaphorical critique. So Goliath on alpine steroids is taking on a small quartet of severely undersized children. Too obvious? This guy could eat all of them in one sitting as a starter and pound them into child paste with barely an effort. They buzz around him but he keeps advancing. While three of the undersized children are engaged elsewhere, one of the children takes on the giant on their own and with a strenuous effort resulting in the child experiencing near fatally serious health issues, the child vanquishes the steroidal giant almost completely. It’s utterly and totally unrealistic. Nothing in the film has suggested this child could take on Goliath on steroids let alone best him. This tips the film into an admission of “Just how do the children manage to defeat Goliath?” And it almost sinks the whole enterprise. And why take that risk at this third act moment? That’s actually the real question. What were the filmmakers thinking? That we wouldn’t question it? These scenes have to flow organically to be both inevitable and surprising. Surprising was cut off at the knees as soon as we realised that steroidal Goliath was no match for undersized child No. 4. I mean, come on.

* https://variety.com/2025/film/news/fantastic-four-director-interview-matt-shakman-casting-auditions-1236461087/