The Fantastic Four: A buoyant and frequently dazzling return to form for Marvel | Canada Voices

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Directed by Matt Shakman

Written by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer

Starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Ralph Ineson, Julia Garner, Paul Walter Hauser, Natasha Lyonne, Sarah Niles

Classification PG; 117 minutes

Opens in theatres July 25

In a cheeky early bit from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Reed Richards tries to explain the multiverse, a concept that might elicit a groan in this surprisingly satisfying return to form for Marvel.

The super stretchy scientist, played as adorably rigid by the internet’s favourite leading man, Pedro Pascal, is teaching a televised Bill Nye-style science class to a studio audience of kids. The subject is parallel dimensions. Reed, also known as Mr. Fantastic, explains that there’s an Earth much like their own that could exist elsewhere (with, as you know, its own set of superheroes).

The children respond with yawns. Defeated by their boredom, Reed wins back his audience’s enthusiasm by inviting them to witness a big explosion.

This, of course, is The Fantastic Four breaking the fourth wall, with a dig about the state of things at the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which has been struggling to hold our attention spans of late. In the five years since Avengers: Endgame, the studio’s bloated and convoluted storytelling has been buckling under the weight of all the multiverse shenanigans they have thrown at their movies and TV shows, contributing to a general sense of superhero fatigue, which – if it persists – could spell doom for the next wave of Avengers movies.

But Marvel scored a critical hit with the relatively modest Thunderbolts* earlier this year. And now The Fantastic Four is here for a proper reset – a buoyant and frequently dazzling one at that, which sort of makes up for the failed movie adaptations of Marvel’s first family from the past.

I should point out, at the risk of tiring the audience, the new Fantastic Four is pretty sparse with its explosions and does actually take place in an alternate dimension – neither in the same realm nor timeline as Iron Man or Captain America. It’s a necessary move, ditching (if only, momentarily) all the narrative baggage from the world of the other MCU movies. And it frees up the space for Matt Shakman’s delightful retro futurist reimagining of Manhattan in the ’60s built around his Fantastic Four.

Shakman (WandaVision) draws as much from The Jetsons and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Jack Kirby’s original comic panels. Sleek and shiny space needles tower above Manhattan’s art deco skyline, which is filled with period details such as the Pan Am building, RKO Palace and billboards for 7Up and Coppertone. The superheroes’ bright blue costumes cut through everyone else’s earthy trench coats, bowlers and tweed suits, as do their rocket-propelled flying vehicles.

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The aesthetic – both on this bright and optimistic alt-Earth and in outer space alongside gleaming black holes – tends to be more intricately detailed than the characters themselves, who don’t get the most room to breathe between scene-setting, monologuing and the action.

Reed, his disappearing wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), solid-as-literal-rock best friend Benn Grimm (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and flammable brother-in-law Johnny (Joseph Quinn, looking and behaving like a young Robert Downey Jr.) are introduced three years after exposure to space radiation made them mutant superheroes. A kitschy period-appropriate newsreel quickly catches us up, before the plot hurries the heroes along on their intergalactic adventure. They’re facing off against planet-munching villain Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his humanoid minion, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). This happens as Sue is expecting her first child, whom the big baddie sets his ultrasound sights on.

If the characters are thinly sketched – in a script credited to four writers, which tends to lean on familiar tropes – you’d barely notice, because the cast fills them out beautifully. There’s an inviting chemistry in their smallest beats, nuanced glimmers in their eyes and a comforting warmth that doesn’t come from the page. This is all exponentially true for Kirby, who, as a beaming mother-to be Sue, not only carries the movie, but is often wrestling it away from being just another Marvel.

But there’s a less generous way to view Sue’s story: You could see her pregnancy as a cute and calculated way to sprinkle humanity onto a shiny new toy of a movie from a megacorp. A funny enough montage where the Fantastic Four’s R2-D2-like robot H.E.R.B.I.E. baby-proofs the house – in which one resident uncle is a walking fire-hazard – certainly leans in that direction.

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But Sue’s tremendous presence – especially when she fumes at the way Reed can be malleable in the face of hardship – is enough to dispel that cynicism. She even lends the action some weight.

The moment she goes into labour, while on a rocket chase through a wormhole, is as entertaining as Marvel gets. And the requisite levelling of Manhattan, in the by now familiar climactic battle with a towering CGI villain, doesn’t entirely bore, because Kirby can sell the stakes (all adorable 18 pounds).

It’s just enough to make me want more, which are words I’ll probably eat. The next time we see this Fantastic Four, in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, they’ll be leaving their wondrous world behind and joining their peers from across the (big sigh) multiverse.