The stakes of the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe installment, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, involve the familial superteam figuring out how to save the Earth by defeating the godlike adversary Galactus (now available in non-cloud form) — an expected development for a superhero movie. What audiences may not be expecting, however, is the Star Trek-like moral dilemma powering the movie’s second half, forcing its do-gooders to question whether it’s worth involuntarily trading one life for billions of others.
By posing this dilemma, First Steps accidentally calls into question whether the MCU has the emotional nuance necessary to treat family as a present-tense condition, in all its glories and setbacks, rather than as past-tense backstory. If Marvel is going to make its most family-forward superteam a cornerstone of its on-screen universe, it should take the opportunity to explore the new storytelling avenues that a family of superheroes offers.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the nature of the big question First Steps revolves around.]
When the movie’s seemingly overmatched superheroes first face Galactus, he actually offers an out from the impending impossible showdown over whether he gets to eat Earth. When the Fantastic Four first encounter the massive being in his vast spaceship, he senses immense power (the Power Cosmic, in fact) emanating from the unborn child of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby). Galactus therefore makes them an offer: Hand over the baby to take Galactus’ place as a nomadic consumer of worlds, and Galactus will spare the Earth.
Sue Storm’s response is immediate, and the rest of her super-family agrees: Absolutely not. In spite of her certainty, the question lingers throughout the second half of the movie: Are these superheroes making a super-selfish gamble on the fate of the human race?
Image: Marvel Studios
A lot of the human race sure seems to think so. When Reed, Sue, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) return to Earth without defeating Galactus, they face scrutiny for their failures — and honestly, they don’t do much to help their case. First, Reed engages in some compulsive honesty by immediately informing the entire world about the Galactus offer they turned down. Then the quartet avoids making the most obvious argument against the exchange: Turning baby Franklin into the next Galactus will spare the Earth while presumably dooming countless other planets in other galaxies. (For that matter, how could Galactus guarantee that Franklin wouldn’t circle back to consume Earth at some point in the future? How much of a Galactus bargain can an infant be expected to honor?)
Weirdly, Reed doesn’t seem to have considered those calculations at all when he – intending to speak purely objectively and hypothetically, in private with Sue – describes giving up Franklin as “ethical.” He agrees that they would never do it, but he acknowledges it as a logical choice.
Regardless of unexplored loopholes in the possible Galactus agreement, though, this story turn is the most thought-provoking element of First Steps, laying bare a major difference between this team of heroes and other MCU team-ups, whether major (like the Avengers), minor (like the so-called New Avengers), or marginal (like the Eternals). Those groups tend to focus on found families, while the Fantastic Four is more or less a traditional family.
Yes, there are some actual familial relationships within other Marvel teams, but they often lean heavily on an element of choice: Natasha and Yelena Romanoff, for example, were raised as sisters as part of a spy program, then separated as children. They could have easily maintained their estrangement indefinitely. This doesn’t make their relationship any less sisterly (or the Red Guardian less of a father to them, for better or worse). Yet the story tensions of Black Widow and Thunderbolts* would play differently if that family of spies were stuck together by blood. The same goes for the fraught relationship between Thor, his adopted brother Loki, and their father Odin.
This version of the Fantastic Four, meanwhile, is built around a proudly functional team. Technically, Ben Grimm is not related to the others by marriage (like Reed and Sue) or blood (like Sue and Johnny), but he’s casually referred to as an uncle, and shares a living space with the other three. When baby Franklin does arrive, Ben is seen doing just as much parenting as Reed or Sue — maybe more. And late in the movie, Johnny is prepared to sacrifice himself for Franklin’s safety (and, tacitly, for his sister’s happiness). All four of them register as parents, even though the title only technically belongs to Sue and Reed.
But sometimes, it feels like First Steps director Matt Shakman and the writing team are at a loss for how to deal with the directness of this arrangement. For all the daddy issues, sibling-esque bickering, and lost mothers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there aren’t a whole lot of depictions of parent-child relationships that involve an actual, well, child. One thing First Steps does get right is the instantaneous, sometimes desperate protective instinct many parents feel toward their children as soon as they’re born if not sooner. (Also, speaking from experience, the movie is extremely accurate about the frustrations of installing a high-tech car seat.)
Of course Reed and Sue will not entertain the idea of gifting their child to a cosmic monster, not even if it means saving the world (at least temporarily). And come to think of it, perhaps it makes sense that Reed wouldn’t be shy about immediately informing the world of their decision. He presumably expects any parental figure would understand their reasoning, just as Sue thinks issuing a vague platitude about how she will neither sacrifice her baby for the world, nor sacrifice the world for her baby, will warm hearts and change minds. (In the world of this movie, she’s absolutely right.)
So yes, the Fantastic Four are objectively selfish parents, in the exact same way that countless other parents are selfish, by instinct and necessity. (As a father, guilty as charged here.) What First Steps communicates less successfully is the experience of parenthood as character development, rather than stakes-raising external motivation.
Plenty of real-world considerations around parenthood would make for meaningful, dramatic character questions here: how to stay true to your “old” self as a parent, how to use work as an outlet but not an escape, whether the dynamic of a marriage changes or strengthens with a new small person in the mix, or how to pass on certain strongly held values to children. It’d be particularly interesting particularly interesting to see superheroes handle these issues, even in passing. Yet in spite of the supposed focus on family, the film treats Franklin and the accompanying dilemma more as a plot contrivance than as opportunities for characterization — Franklin’s continued existence is just another math problem for Reed to solve.
Though Sue does rankle at Reed’s ability to view their family this way, their marital conflict is also more hypothetical than genuine, because the filmmakers are presumably wary about making any of these characters look like monsters by endorsing the possibility of the trade. That decision makes emotional sense, but it’s not especially dramatic, because Franklin’s arrival doesn’t noticeably change the four core characters. In fact, when Reed reassures Sue (and, really, himself) during Franklin’s birth that “nothing will change” when the baby arrives, the statement seems like a lesson in the making — but it turns out to be true, more or less.
Reed doesn’t have to be completely wrong. Not everyone goes through a major change as a result of becoming a parent. (Though, again, based on experience, “nothing will change” is a tall and ridiculous order that the movie only superficially interrogates.) However, his reassurance seems particularly off-base even on the movie’s own terms, because so little groundwork has been laid about the team’s interpersonal dynamics. It’s hard to tell either way how the Fantastic Four might have reacted to a similar one-for-billions dilemma before the one in question was their own kid. Moreover, First Steps barely covers what kind of parents Reed or Sue are (or might become) when actually interacting with their child, rather than mulling over a cosmic choice.
In part, this is because of the way the movie yadda-yaddas over what seems like the family’s first few months of parenthood. It’s hard to tell how much time passes between the Fantastic Four’s return to Earth and Galactus’ arrival, in part because most movies are relentlessly imprecise about baby ages. (For most of the movie, Franklin looks like he’s about three months old.) But there’s definitely a montage depicting the passage of some time, with cute comic-relief bits about H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot doing various baby-related chores that Ben occasionally unwittingly ruins as he does his own co-parenting.
This treatment ensures that the baby remains something of an abstraction, at least until he becomes a center of peril for the climax. It’s fair enough that an infant can’t really be a fully rounded character in a traditional narrative. At the same time, this isn’t the first time the MCU has used family ties as a cheap shortcut to pathos, rather than the subjects of lived-in relationships. Captain America: Civil War starts off as an engaging debate about superhero oversight, then sidesteps those issues in favor of a petty scrap where Iron Man tries to murder a former ally, with a motivation self-described solely as “He killed my mom” — that mom being a character the audience has observed for one (1) scene at the beginning of the film.
Thor: Love and Thunder moves Gorr’s daughter Love around the story like a gamepiece: First she dies to motivate the villain, then she’s reconfigured to provide some emotional lift as Thor’s adopted daughter (again, largely off-screen). The late-movie emergence of a secret son of T’Challa in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is primarily to reassure the audience not to fuss too much about Shuri possibly taking over her brother’s role; there will be another male Black Panther someday!
In the same spirit, fans seemed to love Tony Stark’s relationship with his young daughter in Avengers: Endgame, but it barely amounts to more than the cute catchphrase “I love you 3000.” MCU movies generally seem more comfortable dealing with the franchise’s familiar found-family dynamics than with real families. (There are a very few exceptions, like Ant-Man’s daughter Cassie.) So adults bickering like children are afforded a lot of narrative and character-driven attention, while actual children and parenthood are largely treated as symbolic fodder for backstory. In this particular case, where the entire back half of the movie focuses on the fate of a baby, a few more scenes of anyone doing actual parenting might have gone a long way, regardless of whether it directly serves the plot.
First Steps is aptly named: It makes some baby-sized movement away from children and families as adorable li’l motivators, and toward characters whose relationships with on-screen family members are part of the present-tense story. There is something touching about Reed Richards attempting to game out all possible child-safety scenarios — eventually on a Galactus-sized scale. But that’s just one aspect of his role as a husband and father, and his ultimate acceptance of those risks is, again, based far more on plot than character: The Fantastic Four do defeat Galactus (essentially by pushing him into a hole), and save Sue with Franklin’s unspecified powers.
Because they were eventually able to protect him this time, apparently, it’s somehow OK for their small child to ride along on any manner of world-saving missions, just so long as his car seat stays strapped in. Reed can remain the same guy we barely know at the start of the movie, while Sue simply amps up her considerable powers even more in a demonstration of baby-saving might. (You say mothers can experience a surge of strength when their child is in danger? What a revelation!) The Fantastic Four remain more or less static, at least until a mid-credits scene heralding Franklin’s place in yet another supervillain plot. Their true selfishness doesn’t stem from their determination to not trade their baby’s life for billions of others. It comes from a Cinematic Universe where only a mega-crossover event can inspire true change.
