The Fantastic Four: First Steps features a guy who can set himself on fire and fly, a woman who soars through the cosmos on a surfboard and a planet-eating titan who could keep Godzilla as a pet.
But the movie’s most important character? He’s less than two feet tall and doesn’t say a word.
Franklin, son of Fantastic Four members Reed Richards and Sue Storm, stands (well, crawls) at the center of First Steps. He’s the crux on which the movie turns—the reason why there’s a movie at all. In the best movie ever about Marvel’s First Family, this family member takes center stage.
Oh, and he’s not even born for a good chunk of the film.
I really liked First Steps for a lot of reasons—most of which you can read in our review. Yes, it has some issues that families will want to be aware of before they watch. But it’s a fun, stylish, surprisingly heartfelt film that talks a lot about family.
But—unintentionally, perhaps—First Steps also might be one of the most pro-life films I’ve seen. Let me tell you why.
An Unexpected Gift
The movie basically begins with a pregnancy test, a surprisingly intimate yet relatable way with which to roll into a superhero movie. Sue discovers that she’s pregnant and tells her husband, Reed, almost immediately.
Reed is shocked. They’d been trying to have a baby for years, he reminds Sue. And, naturally, they’re thrilled.
But Reed’s also worried. What if the cosmic rays that so altered their own physiology have an impact on their preborn child, too? What if they make him sick? What if they’ve altered him in some horrible way? Reed wants to conduct a bevy of tests to make sure that their baby is fine. And finally—in order to reassure her anxious husband—Sue, aka the Invisible Woman, lies down on Reed’s super-advanced examination table and turns her womb transparent, so the two can see the living, beautiful being inside.
The pro-life/pro-choice debate can come with a certain level of linguistic self-delusion: When a baby is conceived, we can look at the product of that conception and see—or say we see—very different things.
When a woman becomes pregnant and decides to abort, she may think of the embryo growing inside her as simply an extension of her own body—and, as such, she has every right to keep or dispose of it as she will.
But those of us on the other side of the argument believe that we’re talking about more than an extension of someone’s body. It’s a new life, with rights of his or her own. And that first unalienable right, as so well expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is that of life.
Most moms, when they decide to stay pregnant, understand that something very precious, very miraculous is taking place. They are growing a baby. It doesn’t matter if the mom is pro-life or not. It barely matters how long the pregnancy has been. The being inside her is a new life—growing and changing. And in the sort of paradox that lies at all of our most beautiful mysteries, that life is both a part of the mother and distinct from it.
When Reed and Sue talk about their child, they talk about that baby as a baby—with all the excitement and anxiety that any expecting couple would have.
Insatiable Hunger for Death
Someone else sees that child as unique and precious, too: Galactus, the movie’s world-devouring bad guy.
Galactus (accompanied by his herald, the Silver Surfer), eats planets for a living. Naturally, Earth is next on the menu, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
But when he detects Sue and Reed’s preborn baby—and detects limitless power within him—he makes an offer: If Sue gives him the child, he’ll spare the earth. And before the Fantastic Four leave Galactus’ orbit, the Silver Surfer actually tries to take the baby out of Sue’s womb.
Galactus doesn’t want to kill the baby, though: He wants to use Franklin. He sees the potential in the preborn child and believes that Franklin might well become his successor—a chilling thought indeed.
But even though Galactus doesn’t want to explicitly terminate the baby, let’s consider what Galactus seems to represent: death.
Galactus is equated to a god throughout the film, but what a dark god he would be. Galactus doesn’t just gobble up planets but the lives therein (and each planet he has consumed is indeed a populated one). He comes slowly and inexorably—just as our own final days come. He devours without hatred or remorse. He simply devours.
“He doesn’t want,” the Silver Surfer says. “He feeds.”
Like death, Galactus cannot be stopped, cannot be sated. His coming is presented as an inevitability.
And Galactus wants to take Sue and Reed’s baby.
And so, in the context of the film, Sue must decide: Should she give her baby to a personification of death itself? Or should she … choose life?
You Knitted Me Together in My Mother’s Womb
We have little question what Sue will choose. Even with the fate of the world weighing down the other end of the scales, Sue chooses life. Life for her baby. Life for this precious treasure. Life even knowing that Franklin’s future is filled with uncertainty. She chooses life.
And while the baby is born soon after Galactus offers his choice, Sue’s defense of her child—be he born or preborn—is incredibly fierce. Whether Franklin is in the womb or outside it, Sue’s love is just as strong, just as powerful and just as real: He is her child.
But Sue—along with the rest of her family, the Fantastic Four—refuses to accept Galactus’ binary choice, either. When she tells the world that she’s keeping and protecting her baby, she appeals to them as a mother. But she also promises to protect the Earth as well.
“I will not sacrifice my child for this world,” she tells them. “But I will not sacrifice this world for my child.”
We hear that Sue will move “heaven and Earth” for her baby. Just as so many mothers would do and have done. The child has done nothing to earn such devotion and loyalty. He cannot (apparently) pay back such sacrifice and heroism. And yet Sue is willing to give every breath she has in order to protect her son.
It’s the sort of equation that doesn’t make sense on a spreadsheet. But in God’s calculus, and in the calculus of family, it’s the best sort of bottom line. Parents will sacrifice a great deal for their children, but that sacrifice doesn’t begin at birth: It begins at conception.
Franklin’s story arc here echoes Psalm 139:13-14:
For you formed my inward parts;
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
My soul knows it very well.
In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Franklin is fearfully and wonderfully made indeed. Sue knows it. Galactus knows it. And, if we watch the film carefully, we know it, too.
