Fantastic Four: First Steps is a good movie, well-acted, designed and directed. The Fantastic Four in this film is Flawless. It’s a stained-glass window: a beautiful piece of art that is entirely frozen, without motion or life.
I don’t want to give you the impression I didn’t like the movie, I did. I love these characters and their universe and so much of it was so very well done.
All of the acting was excellent. Reed was the precise balance of ultimate confidence in his own intellect and unabashed insecurity where his family is involved.
Ben was the sad clown, trying to bring smiles to a human race he no longer feels he belongs to.
Sue was powerful and smart and still feminine. She brokered with world leaders and was a wife and mother and there was no need for balance or distinction between the two.
Johnny is not the problem, I really enjoyed the performance, but Johnny is where the problem becomes apparent. When I try to quantify who he is in this movie…there’s nothing there.
The movie tells us multiple times that Johnny is a womanizer and a hot head, but it never shows us either. The only woman beyond his sister he interacts with meaningfully is the Silver Surfer and their interactions aren’t exactly teeming with sexual tension. And as for hothead, he spends most of the film following orders from his family. He’s not reckless, he doesn’t go off half-cocked. Someone tells him what to do and he says “I’m on it!” And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, except that’s not who they’re telling us he is. Johnny Storm translates an Alien Language.
I think the source of the issue is that we’ve picked up the story after the character arcs. Sue has already recognized her own power and taken control of her family’s destiny, Ben has already accepted his ‘monstrous’ fate, Reed is no longer consumed with trying to ‘fix’ what happened to Ben. The world loves and accepts them, to the point that they appear to have a direct contact for world leaders, and the ability to get the entire world to trust them and work together.
There’s no internal conflict, because they’ve already dealt with their character flaws. The Fantastic Four in this film is Flawless. Which leads to a great group of heroes and a strong family, but there’s no drama there, there’s barely story there.
The movie starts with the announcement of Sue’s pregnancy, which is a change of the status quo, but the versions of the characters we get have their shit so together that it doesn’t change anything that matters. Sue says (I’m paraphrasing here) “I will not sacrifice my son to save you. But I will not sacrifice you to save my son either” But we already knew that because (in a stunning reversal of the rest of the narrative) the team has Shown us who they are. There was no need to tell it.
In the 60’s Fantastic Four was fresh and new because, unlike Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, they had flaws and foibles. They argued and made wrong calls and weren’t sure what to do.
This movie represents and almost total lack of understanding of what makes the Fantastic Four beloved. I get how we got here: People are tired of origins, so we jump past it. Critics complain about the “quippy” Marvel Cinematic style, so we get…very few jokes and almost no memorable lines, to the point where somehow Mole Man with like 3 minutes total screentime was my favorite character, because he at least seemed to remember this was a Marvel Movie.
There was a moment, near the end where I thought they were going to do something interesting and kill Sue. She had faced down the devourer or worlds almost single handed and sacrificed herself to save her son, her family and her planet. This could have been an amazing opportunity: an increasingly unhinged Reed, stricken by grief trying every way he can to bring her back, even going so far as to punch the family into another reality in search of answers. Johnny and Ben having to swallow their own loss as so they can be surrogate parents to Franklin. That Fantastic Four, the first family broken and trying to reforge itself bursting into the 616 MCU could have been phenomenal.
But instead Franklin snaps his fingers and she’s back. The moment worked in the film, but does not bode well for power creep in the MCU.
I genuinely enjoyed this movie, but it isn’t what the MCU needed and its not what Marvel’s First Family deserved.