Fantastically Dull ‘THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS’ Miscalculates Introduction to First Family

The MCU is dead. The MCU is back. The MCU is dead. The MCU is back. Someone put a fork in it. She’s cooked. But just you wait until the next one! And on and on the content carousel spins. Even as someone who had gripes with the Marvel machine well before Endgame, I found myself tossing out more than a few positive reviews in that era. In fact, there was a time when I felt rather pot-committed to the whole enterprise, even when its storytelling got obnoxiously self-aggrandizing and interconnected. Post-Endgame, it’s mostly been a tragic slide into mediocrity with some blips of quality. A few titles have become the lone bright spots in an otherwise bleak Phase 4/5 wasteland. Meanwhile, Ant-Man: Quantumania, The Marvels, Thor: Love and Thunder, Eternals, Captain America: Brave New World, and Thunderbolts all earned a solid splat from my little corner of the internet. Now, with James Gunn’s DCU breathing heavily down Marvel’s neck and the franchise’s future hinging on two upcoming Avengers movies (featuring Robert Downey Jr. returning, but as Doctor Doom, for reasons not disclosed here), The Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives with downright heroic expectations. Expectations that are promptly crushed under the weight of its own blandness.

In their fourth onscreen outing, and first proper introduction into MCU canon, Marvel’s “first family” is ushered in with all the excitement of a mandatory meeting that totally could have been an email. Rather than retread the origin story (cosmic radiation + space mission = superpowers), the film drops us in four years after their transformation. On paper, that seems like the right move. In execution, it’s a total shrug. While skipping familiar ground is admirable in theory, what we get instead is a story so flat, so flavorless, that you start wishing for another hour-long radiation sequence just to feel something again.

Set on Earth-828, First Steps finds the Fantastic Four already four years into their superhero tenure. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) are expecting a child, and between bouts of saving the world alongside Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss‑Bachrach), they share the exciting news of their expanding family. The celebration is short-lived. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) crashes in with a cosmic heads-up for the F4: Earth has been marked for destruction by Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a skyscraper-sized devourer of worlds. With entire planets vanishing across the galaxy, the team sets out to confront Galactus directly and negotiate for Earth’s survival before they get swallowed up before Sue can give birth.

Vanessa Kirby is the only one here who comes close to earning the “fantastic” label. She injects Sue Storm with a sort of maternal intensity that doubles as team MVP energy: strong, grounded, quietly commanding. She’s great. Everyone else is… present. Ebon Moss‑Bachrach has potential, but his character’s thinly written for someone made of solid rock, his edges erased as if with sandpaper. Joseph Quinn ticks boxes, but he’s lacking in X-factor. He’s never quite fiery enough and never shouts “Flame on.” This, despite the fact that most of his interactions with The Thing involve trying to get him to say his own cartoonish catchphrase, “It’s clobberin’ time.” It’s weird writing, like the film wants to wink at the inherent silliness of these characters, but only selectively. The script from the committee of Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer acknowledges some of the silliness of the original text while pretending the rest doesn’t exist, drenching it in self-serious bathos.

And then there’s Pedro Pascal. Pascal has proven to be one of the most compelling screen presences of the last decade, but you wouldn’t know it from this performance. He’s low-energy, weirdly disengaged, and somehow manages to make Marvel’s “smartest man alive” one of its dullest protagonists. There were whispers of Pascal being groomed to lead the future Avengers lineup but if that’s the plan, that scheme needs to go the way of Kang. The only thing keeping him from being a total dead weight is his chemistry with Kirby, who once again proves she deserves better than being stuck babysitting a surprisingly limp ensemble.

Michael Giacchino’s score has some flair, and the production design from Kasra Farahani at least tries to differentiate itself from the usual Marvel mush. From a purely technical aspect, the window dressings are all a little more stylized, a little more lived-in, but they’re in service of narrative goop; fancy fixtures on a house that’s built on shaky ground. There’s nothing propulsive about the plot. No real emotional throughline or well-built stakes. So it doesn’t matter that these technical elements pop a bit more than usual. They’re just a handful of decent design choices wrapped around a story that forgets to make you care.

There were moments in the dull quiet of the theater that I actually found myself wishing I was watching Fox’s 2015 reviled version with Miles Teller. At least that disaster swung for something at times. First Steps doesn’t even bother. It spends 45 minutes getting started, then sprints toward a rushed finale that barely registers as climatic. It claims to skip the origin story, but then awkwardly shovels exposition through historical montages and clunky dialogue anyway. SparkNotes dressed up as narrative. The team dynamic—so crucial to a successful version of the Fantastic Four story—is practically nonexistent. We’re told they’re a family. We know there should be some tension but it’s filed down to a nub. Instead, we get plenty of hand-waving and yada-yada-ing and villain speechifying.

Johnny Storm is vaguely a hothead but not really. Ben Grimm is maybe upset about being a rock dude – a whiff of a romantic subplot between him and a schoolteacher played by Natasha Lyonne suggests the anatomical complexity of rock-human relations but it’s so undercooked it barely rises even to the level of suggestion. Reed and Sue have some marital complications born of raising a son in end times. But none of it lands. The film keeps insisting it’s about family, but only in the Fast & Furious sense: say “family” enough times and hope it counts for substance. It doesn’t.

Then there are the villains: two featureless slabs of digital exposition. Galactus is a towering, skyscraper-sized space god who eats planets because he’s just super hungry or something. There’s nothing to distinguish him from the parade of other universe-ending Marvel monsters other than his size. Sure, he’s a planet eater instead of an inter-dimensional demonic entity or life-seeding cosmic Gods, but the template is the same. The stakes are so enormous they loop back around into meaninglessness. When the scale gets so big you have to always open the aperture all the way, everything just gets overexposed. The Silver Surfer should fare a little better, but doesn’t really. She’s Galactus’s herald, a cosmic messenger of doom and gloom, but again, more concept than character. Julia Garner and Ralph Ineson are both fantastic actors, but they’re buried under monotone speech patterns and emotion-smoothing digital effects. The result is flat. Lifeless. Another pair of wasted performances in a sea of the forgettable pixels that Marvel calls villains.

The post-Endgame MCU has been wildly inconsistent, but what unifies most of these projects is how profoundly disappointing they are. They either swing too big and miss hard, or they play it so safe they put you to sleep. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is one of the latter. It has just enough potential on paper to make you believe it might be interesting. But then it isn’t. You’ve got production design with a hint of personality, and a cast that could’ve worked with better material. But the film never figures out how to introduce these characters in a compelling way. Maybe the plan is that they’re saving the good stuff for the sequel. Doctor Doom is secreted offscreen, waiting to make his debut the upcoming Avengers entries. But leaving him out here robs this movie of the one character who might’ve added some actual dramatic heft. Instead, we get a well-intentioned mess. Not the worst Marvel movie ever made, but one of the most disappointing, precisely because the bar was supposed to be higher.

The packed theater I saw it with was palpably underwhelmed. A few scattered chuckles here and there, mostly thanks to Paul Walter Hauser’s Mole Man, who steals every second he’s onscreen and deserves an entire spinoff of his own. But that’s about it. The energy in the room never found a spark because the movie never finds a spark. By the time it threatens you with some energy, it’s already at curtain call. The obligatory mid-credits scene got a minor jolt of applause, a bigger rise than the actual content of the actual movie people came to see. The end-credits scene however is so pointless it almost feels like a provocation. Another Marvel tease with no payoff, no excitement, no reason to exist. Once again, Marvel swings and misses. But this whiff stings more than usual.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ is yet another reminder that Marvel’s multiverse era is more about setups and disappointments than payoffs. And while this entry is relatively self-contained, it still very much feels like just that: first steps. There’s talent all over this thing, but none of it is enough to make this limp reboot feel anything close to fantastic.