When it comes to the household names, comic book movies have pretty much figured it out. Starting with Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978, both DC and Marvel have enjoyed inexhaustible bites at the cinematic apple, and while many a lower tier hero has yet to receive a celebrated filmic adaptation, the heavy hitters have all had their day. Most even have champions to chose from, with Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men providing options to meet the specific viewer’s fancy, leaving The Fantastic Four as the lone property with multiple big screen treatments that has yet to fully satisfy. It makes sense that Marvel, whose qualitatiative and commercial stumbles over the past few years have been discussed exhaustively, would look to such tortured yet enviable IP to turn things around, but the opportunity is a double edged sword. Pure success would be wonderful proof of concept that their extended universe is still viable, but another swing and miss could spell a full-on branding disaster. Studio head Kevin Feige, doing his best Reed Richards impression, has crunched the numbers, and while the first option would sure be lovely, door #2 should be avoided at all costs.

One of the surest ways to dodge outright embarrassment is skirting the laborious meet-and-greet doldrums, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, like its summer 2025 panel-bound doppelgänger Superman, treats our collective understanding of graphic-based serials as a given. Introduced to us some decades ago via an Ed Sullivan-style TV special, astronauts Richards (Pedro Pascal), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Sue and Johnny Storm (Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn, respectively) have already come home from their fateful trip to the cosmos, altered DNA in tow. In fact, they’ve even punched four years on the crime-fighting clock, gaining enough worldwide notoriety that the citizens of earth know just who to look for when calamity comes calling in the form of an unnamed, metallic harbinger of doom (Julia Garner). With humanity’s fate in their hands, the superpowered and intellectually-blessed quartet embarks on a mission to save the globe from Galactus (Ralph Ineson), an ill-tempred, sky-scrapping god with a penchant for devouring entire planets from the inside out. Oh, and Sue is pragnant. Try to keep up.

That’s a lot of gobbledygook to unpack in a relatively modest 115 minute runtime, leading director Matt Shakman and his stable of screenwriters to skip past pleasantries in any form. Gobbling up plot like Galactus wolfing down yet another spinning orb, Fantastic Four doesn’t treat its elison of the team’s origin story as a tactical maneuver so much as a mission statement, sliding right by anything that might hamper momentum. These omissions include character development and motivation, scientific jargon, and basic logistics, which have all been removed with surgical precision, lest the whole enterprise experience friction of any kind. Remnants of a more elongated, exposition-laden offering are littered throughout, with side characters popping up before amounting to nothing, and massive narrative machinations condensed into yet another montage, but it’s hard to begrudge the calculus. These movies aren’t exactly high art, and we’ve spent the better part of two decades watching them dutifully explain their own math. Prioritizing aerodynamics gives the flick something of a new flavor, even if it limits the movie’s qualitative ceiling at every turn.

Sprinting to the finish line is only worth it if you’re still enjoying the race, and what Fantastic Four lacks in knowable players and sensible plotting, it more than makes up for aesthetically. Cribbing its retro-futurism from an episode of The Jetsons, production designer Kasra Farahani and his band of art directors go to town with 1960’s New York, juxtaposing flying cars against antiquated billboards, and household robots with the most lovingly corny costumes that mere mortals can conceive. The whole thing is remarkably tactile, a rarity in the Marvel filmography that pairs handsomely with the studio’s best effects work in years. Straying from the Star Wars depiction of interplanetary travel that’s long been industry standard, Four dreams up new imagery for light-speed travel and comes up aces, scoring the same grade when it comes to Garner’s chrome-fitted antagonist. If only all these digital artists lent a hand in the casting department.

Complaining about Pascal’s over-exposure has been a cinephilic pastime for over a year at this point, but all the kvetching often sidesteps his frequently wrongheaded deployment. Rather than orienting itself around his effervescent charisma, Fantastic follows in the footsteps of The Last of Us, Materialists, and Eddington by handcuffing him with another gloomy character defined by interiority. The fun stuff goes to Quinn, but even here, the character feels cut off at the knees, stripped of his ladies man qualities in the hopes of keeping the film’s aw-shucks bonafides in order. Worst of all is Moss-Bachrach, if only because his work on The Bear is so indelible. You simply can’t see the performer behind the motion capture artiface, and while putting to rest the rubber disguise of The Thing’s previous celluloid outings is probably wise, casting a performer of his intrinsic gravity feels like wasting valuable resources. Kirby is best in the batch, but when this is your competition, that’s not saying a whole lot.

In fact, nothing in First Steps is saying much of anything, which makes its heavyweight battle against Superman for the July box office crown so fascinating. Both use idyllic nostalgia as a guiding light for projects that merit a sizable amount of present-day skepticism, but where James Gunn tangles with modernity and nuance for both better and worse, Shakman only aims for competency. He gets there, which is more than can be said of previous Fantastic Four entries, and the ravishing optical enticement is enough to rank it above most everything Marvel has made in the last handful of years, but both of those achievements speak to an all-encompassing lowering of the bar. Making a good movie isn’t easy, but it does get a little simpler when you don’t let dreams of greatness get in the way.