The Fantastic Four: Marvel’s Most Pleasant Film Yet?

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an attractive, retro-chic reboot of one of the comic book publisher’s oldest superhero groups. It’s a handsome movie with many good performances, particularly from its leads, Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Director Paul Rudd has fun dressing the part, and the 1960s-inspired reimagining is a stylish one. But no matter how many explosions occur or how many characters holler in the climactic battle against the universe’s mightiest villain, there’s never much at stake, either dramatically or emotionally.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens on a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss, who, not incidentally, also plays a scientist involved with the heroes’ backstory. It’s a slick way of serving up exposition and getting across how our four Fantastic Ones (Hear that, Marvel? “Fantastic Ones.” That should be a slogan) became who they are. Four years ago, the group took a space mission, got irradiated by cosmic rays that changed their DNA, and returned to Earth with enhanced powers. Reed, rendered with intelligence and some good comic timing by Pedro Pascal, can stretch his limbs like taffy. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue can turn invisible and blast out force fields. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny can catch fire and fly, while Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben has irreversibly turned into a 7-foot-tall rock monster: The Thing.

The film has some great lines and set pieces—Johnny eating a sandwich, passing some flame out to Reed to roast it, as Reed himself cooks another in the glowing friction of space, before he runs out of oxygen and promptly freezes. The humor is irreverent and deliberate, the costumes and sets are incredibly detailed, and the visual effects serve the plot, not the other way around.

The first major problem with The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the same one that also exists in the Fantastic Four’s comics and early Marvel movies: It’s very good at world-building, but not as strong at actual storytelling. The family that the film makes the core of is there literally from the opening scene, with Sue and Reed sleeping in the same bed. She finds out early in the movie that she’s pregnant, and it makes Reed both appropriately anxious and sweetly loving. He has H.E.R.B.I.E. run around their place and their science lab, putting safety straps on all the sharp corners and lab equipment. Johnny and Ben then get to hash out the same old sibling-sibling relationship they’ve had since they became a family, except it’s now played for both comic relief and because it’s clear they both have huge crushes on their future position as uncles.

There’s no time to revel in the joys of domestic bliss before a ruddy, armored, cosmic floating head comes to announce the end of the world. The herald is a silver-skinned siren played in motion capture by Julia Garner, and the Silver Surfer makes his debut in all his metallic, roided-out, gleaming menace. But as intimidating as he looks and as fun as it is to hear his famous surfy 1970s surf-rock-inspired voice, Johnny has bigger things to do than fight a being so alien and large. (Namely, stare at and oggle the Surfer’s space babe usher.)

Marvel Comics’ Golden-Age villain Galactus is an animated eight-armed, universal-destruction-bot with 1,000-year-old thought-thoughts and glowing, incandescent eyes that lay waste to entire planets as he migrates toward his next meal. The Fantastic Four: First Steps finds him not even as far away as his home galaxy and on a collision course with Earth. He has dispatched the Silver Surfer to give the people of Earth fair warning: The planet will be next on his menu, aye, prepare for destruction most foul. This makes Reed and company even more determined to stop the planet-devouring juggernaut.

The movie, though, is rather light on actual mayhem or panic. Sure, Galactus is first glimpsed when he sets his sights on a giant cloud city full of flying machines and car garages. But as Johnny points out after they escape in their flying car, no one else had come to Earth’s defense. When Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny follow Galactus into space to get him to turn away, they at least have an army of giant insectoids to fight in a floating space mountain fortress of a flying city. The scenes are more comic book than quantum physics, with streaks of white light as characters move or phase, plumes of flame trailing Reed and Johnny, and general colorful cartoonish explosions.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps frequently seems to trip over itself between sincerity and silliness. The scenes with Sue and Reed and the preparation for the new baby are both believable and endearing and absurd in their soft-focus, pastel-colored hue. The familiar theme music also feels a little on the nose: you might find yourself remembering the film and not what’s on the screen while you’re actually in it.

Overall, though, The Fantastic Four: First Steps feels oddly inert, despite all the beautiful action set pieces it has. Marvel films are known for their action, but rarely is that their only selling point. For a generation that has grown up on (or at least with) the company’s movies, First Steps may be a needed palate cleanser. But for everyone else, it’s an occasionally strong superhero movie trying to pass for the whole carton.