Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

 

My family used to have a running gag about 2006’s Firewall. As legend had it, a good friend teared up at the end of that mediocre digital thriller starring Harrison Ford. Firewall wasn’t especially great and wasn’t especially cathartic, making those tears somewhat surprising.

There was no malice in the gag, by the way—the joke was on us, a family rife with emotional movie watchers. When a movie got somebody choked up, the line to regain composure was easy.

“Well, it wasn’t Firewall.”

I’ve watched roughly 1,050 since 2020, and I’ve felt some emotion during maybe half of those movies. It isn’t remarkable to feel some tingling behind my eyes. It’s part of how I watch movies.

Still, I don’t always expect it to happen. During All of Us Strangers? Of course. During Past Lives? Absolutely. During Challengers? A tad unexpected, but that ending is pretty great.

But during Fantastic Four: First Steps? During a Marvel movie with a retread plot and characters I couldn’t care less about? No way. No chance.

Ahem.

Fantastic Four: First Steps follows the titular hero team after their power-granting accident. Cerebral genius Reid (Pedro Pascal) has married Sue (Vanessa Kirby), and together they live and work with Sue’s energetic brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and their reserved buddy Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). When a silver alien (Julie Garner) arrives to announce impending planetary destruction, the four heroes set aside inconvenient personal timing to barter with the cosmic villain behind the threat. When Galactus (Ralph Ineson) insists on a terrible sacrifice in exchange for salvation, the quartet must escape, regroup, and reason out a way to protect Earth.

Usually, I loathe comic book films with grand stakes. If Earth’s in danger, my eyes roll, my brain goes numb because I’ve seen it so often. Likewise, I resist the self-serious entries in the Marvel canon, leaning toward escapist larks that do just a little more than they have to a la Thunderbolts*. In this way, Fantastic Four: First Steps should have turned me off almost immediately. The stakes have never been bigger—Thanos took half, remember—and rarely has a story in their portfolio skewed so serious that the obligatory quips feel grossly out of place.

Yet Fantastic Four: First Steps works. It works unbelievably well.

 

And that starts with the performances. Pascal sets the tone with a portrayal of Reid that feels vulnerable. His scientist solves every problem and wins every fight, but the failed confrontation with Galactus rattles him. He becomes skittish and almost paralyzed in thought; he loses faith in his once unimpeachable ethics. There’s a great moment when he makes a press conference announcement and the reporters receive that news poorly; Pascal keeps his expression subdued, but you can see the shock on Reid’s face. He’s spoken like there was no question, like his decision was above reproach; their opposition reminds him how selfish his decision actually was. He knew that all along; he’s still shocked he lost their love enough that they’d remind him.

Kirby is an even bigger reason this works. Sue is dignified, thoughtful, and optimistic, but she’s a warm presence in a way the calculating Reid is not. As the only woman on a team of male archetypes, Sue must be the emotional center, and Kirby does so with authentic gravity. Whether Sue’s leading the charge in battle or clutched by medical distress, Kirby’s an electromagnet. It’s she who walloped me with emotion, particularly in two scenes that qualify as spoilers. If you know Kirby’s filmography, the first is incredibly moving for what might be meta-textual reasons; the second excels similarly, particularly because her heroism so closely resembles a labor of a different kind. I thought of Harry Potter here, which sounds silly until you realize what aspect it evokes. These scenes are ridiculous from a story perspective, but they stirred up the swell of emotion I spent the credits trying to tame.

Outside Pascal and Kirby, the other performances struck me as fine. Quinn’s Johnny is impetuous one moment, psychologically deft in the next, but that inconsistency is a minor hindrance. Moss-Bachrach brings lightness to the heaviest character, hinting at relatable texture, but nothing further; I’m hopeful there’s more Ben in future films. Garner gets the complete CGI treatment but wrings some feeling from it, and Ineson is a flat villain but shaded a touch darker than I expected. All bring something, but the script trains our eyes on Kirby and Pascal.

The true third star of Fantastic Four: First Steps is the production design, which immediately sets this apart from anything Marvel’s done outside of Wandavision. Instead of plopping this against a backdrop of our modern world, Fantastic Four: First Steps plays out in a retro-futuristic New York City that often looks pretty spectacular. The landmarks are there—and possibly imperiled—but the alternate world lets curving architecture like the team’s headquarters feel like a part of a recognizable ecosystem. I loved even more how the design choice informed the tech: even when machinery and vehicles do incredibly advanced things, the screens look like ancient radar with blocky pixelated numerals. Every instance lends the movie a varnish of novelty that lets me enjoy the world when the story stretches my patience. It helps, too, that the tech here looks fantastic, as do the old-school sweater uniforms sported by the heroes. Weirdly—but maybe intentionally—it tapped into some of my affection for The Incredibles, which adopted a similar conceit. Whatever the motivation, I can picture this world in a way I cannot the Marvel stories set outside Wakanda. Looking different is a precursor to the movie feeling different.

And it certainly felt different because it really got to me emotionally. My heart broke as the earnest Reid spiraled, and I felt a deep investment in everything Sue went through, but I also caught the wavelength of Johnny’s little-brother frustration and Ben’s unvoiced self-consciousness. Until a certain future villain appears mid-credits, Fantastic Four: First Steps does almost everything right.

It’s a strange world we’re living in when I’m crying at a Marvel movie and unmoved by Celine Song, but I’m not complaining. If Marvel embraced the groundedness and aesthetic freshness of this in more movies, perhaps Marvel fatigue could fade. Regardless, Fantastic Four: First Steps is among the studio’s best since Avengers: Endgame, and with the nifty Thunderbolts* from last month, a terrific sign for the near future. Sign me up for more Kirby, Pascal, and retro-futurism.

Even if their movie’s no Firewall.