Fantastic Four: First Steps 2025

I will say that it’s been rather nice to get back into watching superhero movies after such a long break. I’ve long railed against the term “Superhero fatigue” and while I do still think that it’s not an actual thing – it’s more an excuse for lesser quality superhero movies to explain their lower than usual box office returns – I do think it did hit me personally after running this site for ten years. But I’ve been enjoying this catch up of the MCU that I’m about halfway through already, at least if I skip the TV series that I’ve missed, and I’m excited to catch up on DC movies as well as go back through and hit some of the lower budget fare that’s come and gone and those that I still hadn’t gotten around to. This latest movie is the most recent MCU film to have been released so I am skipping over a few titles, but I knew that this one was basically a stand alone movie that’s set in a different universe so I figured it wasn’t a big deal to skip ahead. It’s also nice that it wasn’t an origin story, and I dug the retro futuristic 60’s aesthetic. I’m honestly not sure entirely how well this movie was received, but as with the last two MCU catch up movies I rather enjoyed it and it was nice to revisit a Fantastic Four movie. I’m not completely sure that they completely hit the nail on the head of getting the Fantastic Four right on their fourth try (and fifth movie), it was a pretty decent attempt.

One of the more interesting elements of this movie is that it’s not an origin story, and also the Fantastic Four themselves are treated as celebrities being the only superheroes in this universe. While it’s more common in the MCU these days to forego a secret identity, it’s worth remembering that in the comics, the Fantastic Four were one of the first superheroes that didn’t have secret identities. They still had code names like Mr. Fantastic and the Thing, but they were also just as commonly known as Reed Richards and Johnny Storm. But what’s just as interesting is how the film used their fame throughout the story. In the beginning, their fame was used in place of an origin story as their guest spot on a talk show was used to give the audience a catch up origin story for the team without having to show it in its entirety. But what was even greater was during the main conflict of the movie when they had the choice of giving up their infant son to Galactus in order to save the entire Earth, their fame became a liability as everyone knew who they were and where they lived and gathered en masse to try to protest the family’s perceived selfishness because they wouldn’t sacrifice their child to save the world.

That also leads into the other interesting aspect of this story, the ethical choices that it puts the family through. Besides just having a child between two superheroes with cosmically altered DNA, there is the underlying ethical question that hangs in the air from the time Galactus poses this agreement to the family to when they finally manage to defeat him. It also is combined with the Silver Surfer who sacrificed herself by becoming Galactus’s herald in order to save her own planet and yet became the destroyer of several other planets full of intelligent life in the process. Though she does ultimately redeem herself by giving the final push herself in the final battle with Galactus. There’s also a more subtle question of ethics with how the film portrays the Mole Men aka the Elder of the Subterranea who did initially attack the overworld, but the implication was that he was defeated more through diplomacy rather than brute force and he becomes an ally during the climax.

Getting into the characters themselves as how they were presented in the film. This is a fairly different take on the characters than has been previously shown in the various film incarnations. One of the biggest differences is the character of Johnny Storm. He’s still young and brash, but he’s not quite as childish and immature as the Chris Evans version of him. He still gets to have a brotherly squabble with Ben over a talking toy and Ben’s catchphrase that they explain via the in-universe cartoon of the heroes. But he also gets a great chance to showcase his own intelligence as he deciphers the Surfer’s alien language which he uses to great effect shortly before the climax. Grimm himself is a fairly similar take being the gruff-yet-gentle character who won’t say his cartoon catchphrase for a random passerby on the street but will pick up a car and pretend to throw it for a group of schoolchildren. The film also ignores the sympathy track of him being made of rock. In this universe as a celebrity, he’s treated more like a famous actor rather than a circus freak and the potential love interest doesn’t have to be a blind woman to have a sincere conversation with him. Reed Richards isn’t the full on arrogant know-it-all who cares more about science than he does about anyone else around him. There is still a hint of that, but they balance it out much better with his relationship to Sue and their child. And while he still thinks of the plan to use their child as bait, he knows better than to suggest it as an option, but rather implies it as an out of the question option and one that has to be instigated by Sue rather than by him. Meanwhile, Sue is really the heart of the family and the best character. She is presented as the literal diplomat of the family, gets the best speech, and becomes the lynchpin of the climactic battle.

While there is a lot to like about this movie, there is just something about it that doesn’t quite coalesce together to become greater than the sum of its parts. The action scenes were interesting but fairly minimal and most of them were inconsequential until the final battle. The little snippets at the beginning would have been a bit more fun had they been more fleshed out, though that wouldn’t have made as much sense for the introduction in a talk show setting. There wasn’t really enough room for them to showcase their powers and teamwork, instead the choice to focus on the infant Franklin Richards and the ethical dilemmas of the looming Galactus. The overall pacing felt a little off as well The passage of time from when they came back from Galactus’s meal at another planet that appeared to be uninhabited to his arrival on Earth felt rather nebulous, it seemed to be a matter of months based on how long they claimed that the Surfer would have been stuck in the outskirts of the neutron star, but it didn’t quite feel like it had been that long. The family dynamic also felt a little off, especially with the introduction of the baby during such a stressful time. There wasn’t anything that the film seemed to do wrong per se, but it just always felt like it was missing a little something extra to push it over the top. I will say that I’m looking forward to more adventures with them despite this being my least favorite in this current MCU catch up, though by a pretty small margin. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.