The Fantastic 4: First Steps

The Geometry of a Modern Family

I’m usually suspicious of superhero movies that work this hard to seem cheerful. Too often the brightness feels pasted on, a studio note applied over CGI wreckage. *The Fantastic 4: First Steps* is different because Matt Shakman actually commits to the optimism. Set on Earth-828, an alternate 1960s vision of the future full of gleaming lines and flying cars, the movie wisely skips the origin-story treadmill. No cosmic-ray homework. We arrive after the family has already formed, which gives the film a running start it badly needs.

And no, the retro look isn’t just decoration, though it certainly helps. Shakman, coming off years of playing with television form on *WandaVision*, builds a retro-futurist world where scientific ambition still seems generous instead of ego-driven. Anthony Lane once wrote of another retro-futurist clan that it lets us "imagine, for a couple of hours, what it would feel like to live inside an Alexander Calder mobile." That’s the feeling here too: balance, primary colors, clean motion, everything hanging in the right place until it doesn’t.



The movie turns when Galactus sets his sights on Earth-828 and makes his monstrous offer: the planet survives only if Reed Richards and Sue Storm surrender their unborn child. It’s an effectively cruel premise. All the polished mid-century confidence cracks at once, and the film stops being a breezy science-fiction adventure and turns into a family argument about what survival is allowed to cost.

Pedro Pascal is really interesting in that setup because his recent screen persona comes loaded with protective-father energy. From *The Mandalorian* to *The Last of Us*, he has spent years embodying men who would burn down the world for a child. Here, Shakman uses that baggage against him. Pascal’s Reed is cold, analytic, almost clinically composed. In the scene where the team debates Galactus’s demand, he doesn’t argue with heat; he calculates. The shoulders tighten. The voice flattens. The blinking nearly stops. You keep waiting for the expected warmth to break through, and it doesn’t, which is exactly what makes the performance unsettling.



Vanessa Kirby has the more difficult job because Sue has to feel both wounded and steady, the emotional center of a man reducing people to variables. Her best scene comes late in the second act, when she realizes Reed has already worked out a path that ends with their child sacrificed. Kirby smartly avoids the obvious explosion. The panic arrives through the body first—shallow breath, locked jaw, the awful effort of staying upright—and then, through the logic of the film’s powers, she simply disappears. She makes invisibility feel like an act of emotional self-erasure. It’s a clever, painful beat.

The movie is less sure of itself once it has to deliver the mandatory cosmic action. Shakman knows how to arrange color; the blues and whites of space are gorgeous. But the big fights blur into familiar blockbuster noise. The cuts get faster, the feeling gets thinner, and Michael Giacchino’s big choral score starts pushing emotion the scenes haven’t fully earned.



If that third act sinks it for you, I get it. By the Silver Surfer showdown, I was glancing at the clock and wishing the film would return to the Richards’ living room. That’s where the real danger is anyway. *First Steps* isn’t most interesting when a gigantic purple god is threatening Earth. It’s most interesting when it asks whether a man can be so smart he loses touch with the human obligation right in front of him.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Under all the Jetsons sheen, the movie is poking at a nasty, worthwhile question about what we owe the people closest to us. I’m not sure it fully solves that question, but I was relieved it asked it at all.