I so wanted to love Fantastic Four: First Steps. The third cinematic iteration of Marvel Comics’ greatest comics magazine of the 1960s is oh-so-close. The characters are there, the familial love is there, almost all of the elements were there.
But you know what it felt like? Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I was back in the late 1970s — an absolute great Superman movie followed not long after by a movie featuring one of my all-time favorite casts of characters, this time the crew of the starship Enterprise, but even with all of the original ensemble in place, it kind of fell flat.
The Fantastic Four casting director got it right — this is a great team, although Pedro Pascal needs to get over himself and shave the mustache. Reed Richards only has facial hair when he’s been working in the lab for days trying to save the world. And what’s with the orange brick beard that they gave Ben Grimm halfway through the movie? And please don’t get me started about H.E.R.B.I.E., the silly robot pal who never appeared in the comics until the TV cartoon invented it to appeal to the kiddies.
Nitpicks, all. The family of superheroes I remember were all up there on screen. As I suspected, they wisely used the immortal Galactus trilogy of F.F. #48-50 as the foundation of the story.
It’s a very, very good movie that checks most of the boxes, but it didn’t give me the comic-book-geek thrill that Superman did just a couple of weeks earlier. Still, if Superman was a home run, Fantastic Four: First Steps is a solid triple.
I believe it will all come together in the sequel, just like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn saved that franchise. That’s if we get a proper sequel — the blurb at the end of First Steps says the F.F. will return in Avengers: Doomsday.
The Fantastic Four were the heart and soul of Marvel Comics, not Spider-Man, not the X-Men, not the Avengers. They came first, and the whole “Marvel Age of Comics” was built around the Fantastic Four. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben are not supporting characters in the Avengers; they are the root from which everything else grew.
Maybe someday we’ll get the Fantastic Four movie the characters deserve. They’ve got the pieces in place at last, and they’re oh-so-close.
