REVIEW: Finally, the Fantastic Four get the movie they (and we) deserve

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Flame on! Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting. Everything about this amiable adventure – its space-age idiom, its sub-two-hour footprint, its emphasis on a literal nuclear family of heroes – has been cannily calibrated to dispel the air of listlessness that’s engulfed the Marvel Cinematic Universe in recent years.

The difficulties adapting the First Family of Marvel Comics go back further than that. Josh Trank’s 2015 “Fantastic Four” flamed out despite the presence of Michael B. Jordan as Johnny “The Human Torch” Storm. Tim Story’s 2005 “Fantastic Four” and its 2007 sequel both had Chris Evans playing that physiological hothead, but were too forgettable to disqualify him from suiting up as Captain America later. Most lurid of all was the early ’90s “The Fantastic Four” (italics mine) – rushed to completion by schlock auteur Roger Corman on an austerity budget of $1 million just so producer Bernd Eichinger could hang onto the rights.

Those prior iterations hail from a more innocent age of corporate hegemony, before the acquisition of both Marvel and Fox – holder of the Fantastic Four and X-Men movie licences – by Disney, whose appetites rival those of the new film’s major threat, the giant purple planet-eater Galactus. True to creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s crazypants vision, this deity’s genocidal pig-out is preceded by a visit to our doomed planet from his emcee and enforcer, the Silver Surfer. (Julia Garner plays the surfer in “First Steps,” and despite being coated in digital chrome, she conveys palpable melancholy.)

After opening in media res via a TV special celebrating the Fantastic Four’s many victories, “First Steps” quickly puts the family in family film, with Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm contemplating a home pregnancy test – one of the more prosaic technological anachronisms in this alternate early 1960s, which also has flying cars and faster-than-light travel. “Nothing will change,” says her spouse, Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards (the ubiquitous but still welcome Pedro Pascal), because even super-geniuses can be hella dumb. That’s our movie: What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Violet, Planet-Devouring God.

That Sue is in a family way doesn’t stop her from blasting off with her family to negotiate with and/or defeat Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson), who demands a biblical tribute. Unwilling to pay up, the Fantastic Four get to work on Plan B, which involves uniting every government on Earth in a coordinated defense requiring global power conservation. (One amusing effect of the brownout is that the Thing can’t shave his granite face.) That all this unfolds in just a few brisk scenes with nary a hint of dissent is indicative of the dramatic opportunities that get overlooked when storytellers are bent on efficiency. Still, in an era when blockbuster run times have stretched out longer than Mr. Fantastic’s rubbery limbs, it’s a refreshing change.

Clearly, Marvel and DC have been reading the same feedback cards. Like the equally pithy new “Superman,” “First Steps” eschews its heroes’ oft-told origin and drops us into a world where Reed, Sue, her brother Johnny and gentle-geologic-giant Ben “the Thing” Grimm are already beloved public figures. The director is Matt Shakman, who helmed the memorable MCU streaming series “WandaVision,” where each episode was a pastiche of a distinct era of television. I am duty-bound to tell you “First Steps” is set on Earth-828, a dimension removed from all the other Marvel heroes – for now, anyway. Maybe that’s the reason cinematographer Jess Hall and production designer Kasra Farahani have been permitted to give “First Steps” a distinct retro-futuristic look that escapes the house-style visual tedium of the MCU. Its off-world middle act evokes the cosmic majesty of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” more than the screensavery muck of prior spacefaring Marvel films.

Equally remarkable is that no member of the cast is ever dwarfed by the extinction-level machinations around them. Pascal and Kirby, in particular, tuck into the nuances of their partnership in ways seldom seen in these films. Even the minor players – Paul Walter Hauser’s comic Mole Man, Natasha Lyonne as a Hebrew schoolteacher drawn to the canonically Jewish Mr. Grimm despite his igneous orange bod – leave us wanting more.

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Three stars. Rated PG-13. At area theatres. Superhero action, a zero-gravity childbirth sequence, mild cussing. 118 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.