Film Review - Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the first Fantastic Four movie under the Marvel Studios banner after they got the rights to the characters back due to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, this movie sees Mr Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Eden Moss-Bachrach) face off against the planet eater Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) while also raising their newborn child.

I have had guarded hopes for this movie primarily because this movie is one of they key reasons that we lost 20th Century Fox as an independent movie studio as many Marvel fans were more interested in the MCU getting the right to these characters (along with the X-Men) than whether tearing away at decades of tradition was the right thing to do (then again Fox themselves didn’t help as they utterly failed to learn from their success with X-Men when they had the Fantastic Four rights) but could this movie overcome that feeling or not.

Well it’s a little of both as this movie is a mixed bag for me, first off the cast are really good especially Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm a character that the Fox era didn’t really know what to do with apart from cast Jessica Alba as she was a hot young sex symbol at that time (and those movies tried to get her naked as much as they could) or cast Kate Mara who was all at sea in the role thanks to inconsistent direction, that isn’t the case here as Kirby really shines in both the maternal and heroic parts of the character and she has good chemistry with Pedro Pascal.

As for Pascal as Mr Fantastic, he is okay in the role and does a good job but I prefer Ioan Gruffud from the earlier movies as he felt more believable to me as the smartest man alive and his stretching effects looked a bit better than they do here, the same also goes for Quinn and Bachrach in their roles and like Pascal they do a good job but I preferred Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis from the earlier films and Bachrach in particular felt more like a copy of Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk after a while.

And here is where I will transition to what I didn’t like as much about the film and first off the setting of this retro 1960’s type Earth began to put me off after a while of looking at it, again to go back to the earlier movies (which weren’t the best I know) but those did a great job establishing these heroes in a modern day setting whereas here we have this retro future feel complete with a Rosie the Robot/R2-D2 type character in HERBIE and it feels like its only really being done here so the filmmakers can have the retro technology and costumes and buildings.

And this feels apt in how the film treats Johnny Storm, again Quinn is good in the role but I really wish that the character was more of a Sean Connery James Bond type especially given the 60s inspired setting and something that Evans did so well with his portrayal whereas here he feels more like a cog in a wheel that the film doesn’t really know what to do with at times because it fears embracing that playboy part of his persona from the books.

Secondly the use of Galactus and the Silver Surfer as villains weren’t as good as they could’ve been, Ineson and Garner are okay in those roles but they don’t really do much apart from provide some action scenes, some exposition and background to their characters and then a glorified punching bag for the third act climax and Galactus in particular is a villain that you need to have real genuine stakes with as fighting him should be like when the X-Men face off against Apocalypse, a grand larger than life villain who threatens all around him and all the heroes can do is scratch him while he gloats about how eternal and all powerful he is.

Here Galactus says a few lines but doesn’t carry that grandiose weight that these villains can and should do in these types of movies and it’s one of the key reasons I have grown so tired of these Marvel Studios movies.

And so that was Fantastic Four: First Steps and I can’t help but think that if 20th Century Fox had bothered to learn from their success with X-Men they would still exist as an independent movie studio and we would have great movies with these characters like we do with the X-Men but we are where we are and this one has a good cast but its retro future look bored me and the villain doesn’t feel like the threat he should, 2 and a half out of 5.