Review: 'The Fantastic 4: First Steps' gives the MCU a fresh start, with frenzied action lightened by the clever creation of a retro-future world

There are two movies battling for our attention during the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — and one works so well it makes up for the deficiencies in the other.

This installment, No. 37 in the sprawling franchise, introduces a set of characters new to the MCU: The Fantastic 4, a group of astronauts and scientists sometimes called “Marvel’s First Family.” As the quick retro-TV documentary at the movie’s beginning explains, the brainy Dr. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) led a space mission with his best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his wife, Sue Storm Richards (Vanessa Kirby), and Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn). 

That mission hit a cosmic storm, and the radiation gave all four of them incredible powers. Reed can stretch and contort his body like rubber. Ben has turned into a super-strong rock creature. Sue can turn invisible at will and manipulate powerful force fields. And Johnny ignites into a fire being who can fly. 

On this parallel universe of Earth, called Earth-828 (the MCU mostly has resided in Earth-616), the quartet aren’t just superheroes but super-celebrities. One of the best throwaway gags comes when Johnny opens a box of Lucky Charms and finds his own miniature action figure inside. It’s a retro-future kind of world, where women dress like Jackie Kennedy in the ‘60s, Johnny records space transmissions on gold-colored vinyl LPs, and the “Fantastic Car” looks like a Hot Wheels car from the days of tail fins. 

Director Matt Shakman is clearly at home building this Earth 828, which isn’t surprising for the guy who helmed the era-hopping “WandaVision.” Production designer Kasra Farahani and crew create a “Jetsons”-style futuristic style that permeates everything from the New York skyline to the Fantastic 4’s living room. The look is reminiscent of Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” and a group of movie geeks could stay up all night debating who influenced who. (One supervillain, a subterranean kingpin called Mole Man and played by Paul Walter Hauser, is reminiscent of The Underminer from “The Incredibles.”) 

Shakman makes us and his cast so at home in this world that we don’t mind so much that the story is a patchwork affair. The script is credited to four writers — Josh Friedman (“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), Eric Pearson (who worked on this year’s “Thunderbolts*”) and the lesser-known team of Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, with Pearson, Kaplan and Springer sharing story credit with Kat Wood — and the seams sometimes show. 

Early in the story, Sue reveals to Reed that she’s pregnant, after years of trying. Any family celebration of this blessed event is cut short when an alien visitor arrives, a silver figure on a celestial surfboard. The Silver Surfer, played in motion capture by Julia Garner, tells the people that Earth has been chosen to be devoured by a planet-chomping being known as Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson). The Fantastic 4 vow that they will do something, though the super-smart Reed isn’t sure what, to stop Galactus.

Shakman stages some action scenes of varying quality — a mid-movie outer-space chase as Sue goes into zero-gravity labor is the most frenetic — and more use of the word “family” than any script this side of a “Fast and the Furious” movie. Through it all, Shakman clearly is having more fun building this cool world than capturing the emotional lives of the superpowered humans who are trying to keep it from being destroyed. 

While this is the first time the Fantastic 4 has been in the MCU, it’s not the first time they’ve been in the movies. There was an atrocious Roger Corman-produced adaptation in the ‘90s (the stars of which make cameos in the early moments here). There were two not-horrible movies, in 2005 and 2007, with Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis in the lead roles. (That one was referenced in “Deadpool and Wolverine.”) And there was the train wreck that was the 2015 version, with Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell. This one, unlike those others, manages to gauge accurately how seriously we’re supposed to take all this, which is maybe 40 percent.

The results are a lot more entertaining and eye-catching than some recent Marvel movies. Maybe because Marvel is starting fresh with these superheroes, and giving them a self-contained story that doesn’t rely on knowledge of 14 other characters presented in nine previous movies and TV shows. (Of course, there’s a mid-credits scene that teases an upcoming supervillain, but that’s almost required in Marvel movies these days.) “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” is charming on its own, and a sign that Marvel is bouncing back after the doldrums caused by the inevitable decline after “Avengers: Endgame.”

——

‘The Fantastic 4: First Steps’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes.