The Fantastic Four First Steps movie review: Vanessa Kirby outshines Pedro Pascal as Marvel’s Fantastic Four reboot kicks off in style

A lot has to do with the fantastic four at the heart of this Marvel family, who live together and eat together, and are played by actors who play well off each other, particularly the always-splendid Kirby. As Susan Storm, who is pregnant at the start of the film and a mom not even halfway into it, her superpowers are not just the force field she can generate or the camouflage she can render as Invisible Woman, but also the fierce strength-cum-vulnerability she brings as a mother.

The fantastic four inhabit Earth-828, an alternative reality of the Marvel world. In terms of our world, it is the 1960s, with the look and feel retro-futuristic, or how the people then imagined the future to be. The TVs remain small and round-edged; there are no other screens barring what Reed (Pascal), the scientist and leader of the group of four, conjures up for his experiments; the people are well-turned-out to a fault; and they turn up good-naturedly to cheer their heroes on.

The most liberating part is that Susan or Sue is not expected to drop everything and play mother now that she is one. Susan and Reed may have misgivings about how or – even what – their child may be, being a product of their cosmically altered DNA, but she heads out to space heavily pregnant when called for duty. No one is ringing alarm bells about her efficiency, so to speak.

The baby angle is very gratuitous at times, right from delivery to when Galactus (Ineson) decides he wants the extremely cute and very expressive little thing for himself. Called Franklin, he is put successively in harm’s way, including being left in a pram-like concoction in the middle of Times Square as bait for an inter-galactic fight.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps movie trailer:

Where Kirby manages just the right mix of emotions to pull this off, the otherwise-reliable Pascal seems out of his depth. He seems confused between his personas of a cold, rational scientist, with his brain and stretchability getting him the moniker ‘Mister Fantastic’, and that of a warm, irrational father – and falls half-heartedly, and surprisingly downbeat, in between.

Unlike Johnny (Quinn), the Human Torch, and Ben (Moss-Bachrach), the Thing, Reed doesn’t get even that one burst of sheer exhilaration that superpowers call for. Johnny is supposed to be the joker of the pack, and Quinn keeps it light and simple, even if he is not as funny as he wants to be. Moss-Bachrach manages to bring real pathos and gravitas to his Ben, which is quite an achievement given he only gets a few moments without the orange rock that is now his being – and that is in a showreel at the beginning, through which the film conveys the fantastic four’s back story efficiently, in spare, broad strokes.

Director Shakman, who is relatively new to these big-ticket franchises, even manages to make Julia Garner, who is little more than liquid, shimmery metal mounted on a surf board, as a living, breathing, hurting woman called Shalla-Ball.

The fantastic four’s First Steps may not yet jump off the page, but hang on: those feet are meant for walking.

The Fantastic Four First Steps movie director: Matt Shakman
The Fantastic Four First Steps movie cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson, Mark Gatiss
The Fantastic Four First Steps movie rating: 3.5 stars