Is Fantastic Four 2025 Worth Watching? Here’s the Verdict

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is fun, sleek, and nostalgic. A colorful, candy-coated do-over of one of the publisher’s first comic book superhero teams, the film is full of good performances (particularly from Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and a high style with which to deliver them. But for all of its enjoyable retro touches, it also never feels particularly tense or picks up much emotional momentum at all.

Producer Kevin Feige called the film “a no-homework-required experience.” That may be the best way to sum up Marvel’s latest movie: a superhero outing free of complicated introductions or tenuous connections to its expanding cinematic universe. In a landscape where too many Marvel movies require a mastery of multiverses, cameos, and spin-offs, it’s nice to have a simple one. First Steps eschews the complicated continuity of previous Fantastic Four adaptations, simply reintroducing the group’s four key players (Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm) and their immediate mission. If it has a fault, the film is too content with being simple.

The film begins with a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss, who wisely serves as a convenient mouthpiece for the first half-hour recap of how the Fantastic Four got to be the Fantastic Four. Four years earlier, a space-based science mission went sideways when the crew was exposed to high radiation that changed their DNA. Reed (thoughtful and dry with the right amount of humor, thanks to Pedro Pascal) discovered he could stretch his body into an elastic contortion. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue could go invisible and blast force fields. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny became the Human Torch, capable of igniting and taking to the air in flames. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm eventually shrunk and hardened into The Thing, a rock-covered, super-strong giant.

Living together in what appears to be a mid-century modern compound in space, the team zooms around in flying cars, talks shop over chalkboard equations, and has a toddler-sized robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. that buzzes around the kitchen cleaning up after them. First Steps feels entirely of its chosen period, one where all the showrooms and waiting rooms are retro-futurism: square televisions, no cell phones, and retro design elements at every turn. It’s as if the Marvel Universe collided with The Jetsons and Lost in Space at the 1960s conventions.

As cute as that aesthetic is, the plot doesn’t quite carry the same momentum. While it’s about four things, the key through-line of First Steps is family. Reed and Sue are close, and they’re the parents of the group. Sue is pregnant, which we learn almost immediately, and Reed is a mix of nervous and adoring. In one lovely scene, he has H.E.R.B.I.E. spray wash their home and even the shared science lab with safety foam for babyproofing. Johnny and Ben bicker like siblings and add a sense of comic relief, but both also clearly revel in the idea of becoming uncles.

But before the family can get too comfortable, the film once again reminds us that all things are eventually lost to cosmic forces, radioactive materials, and the passing of time. Galactus, a gigantic armored figure with glowing red eyes, is on a trajectory that’s going to hit Earth, which he plans to eat. The eponymous Fantastic Four are very much on his radar, but he dispatches a herald first to give them the bad news. Galactus’ herald is a silver-skinned humanoid played in motion capture by Julia Garner. The Silver Surfer swings in with sleek menace, but she also quickly becomes an object of fetishization (and later infatuation) for Johnny.

The action is subdued, given the threats. Chasing Galactus in space and avoiding strikes from the Surfer, the film’s fight sequences are on-brand, which is to say more retro-style eye candy than it is blockbuster frisson. Flight to and from the ship is punctuated by glowing vectors of light, human body parts bursting in flames, and sickly orange blast radii. Sue goes into labor in the movie’s climax as she’s in a precarious position on Galactus’ ship. The baby’s birth and a planet’s destruction take place within the same time frame and are presented with a similar visual stylization: like all of First Steps, it’s just slightly surreal.

That combination of sincerity and silliness is perhaps the best way to describe the movie. The intent is there for emotional payoff, but the soft colors and pastel aesthetic often swallow those moments. Stakes never really feel high or visceral, even when the entire world is ending. It’s as much a children’s adventure yarn as it is an action-packed superhero saga.

First Steps is a mild diversion for Marvel’s universe, a reminder of a simpler time before everyone was mired in personal identity crises. It’s well-cast, well-acted, and gorgeously designed. And it might be just what someone is looking for, if they’re in the mood for something that has far more whimsy than world-ending weight to it. For others, it may be a beautifully wrapped gift that doesn’t quite live up to the contents inside.