The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Review: FANTASTIC FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUR! The fifth go at making a movie adaptation of Marvel’s First Family, and they finally struck gold. I have definitely seen some online discourse with some people that were not fans, but that was not me. I’m so exhausted by the ‘Marvel is dead’ & ‘Marvel is so back’ discourse because it’s just so lazy & lame. But I will say that Marvel is on a solid streak & comic book movie fans are absolutely eating right now. I have a lot of other thoughts that I was going to try to form into a readable review, but decided bullet points would work better this time around.
The film started off with a GREAT opening montage & setup that was extremely well done & edited.
The whole retro aesthetic of this movie was awesome & I hope that doesn’t get abandoned.
The VXF were mostly very solid. A couple weird things I’ll get into later, but The Thing & Silver Surfer both looked AWESOME.
Loved loved loved the score. That title song gets me hyped up.
The trailers of this film were very well done, with most of what we see in them being from the first parts of the film.
I really liked HERBIE. He’s cool. I’d chill with that clanker.
Every time the Silver Surfer actually surfed, I got chills because it looked AMAZING
High: The casting of this film was amazing. Vanessa Kirby was the easy stand out as Sue Storm so major props to her. Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm looked, sounded, and acted just like I think the character should. Joseph Quinn quite literally was Johnny Storm. And to anyone who doubted Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards: first of all how dare you? Second of all, I hope his performance proved you wrong, because I really enjoyed it. Julia Garner & Ralph Ineson were both also great in their cosmic characters with both feeling like legitimate looming threats. Even smaller roles like Paul Walter Hauser, Sarah Niles, & Natasha Lyonne felt like they fit perfectly into this world.
Low: Now that I’m a dad, anything with kids potentially being in danger gives me ultra anxiety. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I am giving you an official SPOILER WARNING for the rest of my low. Franklin being in danger made me want to throw up. When the Silver Surfer tried to literally reach into Sue’s womb to take him I almost hurled. When they just left him in the portal of that portal I almost vomited. And when Galactus was holding him & it seemed like he might get sucked into space? Dude, I almost had to stand up and pace. The other low is that there were a couple scenes (like at the end of the game when Franklin was on Sue’s chest) in which the CGI they used on the baby looked really weird. Like it didn’t look awful, but it was noticeably rough.
Rating: 9/10
Rec: Go watch the 1994 unreleased film on YouTube. It’s awful. You’ll love it.
Can you tell I tried really hard to not use the word FANTASTIC every time I gave a positive?
Check out some spoiler thoughts below:
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-SPOILERS BELOW
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The mid-credits scene was exactly what I thought it was gonna be. One guy in my theater yelled ‘Yo! Robert Downey Jr.!’ And I thought about breaking it to him that there was absolutely no way that was RDJ, but I didn’t. That’s all I got in terms of spoilers.
