I have been a little late on seeing new releases by my own standards, but with this weekend’s viewing of the latest MCU movie, I am more or less all caught up. Now personally, I am not really a big fan of the Fantastic Four. I can’t say why. I’m just not. There have been some FF stories that worked for me, but like most fans, none of them were in the movies. But this was Marvel itself, finally getting the rights back to the characters, making a movie that would re-introduce the characters that launched their Silver Age glory that essentially made Marvel what it would become given time.
I may not be the biggest FF fan, but I’ve never been a big Iron Man fan either before the movies came out. There’s the possibility I would enjoy this.
Four years after the cosmic accident made the heroic foursome the Fantastic Four, the only heroes on their 1960s Earth, things seem to be working out well. The foursome are famous, beloved celebrities, and Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) have managed to finally conceive a child. Sue’s immature brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Reed’s best friend, regular guy-turned-rocky-thing Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), are both there to support the family, and Reed then proceeds to childproof their skyrise home and the city as a whole. But then the worst happens: the mysterious Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) has arrived to tell them of the imminent coming of the powerful Galactus (Ralph Ineson). When Galactus arrives, the Earth will be destroyed, and the Surfer claims that there is no way to stop this.
Or there might be. The Fantastic Four have never been the likes to just let something like this slide, so they set off to at least try to understand Galactus. The meeting goes poorly as the godlike entity is far too powerful for the Four to deal with when they can barely handle his servant the Surfer. Their arrival does something else instead and makes Galactus even more invested in destroying the Earth. Such an action actually hurts the Foursome with the public, but that doesn’t mean they are going to quit. With Reed and Sue as new parents to baby Franklin, they aren’t going to give up on the Earth. The Four will do everything they can to save the Earth from Galactus. Can they?
There’s a lot to like about this movie. Kirby and Quinn in particular really inhabit their roles. Kirby’s Sue is clearly the glue holding the family together with an emotional intelligence to match her husband’s more science-based abilities. Quinn, meanwhile, comes across as an immature doofus, but then there are moments when Johnny’s own intelligence comes into play in a credible way. Garner and Ineson have less to do as the movie’s antagonists, but Garner’s one big scene works great, and Ineson’s character is basically a force of nature anyway. The setting does play like one that is both from a past era and futuristic at the same time. Heck, my girlfriend noted, correctly, the movie’s pacing is exactly like the sort of movies that came out in the 60s. Like this year’s Superman, the movie has created a world where characters like the superheroes at the center of the story can exist without looking even a little bit silly.
That said, I enjoyed Superman and even this year’s Thunderbolts* more. The former is just a fun movie that just wants to be fun. The latter takes a deep look into depression in a way that superhero movies rarely do. For this movie, setting aside I am not the biggest fan of the characters to begin with, the flaws are the other half of the foursome. Moss-Bachrach is great as Ben, but I wanted more of him. I had bigger issues with Pascal’s take on Reed. Pascal is an incredibly reliable actor under most circumstances, but I thought the movie’s take on Reed was one where he doubted himself too much. Yes, he does blame himself for what happened to Ben even when Ben is largely fine with what happened by this point, and he finds Galactus perhaps too big a problem, figuratively and maybe even literally, to deal with, but I think the character needed more confidence without tipping into arrogance. That’s a hard path to follow for any actor, and I think Pascal could have done it, but in this movie, he just doesn’t.
Grade: B
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