The villains steal the show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

More than six decades after Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a superhero team to rival the Justice League, the Fantastic Four finally get a worthy big-screen adaption in a spiffy 60s-era romp, bathed in retrofuturism and bygone American optimism. Though the Fantastic Four go to the very origins of Marvel Comics, their movie forays have been marked by missteps and disappointments.

The first try was a Roger Corman-produced, low-budget 1994 film that was never even released. But, after some failed reboots and a little rights maneuvering, Matt Shakman’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is the first Fantastic Four movie released by Marvel Studios. And a sense of returning to Marvel roots permeates this one, an endearingly earnest superhero drama about family and heroism, filled with modernist “Jetsons” designs that hark back to a time when the future held only promise.

“First Steps,” with a title that nods to Neil Armstrong, quickly reminds that before the Fantastic Four were superheroes, they were astronauts. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (a soulful Ebon Moss-Bachrach) flew into space but return altered by cosmic rays. “We came back with anomalies,” explains Reed, sounding like me after a family road trip. They are now, respectively, the bendy Mister Fantastic, the fast-disappearing Invisible Woman, the fiery Human Torch and the Thing, a craggy CGI boulder of a man. In the glimpses of them as astronauts, the images are styled after NASA footage of Apollo 11, like those seen in the great documentaries “For All Mankind” and “Apollo 11.”

But part of the fun of the Fantastic Four has always been that while the foursome might have the right stuff, they also bicker and joke and argue like any other family. The chemistry here never feels intimate enough in “First Steps” to quite capture that interplay, but the cast is good, particularly Kirby. In the first moments of “First Steps,” Sue sets down a positive pregnancy test before a surprised Reed. That night at dinner - Moss-Bachrach, now an uncle rather than a cousin, is again at work in the kitchen — Ben and Johnny immediately guess what’s up. The rest of the world is also eager to find out what, if any, powers the baby will have.

We aren’t quite in our world, but a very similar parallel one called Earth-828. New York looks about the same, and world leaders gather in a version of the United Nations named the Future Foundation. The Thing wears a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Someone sounding a lot like Walter Cronkite reads the news.

And there’s a lot to read when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) suddenly hovers over the city, announcing: “I herald your end. I herald Galactus.” The TV blares, as it could on so many days: “Earth in Peril. Developing Story.” Yes, the Earth (or some Earth) might be in danger, but did you get a look at that Silver Surfer? That’s Johnny Storm’s response, and perhaps ours, too. She’s all chrome, like a smelted Chrysler Building, with slicked-back hair and melancholy eyes. He’s immediately taken by her, but she shoots off into space. In a rousing, NASA-like launch (the original Kirby and Lee comic came eight years before the moon landing), the Fantastic Four blast off into the unknown to meet this Galactus.

But if the Silver Surfer made an impression, Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) does even more so. Fantastic Four movies have always before gone straight for Doctor Doom as a villain, but his entrance, this time, is being held up for “Avengers: Doomsday.” Still, Galactus, a planet-eating tyrant, is no slouch. A mechanical colossus and evident fan of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” he sits on an enormous throne in space. Sensing enormous power in Sue’s unborn child, he offers to spare Earth for the baby. What follows casts motherhood — its empowerments and sacrifices — onto a cosmic plane. There’s a nifty chase sequence in space that plays out during contractions. The two “Incredibles” movies covered some similar ground, in both retro design and stretchy parent and superhuman baby, with notably more zip and comic verve than “The Fantastic Four.”

Associated Press