The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts:

• 1. It’s a four-star MCU film
• 2. Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach have excellent chemistry and can easily anchor future MCU films. 
• 3. Paul Walter Hauser steals the show
• 4. The cinematography, production design and costume design are A+. It’s one of the best-looking MCU films.
• 5. It’s nice watching a group of people who like each other. 

Directed by Matt Shakman (WandaVision, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Game of Thrones, You’re the Worst), The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an amiable superhero movie that avoids the group-dynamic drama that plagues The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Thunderbolts. By leaving out Norse Gods, brilliant jerks, daughters of purple maniacs, former villains and deadly spies who suffer from crippling depression, The Fantastic Four: First Steps eschews drama and instead focuses on a group of likable people as they attempt to save the world. It’s a bit predictable, but what’s surprising is the team never has to be assembled or reassembled; instead they work well together and genuinely like each other. 

The film opens with a scene that shows how Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm Ebon Moss-Bachrach) got their powers (cosmic nonsense), and then quickly moves onto a montage that showcases their first battles with Giganto and The Mole Man (played beautifully by Paul Walter Hauser). It then jumps four years into the future, where they’re beloved by the public and have defeated most of the major supervillains in the world. 

Since several Fantastic Four films have been made, Shakman decided that he could skip an origin story movie and instead tell a story about a well-oiled superhero team who are forced to battle an ancient planet eater. The most interesting choice by Shakman and writers Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer was to make The Fantastic Four: First Steps as straightforward as possible. The plot revolves around a character named the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) traveling to Earth to warn humanity of its impending demise. The Surfer works as a herald for Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson), a cosmic being who crunches planets to fulfill a never-ending hunger. The news isn’t fantastic, and it forces the Fantastic Four to do everything in their power to prevent a large alien from smelling Earth’s dirt (in a great scene) and eating their home. This includes confronting Galactus in space, and making decisions that are felt worldwide. 

I don’t want to spoil anything else, just know that the rest of the movie features a stretchy guy, a human fireball, a large rock, and an invisible powerhouse battling a large cosmic being, who really wants a baby. There are several fun action set pieces and it’s nice watching Vanessa Kirby proving that she looks awesome while putting her hands in the air and hoping that the VFX crew don’t make her look silly. While researching the role Kirby talked to Shakman about Sue’s powers, and the two talked about “refracting light through prisms, and what altering the light of molecules does when you look at it.” This practical knowledge allowed Kirby to look like she knew what she was doing while pretending to use her magical powers. It’s little things like this that make The Fantastic Four: First Steps a top-tier MCU film, and a lot of credit needs to go to Shakman for putting together a cast who have fantastic chemistry.

Special mentions need to be given to the production design, costume design and musical score by Michael Giacchino. One of my favorite things about the film is that it takes place on “Earth 828,.” and can look however it wants to look. Production Designer Kasra Farahani (Loki – which also looks great) excels at creating worlds where advanced technology and retro design blend to create unique locations and visually interesting sets. The costume design by six-time Oscar nominee Alexandra Byrne is fantastic, and each actor looks perfect in their bespoke tailored clothes. The highlights of Byrne’s costuming work are sweaters and cardigans that Ben Grimm (a walking rock) wears as he cooks dinner or buys his favorite cookies from a local spot. It makes me happy that the person who won an Oscar for Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2008) designed clothes for a rock man.

The biggest issue with the film is related to the biggest character in the Marvel Universe. Galactus has always been one of my favorite characters; he’s a cosmic force who destroys planets and tasks cool-looking heralds (Morg!) to find him edible planets. He’s such a gigantic character that it’s hard to do much with him because he’s a Kaiju-sized blob of VFX. It’s nice that he’s not a giant cloud in this iteration, but when Galactus is introduced, it means only one thing – that a planet will potentially be eaten. He’s a credible threat (and Ralph Ineson is great), after so many world-destroying threats in the MCU, it would’ve been nice to give the Fantastic Four a smaller villain who only wants to eat 13% of “Earth 828.” 

Final Thoughts – If you’re looking for an MCU film about capable people being capable, you’ll love The Fantastic Four: First Steps.