The Fantastic 4: First Steps

The Architecture of Optimism

In an era where the superhero genre has largely collapsed into a grey slurry of digital noise and cynical universe-building, Matt Shakman’s *The Fantastic 4: First Steps* arrives not as a correction, but as a hallucination. It is a film that dares to ask what the future used to look like. By bypassing the dreary mechanics of an origin story and dropping us directly into a fully realized, retro-futuristic 1960s alternate reality, Shakman has crafted something that feels less like a blockbuster and more like a lost transmission from a kinder timeline.



The film’s visual language is its most striking triumph. We are not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe we know; we are inside a Jack Kirby panel painted by Norman Rockwell. The aesthetic—dubbed "cathode-ray chic" by some—is a suffocatingly beautiful pastiche of Googie architecture and Space Age optimism. The Baxter Building isn’t just a headquarters; it is a monument to mid-century modernism, filled with curved glass, Eames-inspired furniture, and technology that hums with analog warmth rather than digital coldness.

Shakman, who honed his ability to manipulate sitcom realities in *WandaVision*, understands that the Fantastic Four are not soldiers; they are celebrities and scientists. The choice to frame their world through the lens of a 1964 that never happened allows the film to explore a specific type of American hopefulness—the belief that technology would save us, not enslave us. When Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) stretches across his lab, it doesn’t look like a tactical maneuver; it looks like the playful elasticity of a mind that refuses to accept the limitations of physics.



However, the film’s glossy, candy-colored surface serves as a fragile shell for its central anxiety. Beneath the jetpacks and flying cars lies the terrifying silence of the cosmos. The arrival of the Silver Surfer—reimagined here with haunting grace by Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal—punctures the team's domestic bubble. The scenes involving the Surfer are not action set-pieces but atmospheric horror. She is an angel of death gliding through their utopian skyline, a silent herald that proves their science cannot solve every problem.

The emotional core, however, struggles to keep pace with the visuals. While the chemistry is undeniable—particularly Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who brings a soulful, melancholic resignation to Ben Grimm—the narrative sometimes feels trapped by its own sweetness. The stakes involving Galactus are cosmic, yet the film insists on resolving them through the lens of family therapy. It is a noble attempt to ground the apocalypse in human emotion, specifically the fierce, protective motherhood of Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), but the climax teeters on the edge of mawkishness.



Ultimately, *First Steps* is a film about the collision between the future we were promised and the doom we fear is inevitable. It is a visual feast that occasionally starves its characters of grit, preferring to keep them as pristine icons of a golden age. Yet, in its refusal to be cynical, it offers something rare in modern cinema: a sense of awe. It suggests that even in the face of a world-eater, the most radical act is to remain a family.