Mrs. Know-It-All liked Superman better. She told me so the second we sat down, and the only thing I could say back was this: at the end of Superman, I wanted the movie to be 15 to 20 minutes longer. At the end of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, I was satisfied with the length, but I probably could’ve stood for it to be 5 to 10 minutes shorter. And it was a short movie.
That’s the spoiler discussion you’re getting here. We got out of the theater, immediately sat down, and said we’ve got to talk about this thing. So if you haven’t seen it, jump ship, go see the movie, then come back.
We’re living in ridiculously unprecedented times, and I’m not even talking about what’s happening in the world. I just mean that inside a span of two weeks we got Superman and the Fantastic Four, and both of them are living in a Silver Age. I mean that literally. In comic books there’s the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Modern Age, all these different ages of comics, and what we’re seeing on screen right now is a distinctly golden one. We got Krypto the dog (not cryptocurrency) and Superman being Superman. Now we get H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot and the Fantastic Four and the Fantasticar, which is a phrase I never thought I’d say in real life.
The Four, and the One I Didn’t Expect to Love
Pedro Pascal is Reed Richards. Vanessa Kirby is Sue Storm. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is Ben Grimm, the Thing. And Joseph Quinn, who we remember as the guitar-wielding kid from the last season of Stranger Things, is the Human Torch, and he’s become a household name.
Mrs. Know-It-All thinks they cast the four very, very well, and so do I. I had my reservations about Pedro at first. She remembers me saying I didn’t know if he could do it. He did a great job.
She’s kind of unique on this one, the same way she is when we do Strange New Worlds. She doesn’t know much about the Fantastic Four. She knows they exist, and she’s seen the one with Chris Evans. What stood out for her was the Thing dipping his finger in the sauce and saying it needed a little more garlic, because he’s the guy from The Bear. She was waiting for it to show up. Sometimes what’s in the trailer isn’t in the movie. This one was, and it was so much fun.
The standout for me, funny enough, was the Human Torch. I really dug him. I’ve known who the Human Torch is for a long time, but I’m not nearly the fan Salty Trekker is. We did a thing Friday on NERDFIGHTS talking about it, and he’s apparently a hardcore Fantastic Four fan from back in the day, comics and everything. I think all comic book fans know who the Fantastic Four are, but I was much more into the Hulk or Spider-Man. My uncle got me into Spider-Man before anything else. Later on a friend of mine got me into the X-Men, and from the X-Men I got into Captain America. It was like a ping-pong. The one team I never really got at the time was the Fantastic Four.
So to see them brought to life in a way that honors their heritage, because it’s inspired to do it in this retrofuturistic style, was something. We were joking on the show Friday that I have no doubt Disney was going to put the Fantastic Four in Tomorrowland someday. She’s never been, so I had to explain it: Walt Disney was very forward thinking about what the future looks like, and Tomorrowland is that. Your family will ride their jetpack to wherever. It’s the Jetsons meeting a 1960s sensibility, which is literally this movie. And then I saw the ad earlier today. They’re doing it. A Fantastic Four live show at Tomorrowland, with performers playing them. When I saw that I thought, that’s brilliant, the things fit together. It’s the same move as when they added the movie characters to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Ben Grimm, and the Jack Kirby in Him
Outside the main four, there’s Natasha Lyonne, playing a teacher at a school, who Ben Grimm is seeing. She cleans up well when she hasn’t got the crazy curly hair from everything else, and she’s great.
In that scene you get to see Ben Grimm be Jewish. Ben is canonically Jewish, mainly because he’s the analog for Jack Kirby. There’s a quote they put on the screen in the movie, about how you put a little bit of yourself into every character, and a piece of you lives forever in them. That’s Ben. Ben Grimm is the Jack Kirby analog, and Kirby put it in him that he was Jewish.
I thought that was wonderful, and it’s about that history. They honored that history, and I love that they honored Jack Kirby like that. Jack Kirby is a mountain among men. He was also one of the most temperamental, cantankerous, cranky guys in the industry, because he was a perfectionist. He liked what he liked and he didn’t like being told otherwise. So when he briefly leaves Marvel, he goes over to DC and creates Darkseid and the whole New Gods. Then later on he comes back, and there’s more Fantastic Four, and Thor, and other stuff. It was always bouncing back and forth back then. Sorry, I’m getting into storytelling mode.
Shalla-Bal on the Board
Mrs. Know-It-All liked the Silver Surfer outside of all of that, and she asked me whether that origin story was true, or trueish, or something they had to come up with.
It isn’t the actual origin story for the character, even this version of her. You have to remember this is Earth 828. In the original Earth-616, which is the normal Marvel universe in the comics, Norrin Radd is her husband. He sacrifices himself so Zenn-La, their homeworld, can be saved, and he becomes the Silver Surfer. There’s a What If comic where they ask what if Shalla-Bal became the Silver Surfer, and she does it instead. There may or may not be another instance I don’t know of where she comes into play. To me it didn’t really matter, because this worked out really well. I thought it was perfect.
Mrs. Know-It-All could tell she had some humanity in her, and a lot of regret and remorse for the things she’s done. I think she has regret too, and I love that it’s the Human Torch who shows her that.
Galactus Was Terrifying
Galactus, for me, was utterly terrifying. Breathtaking.
Her point was that there’s nothing the four could do to actually stop him, and that’s why he’s terrifying. It’s like machine guns going after the Hulk. What’s that going to do? She felt like the way they stopped him was the only way there was.
I’d forgotten he has a ship at all, and Salty had to remind me. It’s a monumental ship. I’m much more used to him without one, showing up to a world and just sort of putting his hands into it and literally eating it. Consuming it like food. She can’t imagine it: one day this being comes, takes us out of orbit, and we’re gone.
Ralph Ineson plays Galactus, and his voice is amazing, because that big bassy voice is really what he’s known for. And I didn’t know this. The Thing is motion capture. If you see pictures of Ebon Moss-Bachrach on set, he’s in the dot outfit, walking around the same way Mark Ruffalo does for the Hulk. Galactus isn’t like that. They gave him a suit and they filmed him. They probably shot it at super high speed, because when you play that back at normal speed it becomes slow motion, and larger objects feel like they’re really moving when you do them in slow motion. There’s a picture in the video above of him and his daughter, and she’s wearing a Galactus helmet she made for him for Christmas. The detail in it is unreal.
A Movie That Stands on Its Own Two Feet
I loved the standalone nature of this movie, and Mrs. Know-It-All was glad I brought it up, because if I wasn’t going to, she was. It reminded her of when Iron Man first came out. That movie can stand alone. This was their story.
As someone who knows very little about the Fantastic Four, she also learned a lot about them right at the beginning, when the host is introducing them to come out on stage. That’s something I told her in the theater they did better than Superman. Superman sort of dumped you flat in. This is a very Ed Sullivan kind of TV show, he introduces them, and they roll what they call a promo packet, where you get to see all this history. What a creative way to do it. She remembered them going into space from the Chris Evans one, something going wrong, and them coming back different. Here we didn’t have to see the struggle. While they were describing it, we already knew they’d had it.
I was a big fan of the retrofuturism of it all. And I really liked that on more than one occasion the Fantastic Four are the protectors, the guardians of the planet. When it’s time to jump in and do something, they’re the ones leading that charge. You saw very few world leaders, and you didn’t see them getting involved. These four are the ones tasked with defending the planet.
I both hated and loved that opening montage. I loved it for the reasons we just went through. I hated it because it fell into the same Marvel trope that happens often, which is we’re going to tell you about a better movie than the one you saw. I wanted to see some of those fights. They took the time and made them, and they look like the comic books. So why show it to me as a media package? Take me there. Show me what the situation was.
Mrs. Know-It-All understands why someone like me or Salty would get aggravated by that. It didn’t bother her, because she didn’t know any of it. But if they’re going to appeal to the comic book fans, they need to put those really awesome things out there as well.
Paul Walter Hauser Chews One Scene
Come on, man. Paul Walter Hauser as the Mole Man.
The Mole Man is a classic villain. He was arguably the first villain the Fantastic Four ever faced. I love that Sue brokered a peace with him, and then they have to go to him. He’s this goofy character, and Paul Walter Hauser decided he was going to chew the scenery on the one scene he got. He walks in very much pompous, and he’s like, oh yeah, I’ll give you whatever you want, Susie, but he’s got to be the one to ask.
Without saying it too much or too obviously, that single-handedly spoke to a pre-existing relationship. I wasn’t even curious about it, because their acting told me everything I needed to know. Reed’s behavior tells you he thinks very little of the Mole Man and is really disgusted by the whole situation. The Mole Man’s behavior toward him is, oh yeah, you think you’re better than me. That’s it. Such a small role, and it was good right down to the shades he’s wearing.
And H.E.R.B.I.E. is the coolest little guy. He’s practical, too. He’s a puppet. I couldn’t believe it.
The CGI, and the Baby
Mrs. Know-It-All loved that we couldn’t see any of the CGI except for one thing. I agree with her. There are critics out there saying they didn’t like the CGI. What are you talking about? It was flawless.
Her one thing was Franklin. There’s a moment where they’re holding him, and it looked to her like instead of having a baby in his arms, they took a CGI baby that was crawling on the ground and now it’s crawling on Mr. Fantastic. Like he was added.
That one didn’t trip me up. What did trip me up is the scene toward the end where Sue is dead, seemingly, after the effort and stress of pushing Galactus through that big giant portal. They put the baby on her chest, he reaches over, he does a thing, and the baby brings her back to life.
At first I thought, golly, it looks CGI. Then I looked at stills. It doesn’t look CGI. It actually looks brilliant. There’s an uncanny valley that happens because this isn’t how babies react, move or behave in any way, shape or form. They don’t act purposefully, with the exception of wanting a thing. I want my bottle. I want my toy. This baby emoted. He had an expression like, I need to help mom, and he climbs up and does it. Those are expressions babies don’t normally have, and you can’t teach a baby to do them. It reminded me of a better done version of the Twilight baby, where they took the real-life actress who was going to play her older and CGI’d her into the baby version, and it was very distressing and looked weird.
Mrs. Know-It-All didn’t see it like that at all. She just saw it as, I want my mom. And babies know. They know when mommy’s hurt, they know when daddy’s hurt. That’s a great insight, and it’s fair.
She does think the age of the baby was wrong, and oh, the baby went from newborn to nine months old in like a heartbeat. I thought, whoa.
She was also half expecting him to start crying, and for his little baby tears to be what brought Sue back. Little magic tears. As a moviegoer who doesn’t know this comic book as well as everybody else, she might’ve felt a little let down, because all she knows is the baby’s on her. I was paying closer attention, because I was looking for anything, a wave or something. There’s a slight glow under his hands as he’s sitting there, and it’s the same glow that happens in her eyes when she comes to life. But I get what she’s saying. It was kind of weird.
Teleporting a Planet, and a Fight at Warp
Everybody started getting hung up on the plan to teleport the planet. How does he do that? The logistics of it. There’s no moon, and so on. Hey, if the man can figure out how to teleport a planet, I have the feeling he’s accounted for all the other aspects. And like Mrs. Know-It-All said, if you don’t think he has, then I hope you can show your work for deciphering everything that was on that chalkboard. My feeling is something on that chalkboard had to do with calculating all of that, gravity and the rest. For all we know, the moon was going with it.
Then that doesn’t work. The Silver Surfer shows up and starts trashing the place.
Before that, I thought the warp fight was really cool. I’m used to seeing stuff like that in Star Trek, so I say warp, but the ship is going faster than light, it’s in this weird curved thing, and the Silver Surfer’s attacking. Then the Human Torch goes to shoot these laser turrets, and the shots bend with the light, because they’re lasers. I was like, oh, that’s so fun. It was a very cool scene.
Sue Storm Against Galactus
The whole team faces off against Galactus, and Galactus isn’t hearing or seeing much of any of them. He doesn’t fall for the trap, which is that they move the baby. He’s looking around and he says, “Clever little bugs.”
So Sue, in her being pissed off, knows they’ve got to get him into the thing, and she starts shoving him with a giant shield. She pushes him, and he gets pushed. And everyone’s like, well, this is the weakest Galactus ever.
Look, time out. I believe firmly the only reason she was able to do that is they caught Galactus off guard. I don’t believe Galactus has ever had this much resistance from anyone, ever. He’s like, is this seriously happening? Not to mention he wants Franklin. In the movie they say it’s because Franklin can replace him. In the comics it’s a slightly different story, and that’s a lot of deep lore I don’t need to get into here. Bottom line, they caught him off guard.
Mrs. Know-It-All had her own reason. A mother is going to protect her child at all costs. To her it was Sue’s sheer will, the superhero equivalent of a mom picking up a car with a kid under it. She wasn’t going to back down. She was protecting that baby no matter what the cost, and Reed knew this could kill her. And she’s like, I don’t care, it’s my baby. How many times have we as parents said, I’d take a bullet for my kid in a heartbeat? Same concept. She was mama bear.
I liked it a lot.
In the comics, Galactus is a multiversal constant. In every universe, he’s the same Galactus, and he has a weirdly multiversal consciousness. When he’s talking to you, he’s having that conversation with every version of you in every universe, and he understands that. So I believe we’ll see Galactus again. I don’t know that we’ll see this version of the Silver Surfer. Maybe we will. I do think we eventually get Norrin Radd, the original Silver Surfer, at some point in the future, probably after Secret Wars.
The End Credit Scene
Then there’s the very, very clever end credit scene. Four years later, Franklin has a new playmate, and it’s Doctor Doom.
You don’t see him. It’s a green cloak and hood, and there’s a mask in the hand.
If you’d been in the theater with us, Mrs. Know-It-All will tell you, I lost my mind. It was good. That was the only valuable one. The one at the very end ended up just being goofy.
It didn’t end the way I thought it was going to. I assumed we were somehow going to get them over to the 616, and I still don’t know how that happens. I’m assuming it’s going to have to be Battleworld and Doom and whatever else. The next movie up, unless they change something or add something, is Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The last one ended that trilogy with Tom Holland, and this next one starts a new set of stories with him. Hopefully that builds and culminates into Avengers: Doomsday.
The Verdict
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an eight and a half out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and that number came from both of us.
Mrs. Know-It-All went first. Because of everything we talked about, she likes the movie. She sees the flaws. She’s not blind. Eight and a half out of 10. Mine is eight and a half out of 10 too, and we haven’t been matching like this recently.
This is one I’m very happy about. To me it resets us, or starts us on the right path to Marvel doing some good things again. We were nervous going in, especially coming off the high of Superman.
Marvel needs to do more of this. Let it be a standalone movie. It’s what they did in the beginning. Stand on your own two feet, be your own thing, don’t go crazy, and start meshing them together later on, after all the characters have been introduced. I was really happy that they established a strong team dynamic right out of the gate, and I think there’s a world in which you do the same thing with the X-Men. You create those dynamics, you let the individual movie franchises run, and then you bring them all together for a big event. Super simple.
Your turn. Have you seen it yet? And if you haven’t, what did you read this for? If you have, I’d love to hear what you thought of the whole thing: Galactus, the baby, that end credit scene. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
