The Fantastic Four: First Steps looks great, as long as you don’t look too closely. The trailer, which gave us our first in-depth look at Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn in blue-and-white bodysuits, is a major departure from the MCU in some important ways. It’s set much further in the past than previous MCU movies, even the ’90s throwback Captain Marvel. The ‘60s setting allows for some cool costuming and production design, and much of the trailer has an exciting retrofuturist gleam. And, of course, it’s the introduction of four iconic characters, all of whom are played by likable rising actors.
New York City Is Never Empty
But there are shots in the trailer that give me pause. There’s a lot to like about the production design, from the retro space suits to Reed’s long, sweeping chalkboard to the curving interior design of the Foursome’s apartment. As good as all that is, the film will suffer if its action is set in empty city streets with gray, desaturated visuals and ropey CGI. The action shots we get — Sue squaring up against an unseen foe, Ben sprinting along a street, and Johnny flying above the rooftops — all make the film look murky, its NYC lifeless.
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First Steps looks like it will do a better job than most of these movies at showing the stakes for everyday people. There are multiple shots with New York’s citizens on the streets, including one Spielbergian image of children in The Thing masks gazing up at the sky. But the longer the trailer goes on, the more it reveals that it could just end up being more of the same. Maybe director Matt Shakman will take a page from Sam Raimi’s book and incorporate civilians into the action. The trailer is working hard to sell this as a New York story, but if we don’t see people imperiled, it’s hard to buy that it’s taking place in a city with eight million people.
MCU Movies Need More Time
That isn’t Shakman’s fault; this is what Marvel does to all of its movies, even the really good ones. These movies are often cool until the assembly line formula kicks in and an unimaginative set piece gets inserted where another movie could be kicking into overdrive.
Black Panther is great except for the weightless CGI fight between T’Challa and Killmonger at the climax. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is 95 percent terrific, with one ugly CGI sequence at the end. Ryan Coogler and James Gunn are two of the best directors to ever helm an MCU movie, but even they can’t resist the assembly line.
Making something with as much vision as parts of Fantastic Four seem to have is not what this machine is designed to do. It’s designed to give us the fight at the end of Avengers: Endgame, where the actors’ faces are the only element of reality in a barren CGI wasteland.
I’m holding out hope for First Steps. But I can’t shake the feeling that the schedule Marvel ended up with in 2024 — releasing just one movie, Deadpool & Wolverine — would be the best possible approach to give each movie the time and attention it needs. The best action scenes in the history of superhero movies, like the bridge sequence from Spider-Man and the train sequence from Spider-Man 2, tend to focus on how the action affects real people. The first Avengers movie did this, too.
But staging this kind of scene takes time. It’s much faster and easier to position your leads against a green screen, then fill in the rest in post. But the appeal of The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its specificity, its tactility. And those are qualities you lose when you move regular people out of the frame.
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