“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is showing at 4:00PM and 7:00PM at The Eclipse Theater in Breckenridge.
You won’t be five minutes into “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” before wondering what decade – or what timeline – this latest Marvel movie inhabits.
But give it another five minutes and you won’t even care, swept away by the fullest, finest and coolest production design in a comic book flick since “Iron Man,” to which the Fantastic Four owes a monstrous debt.
This world, where ‘60s fashion and style meet near-future technology, feels like walking into a superpowered Epcot Center. Robots, teleportation and faster-than-light travel coexist with vinyl record players and vintage Beetles. When a big, bad space beastie threatens life as we know it, people are glued to televisions, not cell phones, and a monumental moment like a rocket launch still inspires global awe. Eat your heart out, Tony Stark. Mister Fantastic and Family are better dressed and just as well-educated, and they didn’t have to sell their souls to the military industrial complex.
Sorry. Got lost for a second. I realize not everyone is here for the posh spacesuits and golden vinyl filled with mysterious messages from lost planets, although both play a bigger role in the plot than you might expect.
No, most of us just wanna see stuff blowed up real good. “The Fantastic Four” delivers, but in a way that feels more tangible than almost every comic book movie in the past two decades. When Johnny Storm’s flaming Human Torch flies into the upper atmosphere, his fire is snuffed out by the lack of oxygen. (It’s almost enough to make you forget he blasted off without a spacesuit and wouldn’t be able to breathe either.)
After a brief prologue the movie introduces us to the Fantastic Four – Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny Storm, and friend Ben Grimm. They flew into space, encountered cosmic radiation, and returned to Earth with superpowers like stretchability and force fielding. Grimm, who must have drawn the short straw, became a rock who can grow a beard. But we can’t all be Mister Fantastic.
Director Matt Shakman, of Disney’s WandaVision series, leans heavily on the actors to make us believe this makeshift family belongs together, and his main cast delivers. They sit down for family dinners. They teach a robot how to cook. They celebrate the birth of a new baby. They crack jokes, some of them good, some of them painful. Their lives feel lived in, not cobbled together out of convenience like The Avengers or DC’s Suicide Squad.
This version of Fantastic Four (the fourth since Roger Corman’s in 1994) spends about 15 minutes on the origin story. Smart move. Like the latest “Superman” movie, Shakman knows we already KNOW how these everyday heroes became superheroes. Let’s cut to the chase.
Enter the Silver Surfer, one of the most memorable comic book characters of all time. She brings tidings of destruction from Galactus, the Eater of Planets and Connoisseur of Consumption, but she is also haunted by those mysterious messages on golden vinyl.
The Surfer’s message of impending doom inspires headlines like, “Earth in peril!… Developing story,” which makes the journalist in me giggle like a kid. This movie isn’t snarky and self-aware like “Deadpool” or “Guardians of the Galaxy” — at times it takes itself a little too seriously — but it has a goofy streak that reminds you this is all in good fun.
This goofy streak almost covers the cracks in the plot. Pedro Pascal as Reed/Mister Fantastic is good enough – the “Mandalorian” star seems to be untouchable right now – but his character is often the weakest. We’re made to believe Reed Richards is the smartest man on earth. He drops casual references to Archimedes and is constantly scribbling formulas on chalkboards. But his insights are more convenient than revelatory, reminding you this is a comic book plot, not “Good Will Hunting.” When Reed wants to teleport our planet to a different galaxy, he simply builds a bigger teleporter.
Then, there is the baby. It’s an important baby. If you believe Galactus, it’s the most important baby in the multiverse. The Eater of Planets presents our heroes with a choice – give me your baby or give me your planet. The stakes are astronomical. The ethical conundrum is real, especially for heroes expected to save the world at any cost. It reminds me of a sleeper sci-fi classic, “Sunshine,” where a group of scientists on a suicide mission to the sun wrestle with similar choices.
But I couldn’t shake the sense things would end up just fine for the Fantastic family. That’s the flaw in most comic book movies. They can be beautiful, exciting, outlandish and even inspiring, but rarely are they surprising, and in the end we’re left with a pithy argument over who will buckle up the baby.
The Fantastic Four is playing at the Eclipse Theater in Breck. Go to breckfilm.org for show times.