‘The Fantastic 4: First Steps’ was my favorite stream this week
‘The Fantastic 4: First Steps’ was my favorite stream this week
The movie is available to watch on Disney+ now, and if you’re a superhero movie fan, you should definitely check it out.
Maybe — just maybe — Marvel is on a hot streak. When Disney+ released “Thunderbolts*” in August, that movie easily became my favorite watch of its release week. And now, for the second release in a row, an MCU title has made its way up to the very top of my favorite list of this week’s streams.
That release is, of course, “The Fantastic 4: First Steps,” which first became available to watch on Disney+ on Nov. 5. Like “Thunderbolts*,” I didn’t think “Fantastic 4” was a flawless entry into the MCU, but it was certainly good enough to rate as my favorite watch this week.
“The Fantastic 4: First Steps” is set on Earth 828, another of the limitless versions of Earth in the Marvel multiverse. Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm have already been transformed into Earth’s only superheroes — Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, The Thing, and the Human Torch, as fans know them.
The Fantastic 4 have been lionized as Earth’s defenders by an adoring public, but when the herald of an intergalactic being called Galactus arrives to warn that Earth will be consumed, the team faces their most daunting challenge: to save the planet, they must sacrifice Reed and Sue’s newborn son.
I skipped “The Fantastic Four” in theaters, as I haven’t been terribly impressed with any of Marvel’s cinematic outings in quite some time. But when it debuted on streaming, I had to see if the movie’s retro-futurism was the best thing about it, or if there was something better under the surface.
What I found was a fairly standard superhero movie script, packed with action scenes, technobabble, and the comedy fans have come to expect from the genre these days. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, but I also didn’t feel that it had been executed poorly in any way. It was just average superhero fare.
What I found especially entrancing about the movie was its performances. Pedro Pascal offers a nuanced and emotional turn as Reed Richards, a man whose brilliance often leads him to turn over the worst possible scenarios in his head in a way that haunts him.
Going into the film, I worried that Ebon Moss-Bachrach was a bad fit for the role of Ben Grimm/The Thing. But I couldn’t have been more wrong; despite limited screen time and a heavy dose of digital makeup, I thought Moss-Bachrach conveyed the true tragedy at the core of Grimm’s story: a man who can achieve incredible physical accomplishments after his transformation, but feels his ability to connect on a human level has been severed forever.
Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn as Sue and Johnny Storm don’t quite hit the levels of Moss-Bachrach and Pascal’s performances in my eyes, but they both lend to a cast that elevates what I found to be a fairly unremarkable script overall. I had a ton of fun watching “The Fantastic 4” because of those performances, and yes, the retro-futuristic setting of the movie was indeed a blast.
I’m not sure if the MCU will ever fully capture the magic that it seemed to have in the 2010s, when every release felt like a hit. I wouldn’t say “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” is a return to that level of quality, but it’s a fun time, and it was plenty good enough to rate as my favorite stream of the week.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”