The Fantastic Four: First Steps | Film Review

 

The Fantastic Four face their biggest challenge when they have to defend Earth from an otherworldly villain.

I can't lie, this isn't the Superhero movie that I was most looking forward to this year. After seeing and absolutely loving Superman and Thunderbolts*, I didn't know if I'd love this in the same way. Going into it, I wasn't a huge fan of all the casting choices, and feeling like the only person who absolutely loved the 2005 version and its sequel, I guessed that I might have mixed feelings about this one.

And that's exactly what happened.

I really liked the opening. You need absolutely no context to understand who these people are or what happened to them. The film tells you everything you need to know.

I found the dialogue and character speech patterns hard to get used to. At the beginning, this all felt disingenuous to me - they were speaking like TV presenters and it really hit my ear the wrong way. But either I got used to this or it toned itself down as the film went on because it stopped being a problem.

I didn't love the pacing - it felt like things were moving a bit quickly and it wasn't easy to completely lock into the story.

I liked the story itself, and loved that it wasn't an origin story - but in saying that, after getting to know the actors as these characters, I would like to see them in an origin story! I feel like they could have been a bit more developed here, and maybe that development would have been easier to see if it was an origin.

Because yes, something that I was wrong about was the casting. The actors have great chemistry and all work well in their roles. I was already a fan of them, so I knew that they would do a good job, but I didn't expect them to really feel like the characters as much as they did.

The visuals were amazing. Everything was really carefully created to make this world feel fantastical, and it really works. The downside of this for me though, is that it felt too fantastical and not grounded enough in reality.

It wasn't as fun or funny as I expected it to be, and that's probably on me for assuming it would be. I think because of the trailers and actors and the way it was all set up, I thought there would be more fun mixed in with the high stakes, but I didn't really feel that.

So overall, this film was fine and I had a good time with it, but I definitely didn't find it as enjoyable as the general public seemed to. But that's fine, and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing them again in future Avengers movies!

5.5/10