⚠️ Contains spoilers.
🧂 The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Marvel finally builds a family instead of an origin story, then can't resist handing Galactus a baby-shaped MacGuffin to resolve it all.
Directed by Matt Shakman. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2025.
🧂 Salt: 5 / 10. Hard to stay mad at a superhero movie this committed to being about a marriage first and a cosmic threat second. and ⭐ Stars: 6 / 10. A genuinely good MCU entry with real design and chemistry, undercut by a third act that leans on its biggest swing instead of earning it.
Four years in, the hardest part of saving the world was never the monster. It was telling your family the monster wants your son.
Matt Shakman's smartest move is the one that sounds smallest on paper: he skips the origin story entirely. By the time the film opens, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm have already been cosmic-ray-powered heroes for years, beloved public figures on a retro-futuristic alternate Earth that looks like 1962 never ended and the space race actually won. There's no radioactive-accident flashback to sit through, no reluctant-hero arc to grind through before the plot starts. The team is already a found family, already famous, already comfortable in their powers, when Sue's pregnancy collides with the arrival of a planet-eating god and his silver herald with a trade: hand over the baby, and Earth gets to live.
Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm is the actual center of gravity here, and the film is smart enough to let her run the room. Sue isn't sidelined as the diplomat-slash-love-interest the way this character so often has been; she's the one making first contact with the Silver Surfer, the one steering the team's strategy, and the one whose pregnancy the entire plot pivots around without ever reducing her to a damsel waiting to give birth. Kirby plays her with a brisk, exhausted authority that makes the rest of the cast's deference to her feel earned rather than scripted.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Ben Grimm carries the film's actual emotional weight, and it's the best use of a stretched-thin ensemble. Ben's quiet grief over a body he can never fully be comfortable in, and the halting courtship he's too embarrassed to pursue, does more to make this team feel like people than any of the cosmic plotting. Moss-Bachrach finds the sadness under Ben's gruffness without ever begging the audience to feel sorry for him.
Julia Garner's Shalla-Bal, the Silver Surfer, is a genuinely unsettling creation, and the film underuses her the moment she stops being scary. Garner plays Galactus's herald as something closer to a hollowed-out acolyte than a villain, flat-voiced and unnervingly calm as she delivers an ultimatum about eating a planet like she's reading a weather report. It's an effective, eerie choice. Then the back half needs her to pivot toward sympathy, and the film doesn't do the work to earn that turn before cashing it in.
Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards spends the movie solving an unsolvable equation, and the script wisely refuses to let him solve it alone. Reed's instinct is always to out-think the problem, and watching him finally admit, out loud, that this particular problem doesn't have a formula is the film's clearest character beat. The cost is that Johnny Storm, left without much to do besides be the hot-headed one, drifts to the margins of his own team's movie.
Galactus himself is a terrific, genuinely massive visual idea saddled with a resolution that's weightless. He's rendered as an honest-to-god city-sized cosmic entity rather than a CGI smoke cloud, and the scale of him walking through Manhattan is one of the better pure spectacle images Marvel has produced lately. But the plan to actually stop him lands on a device that resolves the threat a little too cleanly for a movie that spent two hours insisting the stakes were a baby's life versus the planet's.
The verdict: a Fantastic Four movie that finally understands the assignment, four people who love each other first and save the world second, anchored by Kirby and Moss-Bachrach doing the real work while the production design builds one of the most pleasant-looking worlds Marvel has shown in years. It trades its own earned sympathy for a tidy ending and leaves Johnny standing around, but it's a rare recent MCU entry that feels like it knows its characters before the sequel hook kicks in.
So why only five shakers? Because a film this confident about its family dynamics shouldn't need a last-minute device to dodge the sacrifice it spent two hours building toward, and shortchanging Johnny for Reed and Sue's arc is a real structural cost, not a nitpick. Credit where it's due: this is one of the few recent Marvel entries that earns more goodwill than salt.
So did Marvel actually make a Fantastic Four movie worth the decades of false starts? Mostly, yes, it just flinched at the very end when it finally had the nerve to make the cost real.
Pass the salt. 🧂
