Marvel finally got the Fantastic Four right, and then made Galactus too small. That’s the short version, and I’ve watched it a couple of times now to be sure I wasn’t being unfair.
I enjoyed this one. The retro-futuristic vibe is the best thing about it, and it’s the first time this team has felt like it belonged in its own world rather than being awkwardly retrofitted into somebody else’s.
The world is the win
The whole look of it works. A 1960s that never happened, with the technology imagined by people who thought the future would be chrome and optimism rather than screens and grey. Every set, vehicle and gadget belongs to that idea, and the film commits to it completely rather than hedging with a modern framing device.
That commitment does a lot of quiet work. The Fantastic Four have always been a product of the space-race era, a family of explorers rather than a team of soldiers, and putting them in a world that shares those assumptions makes the characters legible in a way the previous attempts never managed.
The character portrayals are good across the board. They read as a family with a working dynamic, which is the entire premise and the exact thing the 2015 version most conspicuously lacked. That film is bad enough to be entertaining, in fairness, but it never had four people who seemed to like each other.
The Silver Surfer is better than we’ve had before
I’d put this as the best Surfer we’ve seen on screen. The design works, the movement works, and the film understands that the character should be melancholy rather than menacing. He’s a herald, not a monster, and the tragedy is that he does the job anyway.
That’s a hard note to hit with a silver CGI figure and no facial detail to speak of, and it mostly lands.
Galactus should have been enormous
Here’s where the film loses me, and it’s a big one.
The Fantastic Four have had some genuinely great villains over the years. Galactus obviously, but also Annihilus out of the Negative Zone, and above all Doctor Doom. Galactus is the one that ought to be unmissable, because he isn’t a villain in any normal sense. He’s a force of nature that happens to have a face. He eats planets, not out of malice, but because that’s what he is.
The portrayal here is much better than what we’ve had before, and I want to be clear about that. It’s a real attempt at the character rather than a cloud.
But he should have been bigger. Much bigger. What we got is something on the order of taller than the Statue of Liberty, and that’s not the right scale for a being who consumes worlds. He should be Celestial-sized, something that doesn’t fit in the frame, something where the camera can’t get far enough away to show you all of him at once. Shrink him to a size a person can look at comfortably and you’ve made him a very large man rather than an appetite the size of a solar system.
That cost the film its fear. When he arrives, the reaction should be that nothing can be done. Instead it’s that something very large has turned up and will presumably be dealt with by the end of the runtime. Infinity War understood this: Thanos worked because the film let him be right about his own logic and let him win. Galactus needed the equivalent, and got a fight scene.
For a comparison closer to home, Thanos at his most cosmic still operated at a human scale emotionally. Galactus shouldn’t. The whole point is that he’s beyond negotiating with.
What the previous attempts kept getting wrong
It’s worth spelling out why this landed when three previous goes didn’t, because the answer isn’t budget.
Every earlier version treated the Fantastic Four as superheroes who happen to be related. This one treats them as a family who happen to have powers, and the order matters enormously. Their powers aren’t combat abilities, they’re personality traits made literal. Reed stretches because he’s spread too thin. Sue disappears because she’s the one nobody looks at. Johnny burns hot. Ben is armoured and can’t be touched. Read them that way and the team makes sense. Read them as a fighting unit and they’re a badly balanced one.
The other thing this version gets is that they’re explorers. The whole origin is a trip nobody had to take. Putting them in an optimistic retro-future where going to look at things is what people do makes their entire outlook coherent, rather than making them oddly cheerful soldiers.
The family, and why it holds
What saves the film for me is that the domestic material is genuinely good. Reed’s anxiety reads as a person rather than a quirk, Sue holds the group together without being reduced to that function, Johnny is fun without being only fun, and Ben gets more interiority than the character usually receives.
Compare it to the original Avengers assembly, which had to spend a whole film convincing you these people could stand each other. This one starts from a family that already works and puts pressure on it, which is a better engine and a less common one.
Marvel has always been better in short form when it comes to family material, and if you want the version of that done properly on the page, the best one-shots get further in twenty pages than most films manage in two hours. This gets closer than I expected.
The scale problem, more precisely
I want to be fair about the Galactus complaint, because “should have been bigger” sounds like a fanboy note about a number.
It isn’t about the measurement. It’s about what the size does to the storytelling. A threat you can frame is a threat you can fight, and the moment the audience can see all of something at once, they start estimating whether it can be beaten. That estimation is fatal to dread.
The version that works keeps him partially off-screen, glimpsed, too large to establish in a single shot. You’d feel him arriving before you saw him. What the film delivers instead is an impressive figure standing in a city, and impressive figures standing in cities are the most common image in this entire genre.
There’s a decent argument that a fully Celestial-scale Galactus is unfilmable on a practical level, and that the compromise was deliberate. I’d accept that if the film hadn’t already shown it could do scale everywhere else. It can. It chose not to here, and the fear went with it.
The Surfer, and what the film understood
Worth dwelling on the Silver Surfer a moment longer, because getting that character right is harder than it looks and this film managed it.
The temptation with a herald is to play them as a lieutenant, a lesser threat who softens up the target before the boss arrives. That’s the wrong note. The Surfer works when you understand that the job is a sentence being served, and that the person doing it has made a bargain they can’t unmake. Every world they mark is a cost they’ve already agreed to pay.
This version plays it that way. There’s a stillness to the character that reads as resignation rather than menace, and it makes the few moments of hesitation land properly. Given the character has no face to speak of and moves like something out of a physics demonstration, that’s a real achievement of design and performance together.
And then Doom
The mid-credits tease does what it needs to. Doom is the correct next step, he’s the character this franchise has been circling for twenty years without ever getting right, and the film is confident enough not to over-explain.
I’ll say this carefully because there’s nothing to go on yet beyond the tease itself: Doom is the most interesting villain Marvel has on paper, and the version of him that works is the one who is genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things. Whether that’s what we get is another question, and one for another year.
Good movie. I’ve watched it a couple of times and enjoyed it both times. I’d give it a 3.5. The world-building is a clear step up for this team, the Surfer is the best version we’ve had, and I’d take another film in this style tomorrow. Just make the world-eater look like he could eat a world.