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Baby steps, in fact. Marvel has rediscovered the lighthearted dimension of superheroism, the buoyant fun and the primary colour comedy – as opposed to the wiseacre supercool of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy. Here it has amusingly brought back the Fantastic Four in their early years (but not to the very beginning) in a retro-futurist version of early 1960s New York where no one smokes. Hilariously, the Four are of course living together as a family in a bizarre hi-tech apartment, like something in TV’s Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, often wearing their comfy blue pyjama-style outfits.
Scientist Dr Reed “Mr Fantastic” Richards, whose nickname rather oversells his peculiar superpower of stretchiness, is played by Pedro Pascal in a lighter vocal register than usual; he’s married to Sue “Invisible Woman” Storm – played by Vanessa Kirby. They are basically mom and dad to a couple of guys who are to all intents and purposes teen boys: Sue’s brother Johnny “Human Torch” Storm (played by Joseph Quinn) and superstrong Ben Grimm played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. They are essentially two grown men who live with Reed and Sue in a cheerfully infantilised state, and what complicates things is that Sue is now suddenly pregnant long after the couple had given up hoping. (There is apparently no IVF in this alt-reality universe.)
So the question arises: will the baby have superpowers doubled, superpowers squared? Is that how it works? Or will it be a kind of bittersweet affliction like that stoically accepted by Ben Grimm? And talking of the consequences of love, Ben Grimm is poignantly in love with a local schoolteacher (Natasha Lyonne) who is maybe unwilling to overlook his granite appearance, and it looks very much as if Johnny is having some amorous chemistry with the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) who arrives on Earth as the emissary of the colossally destructive Galactus (Ralph Ineson) – who says he might spare Planet Earth for a terrible price.
The result hangs together as an entertaining spectacle in its own innocent self-enclosed universe of fantasy wackiness, where real people actually read the comic books that have made mythic legends of the real Four. I have expressed my dissatisfaction recently with superhero films which have to finish with AI cities collapsing – and, yes, this is what happens here, but at least this finale emerges from the established story premise, and works well with the tone of uncomplicated fun. (I was once in a minority for liking the now all-but-forgotten Ioan Gruffudd iteration of Fantastic Four for very similar reasons.)
There is much incidental fun to be had in luxuriating in the film’s hallucinatory 60s production design, down to the imaginary movies being shown in cinemas in Times Square: The Emperor’s Twin from Disney and an Alistair MacLean-type adventure called Subzero Intel. Then when the baby is born, Ben Grimm earnestly brandishes his copy of Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, a permissive book which conservatives were later to blame for raising a generation of undisciplined slackers. Certainly, Kirby’s Sue Storm looks very good for a sleep-deprived new mother with no childcare staff other than one small goggle-eyed robot. As for paterfamilias Reed, he always wears his tie, though sometimes tucks it into his shirt. Overall a very silly movie – though it’s keeping the superhero genre aloft.
