Matt Shakman’s reboot is the warmest and best-dressed Fantastic Four yet, and its four leads behave like people who have shared a bathroom for years. The planet-eater coming for them is a good deal less interesting than their kitchen.
Matt Shakman’s reboot puts the Fantastic Four on an Earth that is not ours: an early 1960s of rounded rockets and flying cars, where the four are already heroes and nobody needs telling how they got their powers. The origin is skipped entirely. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) are married and expecting a baby; her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Reed’s oldest friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) share the top of the Baxter Building with them. Then a chrome woman on a surfboard (Julia Garner) glides in over the city and tells them, without raising her voice, that their planet has been marked for death. Our verdict, for those in a hurry: it is the best attempt at these characters so far, warm and lovely to look at, and the creature coming to eat the planet is the least interesting thing in it.
Kasra Farahani has designed a New York of cream curves, brass trim and rounded glass, where the rockets look like ornaments and even the kitchen has fins. Jess Hall shoots it in warm, saturated colour, the kind of light that comes from a picture book rather than a sun, and he holds his frames long enough for us to read the rooms. Alexandra Byrne puts the four in blue polonecks and their neighbours in tweed and headscarves, so the city looks like a Sunday supplement from the early sixties that somebody has coloured in. It is one coherent place, built once and stuck to. That is rarer in a Marvel film than it should be.
The four are the reason to go. Kirby is the centre, a Sue Storm who runs the household and the diplomacy and treats them as one job, and whom the other three visibly defer to. Pascal plays Reed as a man who can bend himself round a corner but cannot stop worrying about the maths, all fretful hands and unfinished sentences. Moss-Bachrach acts under a rock face of pixels and still gets more out of a shrug than many actors get out of a whole face; his Ben is gentle and a little sad, and the film is kind to him. Quinn’s Johnny is the least written of the four, but he is not the usual oaf, and he gets the film’s odder ideas, which suits him.
We felt a proper chill when Garner’s Surfer arrived. She hangs above the streets, silver to the eyeballs, and delivers the sentence in the flat tone of someone reading out train times, and for a few minutes a Marvel film manages dread, which we had not expected. It does not last. Galactus (Ralph Ineson) has a fine deep voice and a helmet you could hold a service in, but he stays far off for most of the running time, and a threat that never comes closer than the horizon is hard to fear for two hours.
The script, credited to Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, gives everybody a speech about family, and then another one. Paul Walter Hauser’s Mole Man is on screen for a handful of minutes and is funnier than the plot has time for. The second half takes a turn we will not describe; we can say that the last half hour is a city, a device and a countdown, and that we had seen it before. We were not bored, quite. We were waiting.
Nona Khodai and Tim Roche cut it to 115 minutes and it does not drag, which after some recent Marvel running times counts as a courtesy. Michael Giacchino’s score is brass and drums, a marching tune you could hum on the way out, and it is used sparingly enough that it means something when it swells. Shakman made WandaVision (2021), a whole series built out of period television pastiche, and you can see the same pleasure here in getting the furniture right. The trouble is that The Incredibles (2004) put a family of heroes in the same world twenty years ago and gave them sharper things to argue about.
See it in a cinema if you can, for Farahani’s city and for Kirby, and take children if you have them; it carries a 12A and it earns the certificate gently. It is the first film about these people that likes them. It is not yet a film that knows what to do with the sky.
