First Steps is pretty good, better than I was expecting. The retro-future-but-it's-the-present looks amazing and all the performances are good. The film nails the essential likeability of the Four, and it even makes Reed sympathetic while keeping true to the character, although one wonders how much of that is down to Pedro Pascal having charm to spare. Wisely, they skip the origin, Doom is not the villain, and they even give Johnny something "clever" to do while maintaining his position as the silly one.
The final battle against Galactus is a bit of a disappointment as it does come down to a physical fight in the end and that doesn't feel right at all. And while not a short film, it also feels like there's about 30 minutes of missing material; Ben gets a whiff of a subplot that hangs around throughout but never goes anywhere, and the film never really explains what Galactus is and what he wants, or rather the why of it. We do get a spectacular visual Galactus stomping around New York, but as an active agent in the story he's barely more present than the killer cloud of the 2007 film.
All that said, the film gets more right than it gets wrong, and I'd be happy to see more of this version of the Four.
I can second pretty much all of this, and I wonder if I might feel even more positive about it if I hadn't just seen Superman, which arguably did an even better job of capturing the Silver Age feel I was kind of looking for in both of them...
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen that yet, so I came to F4 unspoiled.
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