As an actual narrative film, though, First Steps is not entirely a pleasure cruise. It is even ironically the second superhero movie this month to begin in medias res, deliberately starting after a skipped origin story, and with a mountain of exposition to surmount. Like James Gunn’s Superman, First Steps wants to be a zippy bit of Silver Age comics triumphalism; but at the same time it hurriedly seeks to redeem one of the greatest stories ever told in a superhero magazine, Kirby and Lee’s “Galactus Trilogy” from 1966.
This impulse to be both a fresh beginning like the title says, as well as one of the most somber Kirby tales about Marvel’s happy heroes staring down the End of Days, makes First Steps a movie divided against itself. That does not mean either side of the narrative doesn’t work; they just make for curious bedfellows.
The lighter aspect of this setup is the one you’ve likely seen in the marketing: in the alternate reality of Earth 828, they’re still partying like it’s 1962 and Kennedy’s Camelot is never going to end. In fact, because the Fantastic Four got slammed with cosmic rays some time ago and came back supercharged, things have only gotten groovier. Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards has invented flying cars; they have an adorable robot helper named H.E.R.B.I.E. in the Baxter Building; and as far as pop culture is concerned, this foursome is bigger than the Beatles. The way First Steps tells it, they might even be the only things popping in this alternative 1960s.
At this height of such success, the movie also opens on the loveliest of realizations for Reed and Sue: she is pregnant, and the test came back positive just in time to tell her little brother Johnny and everyone’s surrogate big bro, Ben Grimm, at Sunday dinner. Alas the good vibes are to be brief and fleeting, for no sooner have the Fantastic Four announced to the world that they have a prospective fifth member in the offing than a sleek, silver harbinger of doom (or the “naked space girl” as Johnny enthuses) descends from the heavens to announce the end is nigh. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) has come to herald that Galactus will soon be here… eventually. And with his approach, First Steps is going to become a much different movie.
The sense of foreboding and inescapable doom that pervades the last two-thirds of the movie clash tonally and aesthetically with the faint ‘60s optimism and retrofuturism that First Steps strives for in its first act. Yet this is not wholly a problem. I would even argue the last two acts are the most coherent and focused an MCU movie has been in a number of years, not least of all because Galactus is a genuinely menacing villain, particularly in his first scene which occurs after the Fantastic Four travel to space to get a glimpse of the big guy for themselves.
Portrayed by Ralph Ineson with that wonderful Yorkshire accent he used to haunting effect in The Witch and The Green Knight, Galactus carries immense presence. Part of that is due to some cagey framing by Shakman who uses light, shadow, and perspective to make this un-jolly giant tower over the screen. He’s hidden enough in darkness to subdue the more outrageous aspects of his faithfully rendered purple Kirby designs, but it’s Ineson’s severity and purring indifference that makes him truly formidable.
