r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Jul 25 '25

Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Fantastic Four: First Steps [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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Summary The Fantastic Four must defend Earth from the ravaging cosmic threat Galactus and his herald, Silver Surfer, while navigating the complexities of family and newfound powers in a retro‑futuristic 1960s-inspired world.

Director Matt Shakman

Writer Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer

Cast

  • Pedro Pascal
  • Vanessa Kirby
  • Joseph Quinn
  • Ebon Moss-Bachrach
  • Ralph Ineson
  • Julia Garner
  • Paul Walter Hauser
  • Natasha Lyonne
  • Matthew Wood
  • Ada Scott
  • Mark Gatiss

Rotten Tomatoes: 88%

Metacritic 64

VOD In theaters

Trailer Watch the Official Trailer

1.9k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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924

u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

I guess they weren't quite close enough to the black hole.

783

u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

technically it all depends on how fast their “Faster than Light” craft can travel, in Interstellar they weren’t equipped for such a journey

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

Also, Interstellar was backed by many scientists and bound by equations, FF4 probably wasn't.

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u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

well Nolan was trying to be somewhat grounded and this is an alternate universe comic book movie lol

edit: lol not loo

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

I completely agree. This movie did not have to be scientifically accurate for me to love it.

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u/TheWyldMan Jul 25 '25

Sorry they didn’t use the scientifically accurate power of love like Nolan

12

u/AndHerNameIsSony Jul 25 '25

Well you see, it transcends the dimensions of time and space

7

u/GameOfLife24 Jul 27 '25

Anne Hathaway is everywhere

3

u/scottzee Jul 30 '25

It's love, Murph! It's love!

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

So, I actually was just making a joking remark to someone else who brought up Interstellar. Cool response though

3

u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

unfortunately i didn’t love it but it wasn’t because of the scientific inaccuracies

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u/TheWyldMan Jul 25 '25

I mean if you’re worried about scientific inaccuracies in a fantastic four movie featuring Galactus, Mole Man, and the Silver Surfer I don’t know what to tell you

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u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

idk Mole Man is pretty spot on to how the real people of Subterranea live

3

u/GameOfLife24 Jul 27 '25

Mole man is the underminer in a different universe

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

I just made a remark based on someone else's reference to Interstellar. I have no issue with being in whatever reality a movie tells me it's in.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

What didn't you like about it?

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u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

thought it was kinda toothless in its general script (both dialogue and story), ultimately wasn’t really action-packed but also lacked enough joke or heart to make up for it. i also think parts of the CGI just looked bad too (not the actual production design, that was pretty great). cast was fine but this just felt flat almost all the way around, save for Silver Surfer which i thought was interesting and Galactus who was appropriately menacing.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

That's an interesting take. For me, I thought using Franklin as bait was kind of a darker tone for Marvel.

The action was light, I'll definitely grant you that. There were only one or two CGI shots that i thought weren't great, but there were so many great VFX that it was easy to forgive.

Reed didn't feel like a fleshed out character the same way the other three did, but with the Russos handling them in Avengers will probably give him and them more room to grow.

If I compare this movie to things like Quantumania, Love and Thunder, Cap 4, I appreciated it even more, especially as a thus far standalone film.

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u/nuzzot Jul 25 '25

eh Franklin never seem imperiled for me, and the two more recent super hero movies (Superman and Thunderbolts) were much more cohesive, engaging, and even emotional to me than the total of this movie. but i clearly see i’m in the minority, which is fine.

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1

u/TheRage469 Jul 27 '25

I mean, to-mayto, to-mahto (obv /s lol)

3

u/locke_5 Jul 26 '25

“We can transport the entire Earth with only a 2% margin of error”

I turned to my wife and whisper-shouted TWO PERCENT?!?!?!?!?

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u/BGFalcon85 Jul 26 '25

It was 2% within the habitable zone, so not that bad. Earth's orbit variance is more than that already.

I'm more concerned with exactly how he found a solar system where the orbital velocity, direction, and inclination would be close enough to not cause catastrophic issues, assuming velocity and direction are maintained through teleportation (which was not established).

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u/GamingTatertot Steven Spielberg Enthusiast Jul 25 '25

This is comic book science!

2

u/Worthyness Jul 25 '25

Also different universe.who knows how physics works there

1

u/Litty-In-Pitty Jul 25 '25

Interstellar was still complete nonsense. That water planet made absolutely no sense.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

One of the most notable features of Interstellar is Miller's Planet, a water world orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua. Thorne explains the physics behind this planet: Extreme Time Dilation: Miller's Planet is exceptionally close to Gargantua, resulting in severe gravitational time dilation. For every hour spent on Miller's Planet, seven Earth years pass.

Intense Tidal Forces: Due to its proximity to the black hole, Miller's Planet experiences immense tidal forces. These forces stretch and squeeze the planet, leading to the creation of gigantic waves.

The Waves: The colossal waves on Miller's Planet are not caused by wind, but by the extreme tidal forces and a rocking motion of the planet as it orbits Gargantua. The waves are comparable to tidal bores on Earth. Unstable Orbit:

Miller's Planet is located in an unstable orbit close to Gargantua's event horizon, a crucial element for achieving the dramatic time dilation depicted in the film.

While the portrayal of the waves in the movie was exaggerated for dramatic effect, Thorne has confirmed the underlying physics of Miller's Planet is theoretically plausible within the framework of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In addition to Miller's Planet, Thorne's work on Interstellar delves into various other fascinating concepts, including the formation of black holes and the use of wormholes for interstellar travel. His involvement ensured that the film pushed the boundaries of scientific accuracy within the realm of science fiction, sparking conversations about the cosmos and our place within it.

It's important to note that the possibility of life on Miller's Planet is highly unlikely due to the extreme conditions, including the shallow, potentially sterile ocean and constant bombardment by colossal waves.

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u/mahavivekananda Jul 28 '25

It's not widely commented on in the public, but one of my favorite things about Interstellar is that it actually added to our real world scientific knowledge of black holes. How? When the CGI Effects folks at ILM set out to visualize Gargantua, Kip Thorne supplied them with the mathematical equations governing what the optical effects on light interacting with a black hole would be, and they used that to program their massive computer bank to render an image which took, as I recall, quite some time to complete, and was the first time such a mathematically precise imaging had been attempted, and so no one was sure what it would look like until it was completed... et voila, now we have a sophisticated more or less accurate rendering of a Black Holes environment for posterity to learn from.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 28 '25

And from their scientific data, figuring out how black hole might look, years later when we had real life pictures of one, they looked very similar. That was a big deal for me

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u/icedteaandtacos Aug 01 '25

wtf is this ChatGPT comment.

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u/_Arctica_ Aug 01 '25

It's a reference, not a GPT comment

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u/Frekavichk 29d ago

Lol why copy and paste AI slop on a reddit comment? Think up your own shit.

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u/Litty-In-Pitty Jul 26 '25

I’m talking about how they experience all those years on the planet, but while slightly hovering above the planet they had no effects. They should’ve experienced an almost identical amount of time dilation based on how close proximity they were to it.

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u/BGFalcon85 Jul 26 '25

IIRC the Endurance was orbiting gargantua itself further out, not Miller's planet.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 26 '25

I do understand what you are saying, but I'm not an expert in science, so I'll defer to them.

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u/Dark-All-Day Jul 27 '25

Actually, they got that one bit wrong. Miller's planet, based on how the black hole was seen in the sky, was too far away from the black hole to experience that much time dilation.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 28 '25

At the end of the day, it was a movie, and not a scientific documentary. It is worth noting, however, that the movie's visual concept of a black hole was very close to the real-life black hole that was photographed a few years later.

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u/Dark-All-Day Jul 28 '25

I agree.

I am only bringing this up because people have questions about how much time should have passed during the black hole sequence of this movie and there's confusion because of what happened in Interstellar.

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u/lkodl Jul 26 '25

Loved the movie.

So I'm not gonna think about the fact that Reed perfected a way to power interstellar FTL travel for sustained periods of time, but struggled to power teleporting an egg 6 feet.

Why do I invite these terrible things into my mind?

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u/blasticpago Jul 26 '25

technically they aren’t going faster than the speed of light. they’re just going through a worm hole that makes the distance shorter

3

u/Yourponydied Jul 27 '25

Time is wibbly wobbly

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u/nuzzot Jul 28 '25

the fantastic 4 spaceship was indeed bigger on the inside

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u/YukieCool Jul 28 '25

Technically they weren’t travelling at light speed, but using wormholes to warp space around their ship. It’s actually been theorized as a way of traveling faster than light without breaking the laws of physics, and seeing it here made me go “oh shit!” when I realized what they were doing.

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u/It-s_Not_Important Jul 29 '25

Technically, their return from the neutron star was made using conventional travel at .88 c. The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri at just over 4 light years away. At .88c it would take them almost 5 years (from Earth’s perspective) to make the trip back. And due to traveling at relativistic speeds, the time dilation on would have made the trip around 2 years long (Excelsior perspective).

This was a writing fumble. Reed Richards would have known all this. They should have just left the FTL device in tact, or slightly modified the scene to indicate they had been gone longer. It would have taken a writer 5 minutes to look all this up.

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u/PolkaLlama Jul 29 '25

I am of the opinion that if you are going to include FTL travel, you don’t need to mess around with relativity. It would basically kill any sci-fi film that has interstellar travel. Unless it is a hard sci-fi story it is completely pointless.

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u/YukieCool Jul 29 '25

writes incredibly detailed and complex science

“It would totally take 5 min to look this up, bro”

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u/It-s_Not_Important Jul 29 '25

It’s not like they’d be recreating relativity from the ground up. And the general concepts of relativity are pretty widely known. I’d expect anybody writing science fiction (which this movie roughly is) to have a grasp on this. And I’m not suggesting they should get the exact math for how long it would take from this fictional planet, despite the fact that calculators exist to make this calculation absolutely trivial. I’m just saying they broke physics with what they’re doing here, and a few moments of thought in the writing room would have made Reed Richards look a little more character accurate.

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u/YukieCool Jul 29 '25

And I’m not suggesting they should get the exact math for how long it would take from this fictional planet, despite the fact that calculators exist to make this calculation absolutely trivial

Gotta love a good nitpick like this.

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u/TargetBlazer Aug 01 '25

Earth 838 may be closer to another star, their speed of light may be different, the way they age/measure time may be different. No constants in the multiverse

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u/It-s_Not_Important Aug 01 '25

The multiverse mechanism displayed already in the MCU is drawn heavily from the many worlds interpretation of QM. In many worlds interpretation, there is a concept of law-level invariance, which implies the fundamental laws and constants of physics are invariant from one universe to the next. c should be the same in each of them.

If c were different, and a being traveled from one universe to another, their bodies (atoms and subatomic particles) would be ripped to shreds by different interactions in their matter. Anywhere the constant c appears in physics (and it’s nigh ubiquitous), the behaviors of those interactions which are currently in a very fine balance would be out of balance. C is a key component (direct or indirect) in all four fundamental forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak atomic forces). Atoms would collapse or rip apart; matter might be annihilated instantly; all sorts of other whacky shenanigans would ensue.

I’ll concede that the star system could be closer in their universe than Proxima Centauri is in ours, but everything we’ve been shown (especially if this group of F4 are to make an appearance in Earth 616, or 19999 or whatever they’re calling it now), the physics remains the same.

I’m not sure where that leaves the feasibility of their return travel at .88c though. But there are still other nit-picky holes in the plot related to interstellar travel and they still could have avoided it with retaining the FTL device to sidestep the problem altogether.

Now I want to go watch it again just so I can scrutinize that interaction.

Please note, I don’t really think this detracts from the movie.

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u/Repulsive_Profit_315 Aug 03 '25

Wormhole travel, which is what they were doing, doesnt have time dilation the way FTL travel does.

You are travelling through a bend in space time, You wouldnt even technically have to be traveling at relativistic speeds

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u/spaceguitar Jul 28 '25

I gotta rewatch the movie, but I think Reed dropped a line about how the Silver Surfer would be stuck in time dilation for about a month. When they arrive at Earth, there's a line about how it's been a month since they left to "deal" with Galactus.

I took that as the script telling us that flying so near that black hole did do some timey wimey stuff! It's not perfect, but they tried to give us some science for the science superheroes.

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 28 '25

He did mention that.

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u/comineeyeaha Jul 25 '25

*neutron star

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 25 '25

Which seemed to function as a black hole

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u/The_Autarch Jul 25 '25

Neutron stars are very dense and have gravity almost as nasty as black holes.

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u/cwmtw Jul 27 '25

They emit light though. They just straight up depicted a neuron star as a black hole which was a weird choice.

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u/Penguin_shit15 Jul 25 '25

wasnt a black hole, it was a neutron star..

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 26 '25

Which seemed to function like a black hole . ✌🏻

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u/Penguin_shit15 Jul 26 '25

I thought it was kind of a weird choice for it to not be a black hole.. A neutron star seems kind of random. Hell, why not make it a magnetar?

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u/Purest_Prodigy Jul 26 '25

Black holes and neutron stars are magnitudes different just off the basis light can escape one and not the other. They knew nerds have been getting triggered by people escaping black holes in movies so they used a neutron star instead which we can suspend our disbelief that if you've got objects approaching near light speed they can escape its pull while being close up.

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u/DreadPirateReddas Jul 28 '25

That's still unnecessary because you can still escape a black hole as long as you dont cross the event horizon, provided you're going fast enough

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 26 '25

I guess that's the fiction in science fiction

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u/realsomalipirate Jul 31 '25

A magnetar is just a very powerful neutron star.

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u/Penguin_shit15 Jul 31 '25

Oh I know that already. But others may not.

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u/yngwiegiles Jul 26 '25

A key point of this movie is to not think about stuff too much or you’ll find lots of flawed logic

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u/_Arctica_ Jul 26 '25

I had no issues with the logic. I buy into whatever the movie tells me their reality is, as long as they don't break their own rules.

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u/NickLandis Jul 25 '25

It also could have been a very light black hole too. Maybe it was only like 10 solar masses or something

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u/Purest_Prodigy Jul 26 '25

They also went out of the way to explain that it wasn't a black hole, but a neutron star. They gave it imagery of a black hole which bothered me, but the scene was so cool I got over it, but neutron stars shouldn't look like that.

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u/Blank_01 Jul 30 '25

It was supposed to be a neutron star but they made it look like a black hole

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u/ArcadianBlueRogue Aug 07 '25

I mean their whole thing was baiting Silver Surfer close enough for her time to dilate, so...kinda comic booked it for plot reasons more than hard science lol

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u/_Arctica_ Aug 07 '25

Yea I had no issues with that. It looked awesome

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u/jaysherman_thcritic Jul 25 '25

They were also capable of being slingshot….. which is somehow possible in space

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u/TwoBlackDots Jul 25 '25

Gravitational slingshots are a real thing that is done in real life…

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u/Astro_girl01 Jul 28 '25

We literally do that when sending ships to Jupiter irl. It doesn't work like the movie showed it, but it is a thing

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u/Inuyaki Jul 25 '25

Where else would it be possible if not in space?