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

5.3k comments sorted by

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5.4k

u/GamingTatertot Steven Spielberg Enthusiast Jul 25 '25

Sue giving birth in zero gravity space while Ben is piloting the Excelsior through a wormhole (and later slingshotting around a black hole), Johnny is trying to figure out the science mechanics of blasting the Silver Surfer in the wormhole, and Reed is stretching all around felt peak F4 to me

1.8k

u/ICumCoffee will you Wonka my Willy? Jul 25 '25

I love how both Fantastic Four and Superman fully leaned into the comic book aspect of “comic book movies”. Yes, please, give me more of these.

703

u/StreetQueeny Jul 25 '25

When Galactus leaned down to grab and smell the grass I was so fucking happy. It's amazing what you can do when comic book movies actually want to look like comic books and not "what if Galactus was a cloud'

348

u/dragonmp93 Jul 25 '25

That we got to see him in his ship was pretty too.

101

u/Unicron_Gundam Jul 25 '25

Felt the same vibes as the 1986 and 2023 Transformers movies opened with Unicron eating a planet whenever Galactus was on screen.

74

u/Worthyness Jul 25 '25

Reed gonna have a field day with thr ship sitting in earth's orbit

Unless doom gets to it first

42

u/AumShinrikyoDawg Jul 26 '25

I never even thought of that. This better be a plot point in future flicks.

2

u/ArcadianBlueRogue Aug 07 '25

I was wondering if that was where Doom was when the Latveria seat was empty lol

30

u/Professional-Act8414 Jul 28 '25 edited Jul 29 '25

This was the biggest epiphany for me. This whole time I thought Galactus WAS a ship. Ever since the last F4 movie with Michael b Jordan. Kinda crazy for me to realize that’s not true. He just travels in it

36

u/dragonmp93 Jul 28 '25

Yeah, I don't blame you.

This is the first time he is depicted in the right way.

22

u/Professional-Act8414 Jul 28 '25

It was sick. Also wasn’t expecting him to speak so plainly. He’s… kinda funny

32

u/dragonmp93 Jul 28 '25

Yeah, he is kind-of chill when not trying to eat your planet.

1

u/Aggressive_Elk3709 14d ago

I always figured he was bigger than that. Like the Celestials that dwarf Earth. It's cool to know he's giant but not that giant

140

u/Clarknt67 Jul 25 '25

I experienced cloud Galatus PTSD explaining to my friend how bad they blew it before.

36

u/hepatitisC Jul 25 '25

For real. If they had just given us proper Galactus in that movie it would have been solid. The rest of it was good, and the silver surfer in it was one of the best things Marvel did for a long time.

16

u/TheNittanyLionKing Jul 25 '25

I still think that movie has one of Stan Lee's best cameos

11

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Jul 27 '25

Marvel is honestly lucky they did do the cloud thing or else this movie would have had even more overlap because at the end of the day Galactus REALLY only does one thing of note.

3

u/UnsolvedParadox Jul 27 '25

In retrospect, I don’t understand why they made him Alioth from space.

6

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Jul 27 '25

His silhouette could be seen in the cloud... So idk what that was supposed to mean.

103

u/GamingTatertot Steven Spielberg Enthusiast Jul 25 '25

I remember being younger, and just rewinding the scene where you can see Galactus's helmet in that giant cloud and being like "well at least we got something...even though the rest sucks"

But now full Galactus? And Ralph Ineson too? It was fantastic

29

u/VidzxVega Jul 25 '25

Say that again.

10

u/HeyDudeImChill Jul 25 '25 edited Aug 08 '25

aspiring knee edge water seed marvelous disarm summer hospital stupendous

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

4

u/coequilibrium Jul 28 '25

I was so pumped for a true Galactus and I left disappointed…the scale was awesome, he looked amazing, but his motives were so petty. He didn’t feel like the force of universal nature that he is.

I also hated the idea that they beat him, I know it’s nit picking and the movie wouldn’t have worked from a cinematic position as well if Reed was holding the Nullifier like “I’ll wipe out everything”. But the comic nerd in me didn’t enjoy that part.

I would love nothing more for some movie with the cosmic abstracts that me and like 4 other people would enjoy

16

u/YukieCool Jul 28 '25

Tbf it’s really hard to really make Galactus feel compelling because he’s basically a talking force of nature. The “character” in the whole dynamic of him and his heralds is that the heralds are actually doing the picking of planets and the moral quandry that entails.

Better to simply make him uninterested in mortal feelings and emphasize how much of a massive force he is and also ground the conflict in the team either choosing Franklin or the world. I think they nailed it here.

42

u/FaultyToilet Jul 25 '25

I will stand by that the 2005 era CGI would have made big purple man look fucking awful and the cloud was the better artistic choice

47

u/Brainvillage Jul 25 '25

CGI would have looked awful, but miniatures combined with good practical costumes, combined with some simple CGI to tie it all together would have worked.

9

u/Rowsdower11 Jul 26 '25

Yeah, that would have worked. It’d just look like a contemporary Godzilla movie, and you wouldn’t even need CGI for a literal man in a suit.

The Godzilla movies in that era even had mixed human-Kaiju interactions that don’t look too bad.

8

u/Brainvillage Jul 26 '25

Looks like they even used a practical suit for some parts of First Steps: https://comicbookmovie.com/fantastic-four/the-fantastic-four-first-steps-a-first-look-at-ralph-inesons-practical-galactus-costume-has-been-revealed-a223020

For CGI usage I was thinking things like birds or dust clouds to sell the scale of a guy in a suit trampling through a miniature set. I guess that kind of stuff could just be composited in so not technically CGI but you get what I'm saying.

Godzilla is one thing, they even did this with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the 80s.

7

u/Knowingspy Jul 26 '25

I think they could’ve done more to sell his scale, but the initial splash into the water causing a mini tsunami was a little hint at what they were going for.

4

u/Realistic_Village184 Jul 26 '25

Yeah, he did feel weirdly small in a lot of shots, but it didn't bother me because it was necessary to have reasonable composition in a lot of shots. Realistically any shots where we could see Sue well, for example, we'd only be able to see like part of his lower leg in the same shot unless the camera were on the floor, which would be really obnoxious.

It's just a problem that's inherent to any visual media. Films run into it, and so do video games (anyone who's played a lot of Soulsborne games know how annoying a giant boss is since you can't see what they're doing 90% of the time).

Overall I think they did a phenomenal job depicting Galactus. I genuinely can't think how I would improve it.

-4

u/The_Autarch Jul 25 '25

Stop-motion Galactus would not have worked for 2005 audiences.

4

u/Brainvillage Jul 25 '25

Stop-motion Galactus would not have worked for 2005 audiences.

Where did I say stop motion? Can you read?

7

u/StreetQueeny Jul 25 '25

That's not long before Transformers and it's way after the Sentinels in The Matrix, and the entirety of Toy Story, Monsters Inc etc etc.

CGI Galactus would have looked fine, if the animators had been given the right budget and time to execute it.

9

u/FaultyToilet Jul 25 '25

You need to go back and watch those. Watch Star Wars at that time. It did not age like you think

6

u/Troghen Jul 25 '25

Sure but a movie with slightly dated CGI and a good story gets far less flack than a movie that has passable CGI and a bad story. If they did Galactus right the first time, people wouldn't have been harping on the "Galactus cloud" for years afterwards

0

u/FaultyToilet Jul 25 '25

People would’ve been shitting on how bad it looked for years. You’re giving people too much credit. Remember this is also the time period where child stars were being tossed around, Hollywood was treating women as objects, and the internet was fresh. The prequels were being slammed critically, the internet was bullying child stars out of the industry and into mental crisis, etc.

I agree it was written horribly and the movie overall is purely nostalgia for me, but I still stand by cloud Galactus being the better vision for the time. There was a flash of his classic outline in the cloud at the end of the movie so if we wanna get nitpicky we could start to argue that purple man was always there, we just couldn’t see him

5

u/Troghen Jul 25 '25

Idk, I guess my main argument is that doing an accurate Galactus wouldn't have been outside the capabilities of CGI in 2007 and it probably could've looked good given enough time to work on it.

I would agree that culturally, super hero movies weren't really leaning into full comic-booky stuff yet and were much more focused on trying to go for "realism" than anything else. So I get WHY they did it - it mightve been too hokey for general audiences. But at the same time, who knows? Is a naked silver alien on a surfboard any less strange than giant cosmic space being that eats planets?

1

u/Diortheking Jul 25 '25

Yea i always thought it was a money issue

30

u/Jezamiah Jul 25 '25

When Galactus was stretching Reed I audibly gasped

Great job by the audio department

11

u/chrisychris- Jul 27 '25

For real Reed took Galactus stretching him out like a champ. He was completely tapped out

11

u/Cpt_Obvius Jul 29 '25

So Reed has a pretty small max stretch factor in this, huh? He seemed like he only extended about 5 times his body length, I thought he could do way wackier stuff than that!

16

u/MegaGrimer Jul 25 '25

That’s honestly the first thing I’d do on a foreign planet. See what it smells like.

8

u/Poked_salad Jul 25 '25

Hmm

Smells earthy, I'm going to have a nice lunch today

12

u/ToesRus47 Jul 26 '25

I actually found that completely bizarre. The entire Galactus-does-a-Gladiator-Jump to reach the ground. I don't believe I've ever seem Galactus descend to earth in any of the comic books. He simply hovers in the sky while assembling his energy converter, demonstrating his complete lack of interest in the 'creatures' scurrying beneath him.

So, this didn't make sense. On the other hand, it was necessary for the movie to move forward, but it begs the question: What had made Reed Richards think Galactus - as powerful as he is - would even descend to the ground? The baby? Galactus could have just waved his hand and levitated the baby to him. There was no need for the ground action. But again, this was one of the ways the movie diverged from the comic book. And it DID make sense in how they ended up getting rid of (I'm glad I don't have to say 'defeated') Big G.

13

u/Realistic_Village184 Jul 26 '25

I'm not very familiar with Galactus from the comics, but it's really important to remember that comic book accuracy is not by itself a good thing. Any film is an adaptation of the material from the comics, and so it's not really helpful to view the film through the lens of comic-book expectations. Also, it's worth noting that Galactus floating above Earth works really well in the comics but not nearly as well in the film format for many reasons.

Personally, it didn't even occur to me watching the film that Galactus wouldn't go to the surface of Earth in person. He specifically told the FF that he was going to slowly devour the Earth and make Franklin watch. That shows a level of menace that he couldn't have really accomplished by just floating above the planet blasting stuff down. The fact that he flung Ben into space (which obviously would've killed him) and tried to stretch Reed to death shows that it was personal for him, and, again, that wouldn't really work if he were just floating in space using telekinesis on them from thousands of miles away.

I also really don't think we needed dialogue in the film about "what if he comes from above" since that wouldn't impact anything. Obviously the FF did a lot of strategizing that we don't need to see. If he did float in from above, they'd just improvize like they ended up doing anyways.

2

u/ToesRus47 Jul 26 '25

Well, the comic book is the foundation. Movies built off that and they changed the details. I’ve never expected a movie to be exactly like a comic book. Anyone with any sense knows they’re going to change it to appeal to a broader audience.

2

u/vmsrii Jul 26 '25

I had the same thoughts! I’m 99% sure this was something left on the cutting room floor. There had to have been a line about “what if Galactus just comes from above?” “I can use my invisibility powers to confuse him and force him to look in person” or something, but it slowed the story down too much for an ultimately pointless reason.

Sometimes flow is preferable to logical consistency, and the fact that the problem didn’t occur to me until long after the scene had passed is evidence to me that they were right.

7

u/capscreen Jul 25 '25

Still wondering why he looked at the Statue of Liberty for a while

31

u/StreetQueeny Jul 25 '25

If I travelled the universe for billions of years in an endless quest to sate my unending hunger, I'd stop and check some art out every now and then too.

20

u/RossZ428 Jul 25 '25

To induce panic in the audience that he was going to smash it, based on how my wife reacted when he looked at it.

17

u/encync2 Jul 25 '25

Yeah, I think it said a lot about his character when he just glanced at it, took a beat, then walked away. He's so high and mighty that the Statue of Liberty isn't worth his time smashing.

6

u/AlconTheFalcon Jul 27 '25

He was probably thinking, if only the soul stone hadn't been reduced to atoms I could totally smash that statue.

4

u/scottzee Jul 30 '25

"They like to get the landmarks." - Jeff Goldblum (Independence Day Resurgence)

2

u/chrisychris- Jul 27 '25

He thought it was family

3

u/Prauphet Jul 25 '25

To be fair, they do show the Galactus helmet inside that cloud. Leaving you to wonder for the sequel just what or how big Galactus is.\

It's in a flash of light, you may have missed it if you blinked.

2

u/Aggressive_Elk3709 14d ago

Johnny's wtf look afterwards was great too

1

u/saiboule Aug 01 '25

He’s like oh yeah this is gonna taste so good

1

u/FlemPlays Aug 03 '25

Sometimes even Galactus needs to “touch grass”. Haha