It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s… a Baby?

Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is cute. Retro, colorful, and with a 1960s vibe, the film is a big, flashy fan service for Marvel’s earliest superhero team. And despite some mostly mild action scenes, First Steps is by and large a character study—a tale of four friends and one big (literal) family. It stars an ensemble cast of solid performers (especially Pedro Pascal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who are tasked with conveying more pathos than their heavy rubber costumes allow. The result is a cuddly nookie with some moving moments, but it rarely feels like it’s trying very hard.

Producer Kevin Feige, for one, said it best in a recent interview: this is “a no-homework-required” film. In a multiverse that’s suddenly become as cluttered as it is with properties (if not more), it’s nice to see a Marvel movie that doesn’t demand familiarity with the specific canon of its universe—or necessarily foreshadow future spin-offs, character introductions, or cameos. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its own self-contained origin story, one that reintroduces Marvel’s Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm without necessarily feeding back into the continuity of previous adaptations. To the film’s credit, it is satisfied with a lesser dose of continuity—and, at times, to its detriment.

Opening with a talk show hosted by Mark Gatiss (the character is there to provide exposition and a framing device on how we got to where we are in the Fantastic Four’s lives), we learn that four years earlier, a space mission exposed the group to cosmic radiation that forever changed their DNA. Reed (Pedro Pascal), we learn, has the superpower to stretch his body out like elastic, thanks to both his brainpower and…well, a brief jolt of lightning. Vanessa Kirby’s Sue has discovered she can turn invisible and project force fields from her eyes and hands. Joseph Quinn’s Johnny is the Human Torch: when set ablaze, he can run faster, leap higher, and fly. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm, after an ill-fated rescue mission, has become The Thing permanently: a hulking rock-covered man with superhuman strength.

Fast-forward to the present day, and all four live together as a domestic (pun intended) family unit in a commune or space compound that looks like it was plucked right out of the 1960s: flying cars, chalkboard equations littering the floors, a toddler-sized robot housekeeper they call H.E.R.B.I.E. The world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an 80s-loving nerd’s vision of retro-futurism: square TV sets, rotary phones, no cell phones, and a chipper, almost-caricature design aesthetic that’s half The Jetsons and half Lost in Space.

The plot, however, is less urgent. The focus of First Steps is on family, or the very family that’s at the heart of these four leads. Sue finds out early on that she’s pregnant, and Reed is equal parts anxious and adorable in his reaction. In one scene, he has H.E.R.B.I.E. baby-proof not only the house but their science lab as well. Johnny and Ben act like mischievous siblings, providing bickering comic relief while equally clearly playing the part of the young, slightly less heroic uncles-to-be.

The family moment is short-lived, though. The larger-than-life cosmic menace is on the horizon. Galactus, a gigantic armored figure with glowing red eyes and the proportions of a football field, is on his way to Earth with the express purpose of devouring the planet. Before he arrives, he sends a silver-skinned herald (Julia Garner, in motion capture) to tell Sue the news. The Silver Surfer arrives on a sleek surfboard, and she is both imposing in her alienness (I don’t think I’ve ever seen Garner as sinister-looking before) and an object of ogling (infatuation, even) for Johnny.

Galactus and his herald arrive, and the four launch into space after him. While we follow them on their heroic mission in pursuit of Galactus and away from the attacks of the Surfer, the effects don’t once drop the film’s retro aesthetic. There are blasts of light, streaks of flame, and splashes of stylized, comic book explosion effects. Sue goes into labor at one point during the chase, which the team only narrowly avoids, while she gives birth during the finale in space. The scene is as ethereal as it is absurd: childbearing and the end of Earth are an unusual and unexpected combination, both subdued and made cosmic in the visuals, which are everything you might expect from something with a title card that says SPACE.

Space. It’s a theme of the movie as a whole. Not a theme, really, so much as a metaphor for the tone. There are sincere moments, but they’re cushioned, a little muted by the uniformly soft-palette “space-age” colors. Characters’ faces may be screaming in pain and anguish, but the action and stakes never seem perilous, even when the fate of the world is on the line. It plays more like a Sunday cartoon or a children’s adventure story than a popcorn action flick.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is pleasantly low-stakes and very well acted (save for a somewhat shaky performance by Mark Gatiss). It’s as much heavy on homage as it is on hardcore. It’s no doubt its crowd-pleaser, a winking nod back at Marvel’s retro-futuristic superhero origins. But if you’re coming in for something silly and less world-ending, it’ll be right up your alley. It’s a fan service of a movie for fans of the 1970s, if not a fan service superhero movie in and of itself.