Here comes Fantastic Four: First Steps, flaring with all the theatrical majesty of a dying supernova and trailing, regrettably, the heavy scent of earnest failure. This, Marvel’s third go at rebooting its First Family, arrives less like a blockbuster and more like a funeral procession dressed in retro-futurist drag. It wants to mean something. It wants to be good. And yet.

Set in a 1960s that never was, the film trades bombast for solemnity. There are no multiversal migraines, no sky portals vomiting armies. Instead: Pascal broods, Kirby smolders, Quinn twitches, Garner glows. Especially Garner—she carries Sue Storm with the grace of someone aware she’s in a better film than the one she’s actually in. The director, Toby Haynes, shoots everything as if Kubrick had a lovechild with Malick and left it in a Bell Labs centrifuge. It’s all artifice and atmosphere. There’s silence. There’s suffering. There’s… a talking AI named Diciannove.

Marvel, dear reader, has grown up. Or thinks it has. First Steps wants to be cinema with a capital C. It yearns to be the kind of superhero film one watches at a curated museum screening—next to a plaque explaining its brave deviation from formula. And yet what it actually is feels like a long, lovely yawn. The Galactus menace? Barely a shadow. The action? Minimalist to the point of absence. What fills the void? Talk. Reflections. Flashbacks. People mutating, then contemplating mutation. Pascal’s Reed Richards isn’t a man stretched by cosmic rays but by the film’s unbearable weight of metaphor.

Some critics hail it as a masterpiece of mood and intention—a cinematic prayer for depth in a shallow genre. They see Tarkovsky in its pacing, Malick in its awe, Bergman in its ache. And perhaps they’re right. There are moments when the film feels lit from within, like it’s reaching for the sublime. But then it recedes, scared of its own ideas. Others, less enchanted, call it a “snoozefest,” and that too is true. Its beauty is surface-deep, its emotion self-conscious, its risks calculated rather than felt.

What to do with a film like this? Praise its ambition? Mourn its execution? Marvel may have made its most beautiful film—and its most boring. But in a franchise that often treats artistry as a mid-credit indulgence, perhaps First Steps deserves its slow, strange march. It is the MCU as elegy: forlorn, fractured, fascinating.

Whether it is the first step toward something bold, or the last gasp of a fatigued machine—well, that depends on whether you found yourself entranced or entombed.

WORDS: brice the impaler.