What Critics Are Saying About the New Fantastic Four

The latest Marvel superhero movie seems to have pleased critics and audiences alike. The Fantastic Four: First Steps has a rock solid 89% positive rating from critics and a 92% score from audiences at Rotten Tomatoes. A sampling:

• The movie is "essentially a family drama disguising itself as a superhero film," writes Brandon Yu at the New York Times. And it works, in part because the movie has an "interest in actually building a sensibility, aesthetically and thematically, that is entirely its own, without the invisible hand of an extended universe pulling its strings."

• This is a "total reset" after the "disastrous" 2015 Fantastic Four movie, writes Katie Walsh for Tribune News Service. "The story itself is simple, and while deeply emotional, it's still fairly silly. There are a few attempts at banter, but the funniest person in the movie is Paul Walter Hauser as the Mole Man/Harvey Elder, the leader of the underground Subterranea (and there's not nearly enough of him). Of the four, (Pedro) Pascal delivers the best performance as the fussy, fastidious scientist Reed Richards."
• First Steps "is a solid, intelligent, occasionally inspired comic book movie that delivers most of what a popular audience demands from the genre (including interstellar voyages and massively scaled action sequences) plus a little bit more, mainly through thoughtful and grounded lead performances and production design that deserves its own section in this review—and gets one further down," writes Matt Stoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com. "It's probably a three-star movie in terms of nuts-and-bolts achievements, but the acting and the visuals elevate it far beyond the baseline of the genre."
• Not as wowed is Johnny Oleksinski at the New York Post. The last three attempts to put Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing on the big screen were "pathetic." First Steps "marks a slight improvement from the preceding trilogy of terror. But Marvel still can't nail what should be one of its premiere attractions."