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Cultural Apologetics Column
The following article appeared as an online-exclusive in CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, volume 48, number 03 (2025).
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[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Fantastic Four: First Steps.]
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Directed by Matt Shakman
Screenplay by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer
Story by Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer, and Kat Wood
Produced by Kevin Feige
Starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, and Ralph Ineson
Feature Film (PG–13)
(Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2025)
When it comes to superhero films, subtle isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind. These are stories of spectacle — explosions, capes, cosmic threats, and moral absolutes rendered in primary colors. Sure, there have been exceptions throughout the years: brooding deconstructions and gritty reimaginings, even the occasional arthouse flirtation. The Dark Knight (2008) gave us operatic moral chaos, Logan (2017) offered something like a neo-Western elegy in the mold of Unforgiven (1992), and Watchmen (2009) asked whether heroes were ever heroic to begin with. But even in these darker turns, certain narrative strands remain surprisingly durable, and at its core, the superhero genre still traffics in the same essential materials: transformation and responsibility, power, and the intersection between public duty and private identity.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) doesn’t so much undo those DNA strands as return to earlier expressions of them. Marvel’s so-called “First Family” predates the current age of cinematic superheroes, and in many ways resists the genre’s now-familiar beats. This isn’t a story about vengeance or personal trauma transmuted into justice. It seems to owe more to Gene Roddenberry than to Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, with its dreamlike vision of a Tomorrowland future in which a family of superheroes has brought humanity into a kind of utopia and now stands as Earth’s protectors. It’s about science, discovery, relational breakdown and reformation, all wrapped in the trappings of old-school disaster flicks like When Worlds Collide (1952).1
For Christians seeking to engage pop culture with theological curiosity, The Fantastic Four: First Steps offers an opportunity to reflect on fallenness, the limits of human control, and the ways in which identity is shaped by both grace and those from whom we cannot walk away.
Science, Optimism, and the Strange. Before the Avengers assembled, before Spider-Man swung onto the scene, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe rewrote the rules of the summer blockbuster, there was the Fantastic Four. Debuting in 1961 under the pen of Stan Lee and the pencil of Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four #1 marked a quiet revolution in the world of comics.2 Unlike the clean-cut paragons of DC’s stable, the Fantastic Four bickered and made mistakes. Reed Richards was often aloof and emotionally unavailable, Johnny Storm was reckless, Ben Grimm resentful, and Sue Storm far more than just “the girl.” Neither gods nor loners, they were a makeshift family, fragile and fallible, but bound together by cosmic accident and moral obligation.
In many ways, Fantastic Four laid the foundation for what would become Marvel’s distinctive house style: heroes with problems, powers with consequences. Here, science and imagination were partners in narrative possibility. The Baxter Building became a new Olympus, and its inhabitants made the human condition a little larger and stranger.
Yet for all their importance on the page, the Fantastic Four have remained elusive on screen. Rights entanglements, uneven scripts, poor casting decisions, and studio interference plagued earlier adaptations. Attempts to darken or modernize the tone of Fantastic Four stories often left the team feeling unmoored from what made them distinctive in the first place. In the era of cynical antiheroes and militarized superpowers, the optimistic and speculative Fantastic Four never quite managed to fit. Which is why First Steps feels different.3 It is less a reinvention and more a restoration, a return to something that feels elemental in superhero storytelling.
Lee and Kirby’s early issues were wild, kaleidoscopic blends of speculative fiction and interpersonal drama. Reed Richards, more than a superhero, was a futurist in the truest sense — his brilliance matched only by his blind spots, and his dreams of progress undercut by emotional distance. Fantastic Four made science wondrous. Not sterile or weaponized or reduced to technobabble, but the space race by way of modern mythmaking. And because the team was a family, unavoidably entangled and therefore constantly clashing, their discoveries were as much moral and personal as they were scientific.
That optimism — the belief that knowledge can be redemptive, that exploration of the unknown is a noble venture (and not a vestige of seventeenth-century European colonialism), that science might be a path to understanding rather than control — has grown harder to sustain in our present cultural imagination. Fantastic Four was born in the jet-age wonder of the 1960s, right in the middle of the Silver Age of comic books, when the future still shimmered with a kind of promise. It was the same cultural climate that gave rise to the original Star Trek series (1966–1969) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).4
Today, science fiction is often dystopian, its vision of the future tinged with surveillance or societal collapse. We are less inclined to dream about reaching the stars and more likely to suspect we’ll destroy ourselves before we ever get there. In that light, Fantastic Four can feel out of place — earnest, even naïve. They don’t inhabit the murky moralism of Gotham City, nor are they misunderstood outcasts like the X-Men. Instead, the Fantastic Four are public figures, explorers, aspirational figures. And that may be why they’ve often been overlooked by mainstream audiences: their stories simply don’t fit the expected mold.
The Fantastic Five. The new film begins in the midst of the Fantastic Four’s reign as global heroes. Reed (Pedro Pascal) and Sue (Vanessa Kirby) are celebrated icons, their scientific innovations and Future Foundation efforts credited with ending conflict and ushering in a publicly heralded utopian society. Then Sue discovers she is pregnant — sparking Reed’s anxiety about the cosmic rays that granted them powers possibly affecting their unborn child. His concern is vindicated with the arrival of iconic Marvel supervillain Galactus (Ralph Ineson). Accompanied by his herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), Galactus offers to spare Earth in exchange for the child. Of course, the family refuses, and escalating drama unfolds.
The birth of Franklin Richards is not so much a narrative afterthought as it is the axis around which the film turns (note the film’s clever subtitle).5 His presence complicates every dynamic: Reed’s trust in his own science, Sue’s motherly instincts, Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny’s (Joseph Quinn) newfound status as uncles. And Galactus is drawn to the child’s latent cosmic potential. Franklin, we come to learn, is something new and powerful.6
In the climactic confrontation, Reed devises a desperate plan to channel Galactus through a teleportation gate into deep space. Sue sacrifices herself in a final effort to save Franklin, only for the child to resurrect in an eerie display of impossible power. The moment is too strange to be genuinely comforting, and too intimate to be triumphant.
The film is wise not to lean too hard into messianic parallels, but the shape is there, hovering in the background like the gargantuan silhouette of Galactus himself. A child is born, powers beyond comprehension arrive to claim him, a mother lays down her life, and then — against all natural law — life returns. Franklin is not a Christ figure in any straightforward sense. But he is a figure through whom the familiar archetype of messianic expectation can be glimpsed, however distorted by the genre’s trappings.
For Christian viewers, these familiar narrative beats are a kind of provocation. They remind us that the Western cultural imagination remains haunted by certain narrative patterns, even when severed from their theological roots. First Steps plays in the shadow of the gospel, drawing on symbols and motifs that carry mythological weight even in the secular age.
At first glance, The Fantastic Four: First Steps may look like another cosmic-scale superhero epic. But its shape is stranger and, in some ways, more daring. It is a film about family. Not that sentimental version we often get in blockbusters — bloodless platitudes about “togetherness” in the face of CGI peril — but the kind of family forged through friction and anxiety and the process of becoming something new when everything familiar starts to shift. It’s about what happens to those dynamics when a child is introduced — not in the abstract, but those daily emotional recalibrations that ripple outward from a single birth.
The arrival of Franklin Richards does not bring closure so much as it brings disruption. It exposes some of the cracks in Reed and Sue’s relationship, and forces Ben and Johnny into unfamiliar roles. The world sees this family as a symbol of hope and progress, but behind that carefully maintained public image lies a more complicated truth: science cannot control everything, and no one is ever fully prepared for what new life demands. This is why the film’s quieter moments matter so much, such as Reed using his powers in mundane ways, or Sue trying to balance diplomacy with prenatal care. These are not action beats and would barely register in a typical superhero movie. But First Steps allows these characters and these moments room to breathe, and trusts the audience to understand that not all stakes are global. Some are simply human.7
And yet, because this is a Fantastic Four movie, the global stakes remain. Galactus looms. The Silver Surfer glides in icy arcs through the atmosphere. World leaders panic. The media speculates. Reed draws diagrams. Committees are formed. Solutions are debated. A surprising amount of the tension here comes not from big set pieces, but from meetings — from the political and scientific infrastructure that springs up when the planet faces an existential threat. It sort of feels a bit like the 1954 original Japanese Godzilla film, which pulls so much of its drama from the frantic scrambling of really smart people trying to prepare for a giant figure showing up to stomp around an urban environment.
The film’s preoccupations will likely feel pretty familiar to Christian audiences. The drama of family. The birth of a child who disrupts all known categories. It is a beginning fraught with theological motifs and narrative ambiguity. Sue lives, Galactus is defeated, but very little is “back to normal.” Instead, the film’s final moments leave us with a sense that something has shifted, even as the family tries to go back to normal. Franklin is not so much a new addition to the team (an idea that is played with at the end of the film) as he is a living question mark hanging over everyone’s future.
And that’s all part of the subtle ways First Steps plays with familiar forms such as superhero tropes, disaster movies, and family dramedies. How does one raise immense power? That’s the question that rears its head by the time the film reaches the end of its runtime. The answer will probably be in a sequel, if the post-credits scene is anything to go by. But taken on its own terms, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is less concerned with cosmic threats and superheroic powers than it is about the quiet and disorienting arrival of something new, and the slow work of making room for it.
Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He teaches classes in systematic theology and Bible exposition and writes extensively about theology and popular culture.
NOTES
- For a look at some of the space-age films that The Fantastic Four: First Steps seems intent on emulating, check out Darian Davis, “How to Start Watching: Space Age Movies,” Movie Jawn, July 21, 2025, https://ift.tt/m8FcWnM.
- Read about the circumstances that led to Stan Lee creating the Fantastic Four in “Stan the Man and Roy the Boy: A Conversation Between Stan Lee and Roy Thomas,” Comic Book Artist, no. 2 (Summer 1998), https://ift.tt/odB0j6F.
- For a look at some of the issues facing Fantastic Four adaptations, check out Kenneth Lowe, “What’s So Hard About Making a Fantastic Four Movie?,” Paste Magazine, July 17, 2025, https://ift.tt/LFgnXmu.
- See how director Matt Shakman took inspiration from Kubrick and others in Brian Davids, “‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Director Matt Shakman Talks ‘Interstellar’ Influence and the Last-Minute Silver Surfer Addition,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 25, 2025, https://ift.tt/n0PSpzu.
- Read about the difficulty the filmmakers faced regarding when to introduce Franklin to the narrative in Sydney Bucksbaum, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps Director Explains Ending and Reveals Alternate Version of the Movie,” Entertainment Weekly, July 25, 2025, https://ift.tt/OK3yHon.
- There is precedent for this in the comics, where Franklin Richards is presented as one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel stable. See the director’s comments in Sydney Bucksbaum, “Fantastic Four: First Steps Director Explains Why He Wanted to Introduce Powerful Baby Franklin Richards,” Entertainment Weekly, July 23, 2025, https://ift.tt/o9ixRsB.
- The cast and crew discuss how they developed in the film’s vision of the core team in Adam B. Vary, “‘Fantastic Four,’ Assemble: Director Matt Shakman on Casting Marvel’s First Family Without Auditions and ‘Corporate Pressures’ Not Being ‘My Burden to Shoulder,’” Variety, July 16, 2025, https://ift.tt/o8xequd.
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