[COLUMN] Fantastic Four: First Steps Thinks of the Children | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which opens this weekend in theatres. For those looking for a quick review, the film is fine and functional. It struggles with what to do with Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and would benefit from slowing down to unpack and explore some of its big ideas. But it’s well-structured, has some interesting ideas and hits most of its marks. With that in mind, if you want to see it blind, maybe bookmark this piece and come back, because we’re going in hot.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is an adaptation of The Galactus Saga, published in the three issues leading up to the fiftieth monthly issue of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. The story is legendary in comic book circles, having already served as the (very loose) basis for Tim Story’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer nearly two decades ago. However, First Steps makes one major addition to that narrative: Franklin Richards (Ada Scott).

Franklin Richards is the child of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby). The character first appeared in Fantastic Four Annual #6, published in November 1968, published more than two-and-a-half years after the final issue of The Galactus Saga. Of course, in the comics, Franklin Richards goes on to have a long and complicated relationship with the Devourer of Worlds known as Galactus (Ralph Ineson), but his addition to First Steps is an interesting choice.

First Steps has largely been sold as a movie about Galactus, but the film is much more about Franklin Richards. More specifically, the story is about what it means for Reed and Susan to become parents. The opening scene of the film is not some grand cosmic opera. It is Reed frantically searching for yellow iodine in their shared bathroom as Susan takes a pregnancy test. The film takes place over a year, with Franklin being born midway through the second act, in the gravity well of a black hole.

First Steps is not the only recent entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) concerned with progenation. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ends with the reveal that T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) had a son (Divine Love Konadu-Sun) with Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o). Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania finds Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) adventuring with his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton). Thor: Love and Thunder ends with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) adopting Love (India Hemsworth).

Indeed, the central plot motivator of Avengers: Endgame was Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) refusing to sacrifice his biological daughter Morgan (Lexi Rabe) by using time travel to save his surrogate son Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Even outside of the Marvel Studios framework, Logan (Hugh Jackman) became a surrogate father to Laura (Dafne Keen) in Logan while Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) serves as father to twins Jordan (Alex Garfin) and Jonathan (Jordan Elsass, Michael Bishop) in Superman & Lois.

This marks an interesting transition within the superhero genre. Historically, superheroes have been defined by their relationships to their parents. In Iron Man, Tony Stark announces himself as a hero by vanquishing his evil surrogate father figure Obidiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Even through Captain America: Civil War and into Endgame, Tony is haunted by the ghost of his father Howard (John Slattery). In Thor, the title character clashes with his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins).

This tension still simmers through contemporary superhero films. In James Gunn’s Superman, Superman (David Corenswet) struggles with his relationship to his biological father, Jor-El (Bradley Cooper). In Thunderbolts*, Yelena Belova's (Florence Pugh) strongest relationship is to her surrogate father Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour). Even in Captain America: Brave New World, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) finds himself facing Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), father to Betty Ross (Liv Tyler).

Still, there is a clear shift happening in the kinds of superhero stories that are being told, and the types of relationships that occupy the center of these narratives. The heroes of these tales used to be framed as children, of sons and daughters navigating complicated dynamics with parental figures. It is a classic Campbellian structure – “atonement with the father.” In recent years, audiences have been invited to consider these superheroes as adults, with spouses and children.

There undoubtedly are a number of factors driving this change. The most obvious is that the target market for these movies has shifted. The MCU is now seventeen years old. The teenagers who went to see Iron Man are now fully-grown adults. A couple who went on their first date to see The Incredible Hulk could presumably be taking their child to see Brave New World. The MCU has taken its core audience from one side of the classic 18-34 demographic to the other.

Indeed, while demographics suggest that younger audiences are more likely to regularly go to the cinema than their old counterparts, this is not always the case with franchise fare. If anything, the audiences for these movies are skewing older. 70% of the opening audience for Thunderbolts* was over 25, compared to the 54% of the opening audience for Endgame was under 25. 63% of the audience for Wakanda Forever was over 25, compared to a 50-50 split for Black Panther.

In a very real sense, these movies are trying to grow up with their audience. Indeed, it can feel a little bit like the MCU is working through life stages. This preoccupation with children follows on from a string of movies, including Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness or Eternals or Love and Thunder, that felt like the brand working through its midlife crisis. It is quite something to see a franchise of recognizable intellectual property seemingly work through the stages of a human life.

Interestingly, First Steps seems to open closer to the end of the Fantastic Four’s career than the beginning. Most of their superheroic adventures are recapped in a montage near the beginning of the movie, including confrontations with the Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser) and the Red Ghost (John Malkovich). The bulk of the team’s superheroism is framed as something childish, repackaged as animated cartoons or performed for school children.

First Steps is set in a retro-futurist fantasy world where it seems like the 1960s never ended, but there is an edge to this framing. These characters have been stuck in a moment, unable to move forward or progress. Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tires of repeating his iconic catchphrase and longs for a meaningful relationship with Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne). Susan’s brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) longs to be taken seriously. Susan launches “the Future Foundation.”

Like the title characters in Eternals, there is a sense that the team has grown beyond conventional superheroics, to the point that the film finds them facing “a universal constant.” Reed and Susan are moving beyond the fun of mashing action figures together and towards something more mature and adult. Galactus might be a big purple space alien in a cool hat, but the film treats him as a manifestation of the inescapable and inevitable forces of entropy and death.

While earlier Marvel Studios movies touched on the idea of superheroes as parents, First Steps is overtly about parenting. Central to the movie is the question of whether Reed and Susan are capable parents. Montages of Reed trying to childproof the family’s domicile are cut against sequences in which Reed casually dismantles criminal empires led by figures like Diablo or the Mad Thinker. Ben notes that Reed is “childproofing the whole world.”

In particular, there is a recurring emphasis on Reed’s insecurity about parenthood. When Reed and Susan announce the pregnancy, Johnny congratulates the pair. “You are going to be the best mom in the world,” Johnny assures his sister. He turns to Reed, “And you’re going to be the best dad.” After a beat, he adds, “Just kidding, you are out of your depth.” It is a joke, but it is a telling one. Reed seems speechless, unsure how to react.

While Susan prepares for motherhood, Reed locks himself away in his lab. He delegates the responsibilities of preparing the house to automatons, while he locks himself in his laboratory, obsessing over data. Reed worries that the cosmic rays that he and Susan have been exposed to will have a profound impact on their child. It is a fantastical version of the anxiety that every parent faces, the fear that they will pass something harmful or destructive down to their child.

Although the threat in First Steps is ostensibly global annihilation, with Galactus seeking to feed upon the planet, the stakes are firmly rooted in the family. When Reed leads the team out into space to meet with Galactus to negotiate potential alternatives, Galactus offers to spare Earth in exchange for the child the Susan carries. When Reed and Susan return home, humanity turns on the team, demanding that they sacrifice their firstborn for the good of the world.

Within the narrative of the movie, Galactus offers Reed and Susan the opportunity to save billions of lives. However, in the larger context of the superhero genre, Galactus is offering Reed and Susan the chance to remain in their current status quo. If Reed and Susan surrender their son to Galactus, their lives can continue as normal; they won’t have to face age or entropy or death. After all, as Ultron (James Spader) pointed out in Age of Ultron, children are themselves a reminder of their parents’ mortality.

This is the moral pivot of the movie. The question of what it means to be a parent. For a brief moment, an expression of his own insecurities more than anything else, Reed seems to consider Galactus’ proposal. He deems it “ethical.” However, Reed and Susan eventually make it clear that they will not sanction such a possibility. “I will not sacrifice for my son to save this world,” Susan tells humanity. “But I will not sacrifice this world to save my son.”

This bargain reverberates through First Steps. Galactus announces his arrival to Earth through his herald the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). It is eventually revealed that the Silver Surfer volunteered herself as a servant to Galactus to protect her own child. As part of that deal, it is the Silver Surfer’s duty to find other planets upon which the Great Devourer of Worlds might feed. The Silver Surfer does not sacrifice one world to protect her child, but dozens – if not hundreds – of planets.

Tellingly, Reed eventually hatches a plan to literally teleport the Earth out of the way of Galactus, symbolically testing the technology on an egg. While this doesn’t come to pass, it feels like a potent metaphor for parenthood, a father literally moving heaven and earth to protect his child. Ultimately, the team succeeds in teleporting Galactus away, a feat that takes so much energy that it literally kills Susan. However, Susan is resurrected by Franklin. The parent is redeemed through the child.

There is a profound humanism and an optimism in this idea, in the belief that parents hold an absolute and unquestionable obligation to protect their children and to allow those children the space to grow and develop beyond their wildest imaginings. So much of the modern superhero genre can get lost in empty power fantasies, but First Steps asks its heroes to look past themselves. “He’s not us,” Susan whispers to Reed at one point. “He’s more.”

The nature of comic books means that superheroes are often stuck in a perpetual second act, unable to truly grow and change. One of the challenges of adapting the idea of a shared universe of superheroes to a medium like live action film means having to grapple with the passage of time. In First Steps, Marvel’s First Family cast their eyes to the future, as Reed and Susan are forced for the first time to consider something that might live beyond them.