Fantastic Four: First Steps is an unapologetic love letter to the cishet, white, patriarchal, nuclear family.

The film seems to ask “Can the white family save the world?’

Spoiler Alert: This review goes over the film and many of its scenes in detail. 

Art exists in context. 

Fantastic Four: First Steps was released in the context of an increasingly far-right policy consensus across global governments and the private sector. 

The film is in alignment textually with far-right ideals of white supremacy, suppressed diversity, erased disability, the human body’s supposed immutability, and the idea that the white cishet patriarchal nuclear family, enforced as the only social unit, can lead to global utopia. 

In the context of our real world, the film largely endorses the sweeping rise of far-right policy and the obliteration of online privacy. 

It was released almost immediately after total, legal-identity-based, internet surveillance on social media started being rolled out across the UK and Ireland. While the two laws- one for the UK, another for Ireland, are different, they both require uploading legal documentation such as a passport to access much of the internet.

Critics of the ID-verification laws enabling this real-world super-surveillance have called the requirements of those laws “structurally incapable” of the stated aims, which are to protect children. 

Further concerns center around the weakening of encryption- enabling further mass surveillance and giving Big Tech even more unaccountable power- one cybersecurity expert said the UK government is guilty of “magical thinking” concerning these new laws.

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking sums up how the movie solves its conflicts, starting with the Fantastic Four as scientists-turned-astronauts who become superhuman. 

The Fantastic Four then become a world-ruling family, as explicitly delivered through the narrative device of newsreels and public broadcasts.

It does this through a secondary theme of what I’ve termed “superveillance.” This idea is that, somehow, entering all private life into the public sphere is going to lead to good things, and is natural- therefore it should be celebrated.

Of course, in the real world, eroding privacy enables both right-wing politics and mass harm to people, and the families that the film seems obsessed with defining. 

As the film opens, Sue is in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, counting down the seconds until the results of an at-home pregnancy test come through. Reed looks unsuccessfully for some medicine. When Sue comes out of the bathroom, immediately, she gets his medicine, then gives him the news that she’s pregnant.

Sue choosing to medicate Reed before anything else, literally pausing the big reveal of her pregnancy to take care of Reed, felt very domestic in the worst way. 

The setting of this scene says a lot; it’s a slightly futuristic but still clearly 1960s-era or so bedroom. 

As the scene closes, Sue says, “Nothing is going to change,” and Reed replies, “Of course not.”

Promising normalcy–a world where nothing changes in the face of inevitable and unstoppable change–is one of the core premises of fascism. It is what far-right politics sell to those it wants to be its in-group or its foot soldiers. 

This pregnancy-reveal scene sets the tone for the entire movie. The aggressive assertion of this nuclear, or cosmic, as the case may be, family is the central messaging vehicle for the whole movie. 

Alternate History

The next scenes include a news reel that effectively contains the Fantastic Four’s origin story and an alternate history for this fantastical Earth, all within several minutes of exposition. 

We see glimpses of the Fantastic Four’s rise to power—not just superhuman, but also political.

Supremacy of the family unit, as represented by the Fantastic Four, somehow creates a global utopia in less than four years. 

In a family dinner scene, it takes what feels like… 30 seconds for Ben Grimm to figure out that Sue is pregnant, making natalism and the reproductive capacity of Sue a central theme of the movie.

The film also discusses Sue and Reed’s fertility journey in a heavy-handed manner.

The utopia the Fantastic Four built, of course, relies on the foundation of the family unit, having rolled all world leadership structures under them and achieving total military disarmament worldwide. 

Their powers, both super and political, make them the world’s leaders and protectors. 

Throughout the film, when things go wrong, the Fantastic Four are summoned. They even have smartwatches that alert them when they are needed.

Somehow, despite being framed as the world’s protectors and political leaders, their limited superheroing only happens in NYC. 

Natalism

Later in the film, the tone of the narrative reinforces the natalism and white supremacy inherent in the movie’s message.

This can be seen in the scene where Earth’s population is forced to conserve power around the world. There is a total electrical blackout on weekends, so the power can be stored for what the film in-text calls “the Fantastic Four’s Hail Mary.”

At the onset of the first power-conserving blackout, we see that Ben Grimm has to shave his rock-surfaced body. 

This reinforces that the film is more concerned with the supposed immutability of the human body than it is with superheroing or delivering an inspiring message to its audience.

That last-minute plan is to teleport the Earth (but possibly not the moon) to another corner of the universe. 

As a former aerospace engineering student, I can tell you that Earth without its moon is no Earth. It would not be astrodynamically or geophysically the same planet. 

Also, if you just drop a planet into another solar system in an instant like the film shows the Fantastic Four attempting, it would have no orbital momentum and end up inside its new host star.

The Fantastic Four, as protagonists, care only about the preservation of the family as a social unit- much like many types of real-world fascists.

This comes over preserving the planet or the way-too-cheery utopia they’ve created, where the world depends on them and gives them total political power. 

Their son isn’t a character so much as an object for representing the film’s natalism and white supremacy. 

The best place to see this is in the film’s concluding scenes, especially the death and resurrection of Sue Storm.

Sue makes the ultimate sacrifice to stop Galactus, making it so they strand the world eater somewhere on the other end of the universe.

In hatching this plan, and the former “teleport the earth” plan, the focus is on protecting their family-  the rest of the planet is not central but is technically a concern. 

Never is there a focus on stopping the destruction of countless worlds, when they could easily end Galactus as a threat to the entire universe with a terrible sacrifice, letting Galactus consume Franklin’s power.

In the film, Galactus says that Franklin was hiding his nature from Reed and Sue.

I say that the singular focus on normalcy and a healthy white baby with nothing wrong with him aligns with fascist logics: excluding diversity, disability, and other ways of being, from allowable existence.

Sue doesn’t stay dead; her ultimate sacrifice is only temporary.

After Reed does necrophilia in the form of making out with her corpse, Ben and Reed lower Franklin onto his mother’s dead body and he crawls on her for a few moments. 

When the infant’s hands rest on his mother’s skin, specifically her neck, her body starts to twitch, and she comes back to life a few moments later.

Sue’s first line of dialog post-resurrection is “He is not us, he is more.”- again reinforcing the idea that the nuclear family as the sole social unit around which to organize society somehow elevates those in that social relationship.

Diversity issues

The central conflict of the film comes to a head in one scene, before they figure out their last-ditch plan.

In that scene, Sue walks outside to a gathered protesting crowd, leaving her literal ivory tower with her child, Franklin, who is still an infant.

She gives a speech that centers on the idea that the family as a social unit makes people more, makes society more, and should be valued above all else.

While she is giving this speech, the film very blatantly flicks camera angles to different people of color, who are mostly in the gathered crowd. 

This assortment of people of color engaged in protest is the most racially diverse scene in the entire movie, and each shot is much more racially diverse than nearly any prior or following camera angle throughout the movie. 

Focusing on angry protestors in the movie’s most racially diverse scene, a scene with the only representation of civil strife, felt like a steroidal boost for racist and white supremacist narratives about dissent that exist in our real world. 

The film appears to use people of color as set dressing. There’s only one person of color as a named character with lines of dialogue. In addition, there are only three people of color characters with any dialogue, not including two children for a brief moment.

Those children only speak alongside a scene where a large group of children are screaming at Ben Grimm to throw a car. Unlike one of the white children characters, they aren’t afforded lines of their own, and are both part of a group chatter.

The most prominent of those very few people of color characters spoke five times, usually a single line, with what is likely only seven lines of dialogue according to screenwriting standards published by the London Playwrights Association.

Another character is a journalist with three lines of dialogue according to those same standards.

The final person of color character with any dialogue barely says one line. 

The most prominent person of color character was also the only named person of color character in the entire film- Lucy, Sue Storm's assistant who is a black woman doing feminized labor as help for Sue, a literal world ruler. 

Not having prominent characters of color in the movie is a very heavy-handed way of baking in the white supremacy of its messaging.

Techno-fascism

The technology in this fictional world is clearly more advanced than our own today. 

However, only the Fantastic Four are shown to enjoy every benefit of that technological advancement. 

Herbie, their assistant robot, represents the invisibilization of domestic or private labor. Despite being a “he,” he is used for all the thankless domestic work of the private sphere. 

Earlier in the movie, Herbie is used to baby-proof the Baxter Building–a futuristic skyscraper on Times Square in NYC.We see not a single human or superhuman involved in all of the domestic work to baby-proof a literal skyscraper. Herbie also cooks the family’s dinners and other meals.

This ties into cynical ideas of automation, technological progress, and consolidation of power and surveillance in ways that only truly benefit the so-called “elite,” whether they be the Fantastic Four or real-world billionaires and CEOs.

There is a scene where Johnny says, “You babyproofed the world”  to Reed, who just admitted to globally tracking “criminal organizations.”

In this scene, we see the largest police presence of the entire movie. This is an early reinforcement of the film’s secondary messaging of mass surveillance being good, desirable, and automatic.

The advanced technology and publicization of the private sphere are not asides; they are a very clear acceptance of the ideas of Silicon Valley’s brand of fascism. 

That is, using technology to make human workers ever-more obsolete while totally powerless and thereby control, rather than liberate, anyone who is not a billionaire. 

It is a type of techno-fascism, a large consideration in the real world.

Selling Far-Right Politics

Largely, the film sells us on ideas of white supremacy and natalism as cures for the world’s social, scientific, and economic woes while using what fascism, including white supremacist ideas, uses to solve problems: magical thinking. 

The Fantastic Four are so focused on the preservation of the family unit that all of their plans, even in a fantastical world with technology approaching the threshold of magic, wouldn’t actually save the world.Instead, they would doom it differently.

Teleporting the Earth to a new solar system would still be the end, a certain apocalypse, based only on orbital mechanics and the loss of the moon.

Again, it’s magical thinking to rely on technology and far-right ideology to solve real-world problems that both technological development and right-wing ideologies are incapable of solving.

The film’s answer to the question that it asks, “Can the white family save the world?” is delivered to audiences as a willfully false yet constructed “Yes.”