The Fantastic Four: First Steps Actually Understands Its Villain
You’re gonna need a bigger hat rack.
After a long, long wait, Marvel’s First Family is finally part of the MCU. Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps will hit theaters on July 25 and introduce Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben into the Marvel Cinematic Universe fold. The first teaser revealed a movie that’s retro, bright, and likely set in an entirely different universe, making it unlike anything the MCU has tried yet.
But the most exciting part of the trailer was a glimpse at the movie’s big villain — one of the biggest in Marvel history — which proves that Marvel is now embracing an element of its comic book history that it previously shied away from.
Galactus, as seen in the Fantastic Four: First Steps teaser.
The Fantastic Four trailer gives us a brief glimpse of Galactus, a cosmic being and frequent comic book foe of our heroes. Galactus is an odd villain: he feeds on planets, so his destruction isn’t based on revenge or spite or even an inherently evil nature. He’s just hungry. In First Steps, he’s voiced by Ralph Ineson, although we don’t hear from him in the trailer. Even so, the mere sight of him is terrifying.
He’s not as big as he’s usually shown in the comics, where he’s usually larger than the planets he devours, but he’s still big enough to cast a shadow over much of Manhattan. Besides slimming down, Galactus is surprisingly comics-accurate: he even has his pronged helmet.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer took a stranger approach to showing Galactus.
This is quite the change for Fantastic Four movies, which have previously shied away from the (admittedly pretty goofy) Galactus design. In 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Galactus was mainly portrayed as a nebula-like cloud, although we did briefly see his iconic shape in shadow. That movie had bigger problems, but it felt like it was afraid of its own story.
But First Steps is embracing the Fantastic Four’s retro roots. It does look silly when The Thing wears a little hat, and it does look weird for these heroes to don 1960s-style space suits. Its attempt to recapture the magic of reading old comic books is part of its charm. Galactus may look a little goofy, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be another Thanos-level threat, one the MCU badly needs. Hopefully the movie proves you can save the world and still have fun doing it.
