The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Maybe if this film had been made and released two decades ago, before the entirety of the superhero splurge, I might have watched it thinking, wow, they really made something amazing here. But we cannot undo these things we’ve done, as someone once said, and the effect of having seen superhero group after superhero group after superhero group save the world again and again and again cannot be easily nullified. As it is, no amount of interesting conceptual design, or nostalgic kicks, or even just plain, good storytelling and performances, can get this work to break through against all that has come before it and lead the viewer to anything more than mild appreciation, to a diminished admiration that battles against a flattened sense of what a movie like this is supposed to be. It’s fine, really; all of the above mentioned elements are well done, and if you’d never seen another entry in the genre you’d probably rave about this one. But few of us out here are infants without prior experience, so the impact of this iteration is very much dulled. More standard than fantastic.