Christian Research Journal Reads Episode 126: Family First: A Film Review of ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

This is Episode 126 of Christian Research Journal Reads. This is an audio version of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL article, “Family First: A Film Review of ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps” by Cole Burgett.  This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 03 (2025).https://www.equip.org/articles/family-first-a-film-review-of-the-fantastic-four-first-steps/

It was accompanied by Postmodern Realities Episode 457 Family First: A Film Review of ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps”[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Fantastic Four: First Steps.]


This podcast presents audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles. As the flagship publication of the Christian Research Institute, the Journal seeks to equip followers of Christ to think and to live Christianly—to exercise truth and experience life. Truth, especially essential Christian doctrine, forms the basis for how we live our lives in Christ. As the apostle Paul instructed Timothy in 1 Tim. 4:16, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.”The Christian Research Journal enjoyed a print incarnation of almost 45 years. Now exclusively an online publication, the Journal consists of thousands of free articles. We hope that through these audio articles you are not only equipped to proclaim and defend your faith but that as a disciple you also draw closer to Christ in your walk with Him.  You can find the written version of each article that is an episode of Christian Research Journal Reads at the website of the Christian Research Institute, equip.org. All Christian Research Journal articles at equip.org are completely free and do not require a subscription and are not under a paywall.All episodes will be available at the following podcast platforms with more being added daily! You can help spread the word about this new podcast by giving us a rating and review from the other channels we are listed on and telling others!Our Website at the new special link and off our Journal main page.   



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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is episode one hundred and twenty six of the
Christian Research Journal Reads Podcast. Family First, a film review
of the Fantastic Four First Steps by Colbergett. This article
first appeared as an online exclusive for The Christian Research Journal,

(00:28):
Volume forty eight, number three, twenty twenty five, in our
Cultural Apologetics column. The Christian Research Journal Reads Podcast presents
audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles. To read the
full text of this article and to read its documentation,

(00:50):
please go to equip dot org. That's e quip dot org.
This is a feature film review The Fantastic Four First Steps,
directed by Matt Schankman, Screenplay by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson,
Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer. Story by Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan,

(01:15):
Ian Springer, and kat Wood. Starring Pedro Pascual, Vanessa Kirby,
Eben Moss, Backrack, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Sarah Niles, Mark Gaddis,
Natasha Leone, Paul Walter Hauser, and Ralph Inneson. This film
is rated PG thirteen from Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

(01:39):
twenty twenty five. Family First, a film review of The
Fantastic Four First Steps by Colbergett Editor's Note. This review
contains spoilers for The Fantastic Four First Steps. When it
comes to superhero films, subtle isn't usually the first word
that comes to mind. These are stories of spectacle explosions, capes,

(02:03):
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 art house flirtation The Dark
Night two thousand and eight gave us operatic moral chaos
Logan twenty seventeen offered something like a neo Western elegy

(02:29):
in The Mold of Unforgiven nineteen ninety two, and Watchmen
twenty nine asked whether heroes were ever heroic to begin with.
But even in these darker turns, certain narrative strands remained
surprisingly durable, and at its core, the superhero genre still

(02:50):
traffics in the same essential materials transformation and responsibility, power,
and the intersection between public duty and private identity. The
Fantastic Four First Steps twenty twenty five doesn't so much
undo those DNA strands as returned to earlier expressions of them.

(03:12):
Marvel's so called quote first Family end quote 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

(03:34):
Jack Kirby. With its dreamlike visions 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

(03:54):
in the trappings of old school disaster flicks like When
World's Go Glide nineteen fifty two. For Christians seeking to
engage pop culture with theological curiosity, the Fantastic Four First
Steps offers an opportunity to reflect unfallenness, the limits of
human control, and the ways in which identity is shaped

(04:18):
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, and before the Marvel Cinematic Universe
rewrote the rules of the summer blockbuster, there was the

(04:39):
Fantastic Four. Debuting in nineteen sixty one under the pen
of Stan Lee and the pencil of Jack Kirby, Fantastic
Four number one marked a quiet revolution in the world
of comics. Unlike the clean cut paragons of DC's stable,
the Fantastic Four bickered and made mistakes. Read Richard's was

(05:01):
often aloof and emotionally unavailable, Johnny's storm was reckless, Ben
Grimm resentful, and Sue's storm far more than just quote
the girl end quote. Neither gods nor loaners, they were
a makeshift family, fragile, infallible, but bound together by cosmic
accident and moral obligation. In many ways, Fantastic Four laid

(05:26):
the foundation for what would become Marvel's distinctive house style
heroes with problems, powers with consequences. Here, signs and imagination
were partners in narrative possibility. The Baxter Building became a
new olympus, and its inhabitants made the human condition a

(05:46):
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 Judio's interference
plagued earlier adoptions. Attempts to darken or modernize the tone

(06:06):
of the Fantastic Four stories often left the team feeling
unmoored from what made them distinctive in the first place.
In the era of cynical anti heroes and militarized superpowers,
the optimistic and speculative Fantastic for It never quite managed
to fit, which is why First Steps feels different. It

(06:30):
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. Read Richards, more than a superhero, was
a futurist in the truest sense, his brilliance matched only

(06:54):
by his blind spots and his dreams of progress undercut
by a 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

(07:15):
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

(07:35):
a vestige of seventeenth century European colonialism. That science might
be a path to understanding rather than control, has grown
hard to sustain in our present cultural imagination. Fantastic four
was born in the Jet Age wonder of the nineteen sixties,
right in the middle of the Silver Age of comic books,

(07:57):
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 nineteen sixty six through nineteen
sixty nine and two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey
nineteen sixty eight. Today science fiction is often dystopian, its

(08:19):
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 will destroy ourselves before we
ever get there. In that light, Fantastic four can feel
out of place, ernest, even naive. They don't inhabit the

(08:41):
murky moralism of Gotham City, nor are they misunderstood outcasts
like the X Men. Instead, the Fantastic for our public
figures explorers aspirational figures, and that may be why they've
often been overlooked by mainstream audience. Their stories simply don't

(09:02):
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

(09:23):
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

(09:43):
iconic Marvel supervillain Galactus, Ralph Innocent and accompanied by his
herald the Silver Surfer Juliet Garner. Galactus offers to spare
Earth in exchange for the child. Of course, the family refuses,
and sa delating drama unfolds. The birth of Franklin Richards

(10:04):
is not so much a narrative afterthought as it is
the axis around which the film turns. Note the film's
clever subtitle, His presence complicates every dynamic reads trust in
his own science, Sue's motherly instincts, ben Ebon Moss Backrock,

(10:26):
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. In the
climactic confrontation, Reid devises a desperate plan to channel Galactis
through a teleportation gait into deep space. Sue sacrifices herself

(10:50):
in a final effort to say 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

(11:11):
is there, hovering in the background, like the gargantuine silhouettes
of Galactus himself. A child is born, powers beyond comprehension
arrived 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

(11:34):
is a figure though 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

(11:58):
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

(12:21):
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.

(12:45):
It's about what happens to those dynamics when a child
is introduced, not in the abstract, but those daily emotional
recalibrations that rippled outward from a single birth. The arrival
of Franklin Richard's does not bring closure so much as
it brings disruption. It exposes some of the cracks and

(13:07):
Read 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,

(13:27):
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 Read 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

(13:49):
typical superhero movie. But First Steps allows these characters and
these moments room to breathe, and trusts the audience to
under stand that not all stakes are global, some are
simply human. And yet, because this is a Fantastic Four movie,
the global stakes remain. Galactus looms, the Silver Surfer glides

(14:15):
in icy arcs through the atmosphere, world leader's panic, The
media speculates, Read draws diagrams, Committees are formed, solutions are debated.
A surprising amount of the tension here comes not from
big set pieces, but for meetings from the political and

(14:36):
scientific infrastructure that springs up when the planet faces an
existential threat. It sort of feels a bit like the
nineteen fifty four 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 figures showing

(14:57):
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

(15:22):
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

(15:43):
over everyone's future, and that's all part of the Subtle
Way's first steps. Plays with familiar forms such as superhero tropes,
disaster movies, and family drama ties. How does one raise
immense power? That's the question that rears its head by
the time the film reaches the end of its run time.

(16:05):
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 super heroic powers than
it is about the quiet and disorienting arrival of something

(16:27):
new and the slow work of making room for it.
Thank you for listening to another episode from the Christian
Research Journal Reads podcast, which provides audio articles of Christian
Research Journal articles. If you go to equip dot org.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
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(17:09):
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(17:32):
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Speaker 1 (17:42):
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