After three previous attempts and a merger of studios to bring the film rights back to Marvel Studios, there is yet another shot at bringing the exploits of comics’ first family to the larger-than-life screen. The Fantastic Four is this time titled Fantastic Four: First Steps.

First published in 1961, The Fantastic Four is a quartet of heroes with very public identities and celebrity status in the comic book continuum. Though a popular franchise for over 60 years, the group has struggled to find a successful silver screen adaptation. The filmmakers with this reboot have elected to jettison more conventional approaches for a bold vision.

Marvel Studios

Fantastic Four: First Steps drops the audience into a parallel universe where the family of superheroes are already not only known but honored globally for their exploits and bravery. It is an alternate 1960s, and the production is drenched in retro-futurism—a future that people of the 60s envisioned but never came to pass, colorful and optimistic. The team’s ‘origin’ is quickly recounted as backstory for a television special. How scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), pilot Ben Grimm (Eben Moss-Bachrach), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), and her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) ventured into space and returned changed, imbued with amazing powers. In addition to eschewing recreating their origin, the filmmakers also steered clear of the team’s most notorious opponent, Dr. Doom. Instead, they are confronted by the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), Herald to the god-like being Galactus (Ralph Ineson), whose insatiable hunger drives him to consume planets teeming with life. Galactus is presented in the film as he was in the source material—a kaiju-sized humanoid in fantastic armor. The Silver Surfer has selected Earth as Galactus’ next victim, and the Fantastic Four attempt to negotiate with the god-like being. But when Galactus demands a price too high for the team to personally pay, Earth is set as his next target, and the world turns on its former heroes.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, in my opinion, is a mid-tier Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. Not as weak as some of the franchise films, but also nowhere near the excellence of its best. The script has four credited writers for both screenplay and story, and the final product is a bit muddled, showing what was likely a turbulent development and production. The cast is good, with Pascal and Kirby being outright terrific. Julia Garner plays enigmatic well and has one of the best ‘cheer’ moments in the feature. I think most of my issues—and why this film did not enthrall me completely—stem from the world-building of the alternate Earth failing to convince. It is not the retro-futurism that I found unconvincing (that I looked forward to), but some of the human aspects that were baked into the world that I found beyond my ability to accept. In Iron Man 2, it was stated that Stark ‘privatized world peace’—one moment of hyperbole that could be and should be ignored. Here, a similar concept is baked into this world’s canon.

Still, I did not regret venturing out to the theater for a fun, bright, and optimistic superhero film far from the dark and grounded miasma of cynicism.

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‘Hard Science Fiction is the sub-genre where no detail contradicts the know laws of physics.  in this there is no faster than Light travel or communication or any form of telepathic psychic ability. It is a rigorous artform practiced by only a few. Once you diverge away from ‘Hard’ SF and into less rigorous applications of scientific fact and theory the art because far wider, encompassing everything from Star Trek the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Often at some point a piece will require some extraordinary effect that upends expectations, introducing new and often unreproducible effects. What is interesting is that in various historical periods there has often been a consensus on what can produce these transformative events.

In the first few decades of the 20th century ‘Rays’, light beyond the visible spectrum, were a common fantastical effect. In 1931’s Frankenstein, Victor boasts of discovering a ray beyond the violet and ultraviolet, a ray that first brought life and one which he harnesses to give life to his creation. In Captain America: The First Avenger is the writers tip their hat to Frankenstein and use a period appropriate ‘Vita Rays’ as per of the process that created Captain America.

By the post-war era ‘rays’ had become a tired trope and in the new atomic age ‘Radiation,’ which really were rays all along, because the empowering effect that grew insects and people to impossible proportions, created powerful mutant abilities, reanimated the dead to cannibalize the living, and endowed several comic book superheroes with the flashier abilities.

Radiation, like the rays before them, eventually passed out of favor as the magic system of less than demanding science fiction stories.

What replaced ‘radiation’ as our go to we need something fantastic to happen here effect?

Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, and in particular the many worlds interpretation of wave form collapse, had been used the furious wave hands and craft stories are in effect blatantly impossible. You want a ‘rational’ reason why the devil is in a jar of goo in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic Church? Quantum Mechanics. You need a method of time travel to collect some shiny stones and reverse the villain’s victory? Quantum Mechanics. You want a musical episode where the characters react to diegetic musical and sing their truths? Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics is no more likely to induce a ‘musical universe’ than gamma radiation is to transform a normal man into an eight-foot tall several hundred-pound monster. These are artifacts of very soft science-fiction employed to wave hands past the impossibility of it all in order to deploy the story the writers want to tell. As long as we remember that these stories are not reality, not a possible future, but the modern equivalent of ‘Once Upon A Time…’ then we can enjoy them for the myths that they are and remember that truth that matters in these stories is not the science but the emotions of the human condition.