Starring: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Egon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn and Julia Garner
Distributor: Disney
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2025
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone MSC
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Peter Malone MSC 29 July 2025
Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, the Fantastic Four must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus.
2025 has been a superpower blockbuster movie year, Thunderbolts*, then DC with Superman and Marvel with The Fantastic Four. The latter two performed beyond expectations at the box office in the US and around the world.
The Fantastic Four are not as familiar to moviegoers as Superman or Batman. There were two films in 2005-07 and an attempt to revive the franchise in 2017. This film is another attempt – and with the promise that the Fantastic Four will appear in forthcoming Avenger films.
One of the features of the Fantastic Four is that they are a very friendly group, especially likeable for the audience – and with a PG rating. For anyone not familiar with them, and for those who are, there is a prologue to this film, a TV program, a kind of ‘This is Your Life’ summary with clips of the personal lives and origins and all the exploits of the Four, their venture into space, their DNA being altered, then becoming superheroes, and popular with the citizens of New York City and the world.
Reed Richards, played sympathetically by Pascal, is the scientist, mathematician, intelligent, cerebral in his approach to crises. By contrast, is his wife Sue Storm (Kirby) who discovers she is pregnant. She, the family, and the audience are happily anticipating the forthcoming birth. Then there is her younger brother, Johnny Storm, played enthusiastically by Quinn, who is sometimes brash, literally full of fire and eager to be an uncle. The fourth member is Ben (Moss-Bachrach), seen as his ordinary self in the prologue but then his DNA is drastically altered to something of a monster look, but genial behind all that orange granite that forms his exterior. Casting is interesting because two of the Four are British (Kirby and Quinn), while Pascal is from Chile.
When Earth is threatened by a strange alien, the Silver Surfer (Garner), and by the archetypal cosmic villain, Galactus (voiced by British Ralph Ineson), the Four go into space to confront him.
Part of the drama is their initial failure (though with some spectacular sequences in space, and, emotionally and dramatically, the birth of the baby), the brief press conference where they tell their adoring public that there is no hope, then the determination to find a way of confronting Galactus who has set his ambitions on taking over the newborn child and its powers. Which means that the second part of the film is the confrontation of Galactus, the intervention of the Silver Surfer, the giant Galactus heavily treading through New York City demolishing huge areas (as Lex Luthor did in Superman) intense demonstration of the superpowers by the Four.
And, there is nothing like a baby to elicit audience sympathy – and there is a pleasing preview during the final credits of the baby at four, with his mother, just having spent a day reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
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