Let’s start with the positive: Fantastic Four: First Steps is, in my opinion, the best Marvel movie to come out in a long time. It creates a living, breathing alternate Jetsons-style future-reto 1960s and it’s gorgeous. This isn’t an origin story; the origin story is shown in newsreel footage and interviews, when our story begins the Fantastic Four has already been active, and is beloved by earth. I like that; we’ve seen enough hero’s journeys in superhero movies already, let’s get to the story.

The interpersonal relationships between the members of “Marvel’s first family” are excellent. Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach truly shine. The marital relationship feels lived in and real, not manufactured. The stakes and the stress on them is palpable. And the love that they feel, for each other, for their earth, comes through. This isn’t surprising, as excellent director Matt Shakman did such a fantastic job with the interpersonal relationships in WandaVision.

Admittedly, I’ve fallen off the Marvel train a bit. I haven’t seen all the Disney+ shows. I haven’t seen the last movie (and the last few before that, I waited until they was streaming). But that’s one of the strengths of this film, the Fantastic Four exist in a different universe (technically earth 828, so named as a tribute to creator Jack Kirby’s birthday, August 28th, 1917).

This has two very positive repercussions. First, you don’t need to be familiar with the events of any previous movies or shows in order to understand what is going on. But perhaps most important, it takes away the Marvel habit of overstuffing their films with cameos and side-trips in order to tee up the next movie.

Unfortunately this movie didn’t completely avoid all the weaknesses of Marvel movies. There are after-credits scenes, and one of them does tee up a future movie. Another regular weakness of Marvel movies is that their “house style” for post-production is to wash out all the colors and use a very diffused color palette, giving everything a dull look. Fantastic Four does a great job with using 60s-style split screen visuals, warm color palette to invoke the feeling of old film reels at times, and it almost escapes the Marvel house-style of “washed out” colors…but unfortunately, when they’re not on a TV show or split screen, the movie falls back to faded colors.

Finally, there is a sameness to many Marvel soundtracks. They use some fantastic composers, and yet for many of the Marvel movies (with the exception of the Avengers movies) I can’t remember a single theme. I am generally a fan of Michael Giacchino, who did this soundtrack, but I didn’t walk out of the theater remembering any of the music; from my single viewing, I couldn’t even tell you which scenes had music at all.

I should also talk a bit about the villain(s) of the movie. Galactus is a larger than life planet-killer, never done justice in live-action before. And they did a great job visually with Galactus in this movie. He doesn’t really have enough scenes to make him three dimensional or all that interesting, he’s just an incredibly powerful obstacle to be overcome. So while not up there in the pantheon of the best Marvel on-screen villains, he was at least a good foil.

And then there’s Silver Surfer, who in this movie is the female form of the surfer from the comics, Shalla-Bal. (It’s so tired to say that the sexist snowflakes were upset and pouting on social media that Silver Surfer wasn’t a guy…but yeah). They chose the right Silver Surfer for this movie, and I think Julia Garner played it quite well. She was more fleshed out than Galactus, and I hope we get to see more of her in the future.

So overall I think that this is a very enjoyable, solid movie. Any fan of the Fantastic Four comics should feel that they’ve finally been done justice on the big screen. Fans of superhero movies in general should like this one, too. I’d love to see another Fantastic Four movie in the future that keeps all the unique and excellent elements of this movie, and is able to get away from the weaknesses of other Marvel offerings.

I should add: I think it’s wonderful, and wonderfully appropriate, that this month has seen the release of two superhero movies that have both had messages of hope. I feel like this is a particular point in our history where we can use as much hope as we can get.