The Fantastic Four: First Steps was pretty decent, but it didn’t blow me away. I don’t know that I would tell anyone they should go see it instead of another movie that’s playing, and I likely won’t be giving it a second watch any time soon. So much of the movie was spent on establishing the characters as the heroes they are that the main plot point felt like an afterthought. The first half of the movie was great, the actors were all great, the film just took a bit of a nosedive after the introduction of Galactus.

The team being met with a dumbfounded group of reporters after going to confront Galactus and revealing that they did not defeat him was enjoyable. The silence filled the room and you could tell everyone’s thoughts were along the lines of “What do you mean you didn’t defeat him? You’re the Fantastic Four, you always beat the bad guy.”

I know Johnny Storm isn’t dumb, everyone on the Fantastic Four team is pretty smart, but Johnny displayed some super-genius level linguistic abilities in this movie. After learning 3 words of the Silver Surfer’s language he was able to decipher and learn her language. Maybe it’s just the linguist in me, but it’s really rather absurd how easy he made it look to just figure out a language by just mentioning the Rosetta Stone and creating some interlinear glosses.

The scale of Galactus felt inconsistent at best, and ontop of that the film established there is no reason for Galactus to need to touch down on Earth in order to get what he wants and yet, he did anyway. Perhaps he just really needed get out and touch some grass. (Literally, one of the first things he did on Earth was grab a chunk of earth and a tree to eat it).

I typically find myself giving rather high reviews of everything I consume, and almost always wind up higher than other review sites like Rotten Tomatoes. As it stands this movie has 86% and 92% for its scores on Rotten Tomatoes and I just don’t get it. I don’t think I can justify giving more than 5 stars for this. Marvel movies don’t need to have world-ending stakes to be good, and won’t be good just because they have those crazy high stakes.