By Michael Marano

My reviewing this movie is like Proust reviewing a tea-dipped madeleine, but I think even old Marcel could spot when bits of the sponge cake were stale or too soggy.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, directed by Matt Shakman. Screening at AMC Assembly Row 12, Kendall Square Cinema, Capitol Theatre, and other movie houses throughout New England.

The latest cinematic incarnation of the Fantastic Four. Photo: 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios.

“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings… my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea….”

It’s as impossible for me to write an objective review of Fantastic Four: First Steps as it is for Marcel Proust to write an objective review of a neuron-nuking madeleine dipped in his Auntie’s tea. I’ll try to be objective and so serve this readership. For me, this wasn’t a movie, it was memory. Mainlined memory. There’s a lot wrong with Fantastic Four: First Steps. But there were also long stretches in which I was in the mental space I was in as an eight-year-old, having my brain and imagination expanded by Fantastic Four comic books featuring art by Jack Kirby, and later by George Perez.

For the uninitiated, the Fantastic Four are a quartet of people, basically a family, who, in order to beat the damned commie pinko Reds in the Space Race and in the spirit of exploration unique to the Mercury 7 era, take off in a private, homemade rocket, get exposed to cosmic rays, and come back to Earth with superpowers. They have nifty “gosh-wow!” adventures exploring interdimensional realms, subatomic microworlds and outer space, fighting super-criminals, and defending the planet.

The filmmakers keep the “Right Stuff/Atomic Age/Mad Men” aesthetic of the classic comic books in Fantastic Four: First Steps (it’s set in an alternate 1960s). So, at the very least, the movie kicks your eyeballs differently than does recent, gloppy-looking Marvel product like Captain America: Brave New World. It’s refreshing to have that Kennedy-esque “can do!” optimism in a movie that isn’t just gray and brown and washed-out green, especially since “Dark and Gritty!” has been the primary mantra of comic book movies going back to Tim Burton’s first Batman flick. And, though I had problems with it, it’s heartening that this movie and Superman are expanding the look and tone of comic book movies.

Here’s what Fantastic Four: First Steps nabs intact from the comic books that so thoroughly sculpted my brain and imagination as a kid. Like I said, the comics are about a family, and, by extension, their home. It’s a super-duper modern home full of high (’60s) tech, kind of a cross between Hugh Hefner’s place and NASA’s Mission Control. But it’s a home, nonetheless. The Fantastic Four have all kinds of gear in their pad that can, for instance, open portals to other realities full of hostile invaders. And more times than I can count, invaders (alien and otherwise) have ventured to the Fantastic Four’s crib for a throwdown. So essentially, when the Fantastic Four, the members of a family, defend the planet, they’re defending their home. The global becomes domestic, and the domestic becomes global. Hell, the interplanetary becomes domestic, and vice versa.

And a lot of the Fantastic Four’s adversaries were basically demigods. Near-deities of almost unimaginable power.

Fantastic Four: First Steps really nails this confluence. It’s about a family defending their home and the Earth against an adversary that is basically a god. As a kid reading this kind of Fantastic Four story, these near-divine adversaries, who spoke like Shakespearean tyrants tapping into Old Testament verse, were my first sip of the sublime, of awe. And, since these cosmic, intergalactic conflicts took place basically in the Fantastic Four’s living room (and maybe across their Manhattan neighborhood), it upended their family dynamics. This was my first taste of the uncanny, the disruption of the home space into what Freud called the Unheimliche, the “un-homelike.”

Fantastic Four: First Steps had me reliving what it felt like to read those comic books in a state of almost total recall. Pretty sure if you hooked an EEG to my skull while I was watching, it’d spit out the brain waves of a kid in third grade.

But just because, on a neurological level, I relived what I experienced as an eight-year-old doesn’t mean I can forgive Fantastic Four: First Steps its flat-footed, thudding shortcomings. While, on one hand, I really liked how the movie took its time to ease the audience into its reality and the domestic space of the Fantastic Four (you need a sense of home to create the “un-homelike”), it does so almost at the expense of the story missing its First Act. The movie starts with a life-changing event but, for too long a while, there’s no sense of the plot escalating from that event, the way it would in a domestic drama or comedy.

Vanessa Kirby in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Photo: 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios

And the movie screeches to several agonizing halts so it can tell us what it’s about. There’s too much narration and exposition given by TV reports and announcers. And there is a cringe-inducing speech in which one character lectures a mob (and by extension, us in the audience) about the movie’s themes and its !!!MESSAGE!!! just in case we’re too dumb to pick up on what’s been clubbed over our heads for the past hour and a half or so.

Like I said, me reviewing this movie is like Proust reviewing a tea-dipped madeleine, but I think even old Marcel could spot when bits of the sponge cake were stale or too soggy.

Blissfully, though… because Fantastic Four: First Steps takes place in an alternate reality, it doesn’t, technically, exist in the near-flogged-to-death Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s no fascia connecting this movie to previous entries, and barely any fascia connecting it to upcoming movies. It feels like a movie unto itself, and whoa –that’s a breath of fresh air. Yeah, like Superman, it begins in medias res and plops us in a new cinematic reality. But Fantastic Four: First Steps is deliciously self-contained.

So, for those of you not prone to sundering floods of childhood memory, Fantastic Four: First Steps should be a good bit of retro-futurist fun, something that feels like a science-fiction movie that happens to be full of comic book goofiness, unburdened by franchise fatigue. If you’re a comic book fan, this movie, except for the turgid parts, will zap you back to your past just as surely as would a bite from, if not a madeleine, then maybe a freshly unwrapped Snickers or Baby Ruth.

In 1974, author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike) got a money order for a whole $1.50… plus postage!… to send away for the oversized Marvel Treasury Edition of The Fabulous Fantastic Four, which reprinted the classic story from the 1960s that was adapted for Fantastic Four: First Steps. He read and reread it until it basically disintegrated.