The timing of the release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, only two weekends after James Gunn’s Superman opened in theaters to warm critical acclaim and, by 2025 standards, boffo box office, will probably work out in the former’s favor. This third attempt to reboot the 1960s comic-book franchise seems likely to draft off the energy, and the renewed interest in superheroic exploits, generated by DC’s fresh take on its most storied cape-wearer. Unlike the wan pair of Fantastic Four films made in 2005 and 2007 (starring a pre–Captain America Chris Evans as the incendiary Johnny Storm), or the truly dire 2015 reboot that stranded a lost-looking Michael B. Jordan on the appropriately named Planet Zero, this latest iteration of the super-quartet might actually stick around long enough to justify the movie’s hopeful subtitle.

That’s good news for Marvel, which, 37 movies into the cinematic universe it’s been building for the past decade and a half, has been struggling to draw the audiences it did in its prime Avengers era. Is it good news for viewers, for the future of the film medium, or for the four overqualified actors who inhabit the roles of Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), the Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), and the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)? I’m not so sure. Even as this Fantastic Four benefits from the goodwill trailing in Superman’s wake, it also can’t help but invite comparisons between that picture’s crisp wit and its own relative … the kindest word I can think of is limpness, evoking the late scene in which Mr. Fantastic’s elastic limbs get stretched out way too far. Both movies do share some positive qualities: a modest two-hour running time, a retro sensibility (manifested in Superman by details like the omnipresence of physical newspapers, and here by a period setting in an alternate version of the early 1960s), and a commitment to sincere emotional connection that’s a welcome break from the snark and gloom of the typical 2010s superhero. But though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, handwaving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.

First Steps is directed by television veteran Matt Shakman, best known for directing all nine episodes of WandaVision—a series that, like this movie, imagined its superpowered protagonists’ lives in a domestic setting from which the action and the drama sprang. An opening montage, framed as a TV news clip, briskly establishes the Fab Four’s backstory—they were astronauts on a space mission that encountered a cosmic anomaly, leaving them each with a different set of powers. Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, is a scientific genius with the rubbery body of a vintage Stretch Armstrong doll. His wife Sue Storm can create force fields and make herself invisible. Sue’s brother Johnny, an excitable type always spoiling for a fight, can set himself aflame at will. And Ben Grimm, alone among the four, has been permanently transformed into a not-quite-human shape; he’s basically a walking pile of rocks, with a correspondingly mighty pair of fists that he, unlike the hotheaded Johnny, is loath to use except in the most extreme circumstances.

The movie’s opening act finds the foursome cohabiting in their midcentury-modern-styled New York high-rise, decorated in Jetsons style with plenty of bubble-shaped turntables, Saarinen tulip chairs, and primary-colored accents. In this nifty abode, the gentle Ben prepares lovingly made dinners (prompting fans of Moss-Bachrach’s work on The Bear to murmur “yes, chef”) while Reed fiddles with his experiments in teleportation. When Sue announces that she’s pregnant, the whole super-family is thrilled, but their joy is soon cut short by the arrival of a naked metal lady (Julia Garner) on a flying surfboard. This Silver Surfer is an envoy from outer space, sent to announce that her boss, a giant space god named Galactus (Ralph Ineson), will soon be arriving to consume the entire planet. (Why exactly the villain feels the need to warn the denizens of Earth-828, as this alternate world is known, of their impending doom remains one of several key plot holes.)

A series of battles with the exceedingly dull Galactus—a character whose design and motivation can be summed up by the question “What if a guy was really big and hungry?”—ensues, first in space and later right at the Fantastics’ doorstep. On one early space mission, Sue goes into labor as our heroes are attempting to escape the peckish behemoth at warp speed. It’s a birth sequence that’s clearly written by four men, one that sanitizes the process so thoroughly that it wastes the chance to imagine what might happen to quarts of bodily fluid, never mind a placenta, in zero-gravity conditions. The resulting baby, a boy named Franklin, then becomes the focus of the story, as the giant determines that the child’s incipient superpowers will make him the only object in the universe capable of satisfying his gnawing hunger once and for all.

Galactus’s insatiable desire to consume the wee Franklin sets up a moral quandary for the Four: If they give up their beloved baby, the world will be spared from destruction. This kind of “trolley problem” dilemma has made for some memorable moments in previous superhero blockbusters: The scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker rigs two boats with explosives and gives each the option to destroy the other, for example, forces the characters and the audience to debate the morality of weighing the relative value of human lives. But The Fantastic Four forecloses any such debate by asserting, almost as soon as the question is raised, that both baby and world must be saved at all costs. In a would-be inspiring speech to the angry crowd gathered outside the Four’s high-rise, Sue Storm, baby in arms, exhorts them to think of the whole world as one big family. The sentimentality of this scene is dispiriting, in that it reduces Kirby’s character to the sole trait of devotion to her child—not that one would expect a new mother to be willing to sacrifice her baby, but a superhero worth engaging with should at least struggle to reconcile her own family’s needs with the continued existence of the community at large.

The central foursome’s attempts at solving the Galactus-wants-our-baby problem, which I won’t detail for fear of spoiling, defy even the zaniest comic-book-movie logic; they’re the equivalent of that South Park meme where the intermediate step in an outlandish plan is represented by two question marks. The obligatory big final battle takes place in a city whose population has been evacuated to the underground kingdom of Subterranea (lorded over by a scene-stealing Paul Walter Hauser as Mole Man). The Fantastic Four’s plan to stop the villain may be weak, but their will and their superpowers—bendy limbs! Rocky fists! Force-y fields! Flaming … selves!—are indomitable, and in the end they live to fight another day. That day will next come in December 2026, when the Four are set to appear in Avengers: Doomsday, an all-star Marvel extravaganza in which a pack of do-gooders including the new Avengers and the X-Men will team up to fight none other than Robert Downey Jr., now playing not Tony Stark but the bad guy Dr. Doom. In the 17 years since the release of Iron Man, the hero has become a villain as the ever-self-regenerating MCU eats its own tail, ouroboros style. At least it’s not eating a baby.