Vanessa Kirby Is the MVP of The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Slick with a 1960s retro-futuristic sheen, Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is zippy and airy and asks little of its audience. It tells a genial story with threadbare characters. Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) is the exception, the most well rounded of the leading heroes, who are four years into their career of superheroics in the aftermath of a space flight that granted them awe-inducing abilities. Sue is emotionally intelligent and forthright. She navigates her celebrity and powers with aplomb. And the strength of her powers, including invisibility, far outstrips her peers. It is Sue who goes toe-to-toe with the movie’s planet-consuming villain, Galactus, in a spectacle of ferocious maternal instinct. That Sue is by far the most compelling character to watch, however, accentuates ho