It’s no stretch to say 2005’s Fantastic Four was pretty good.

Before they ever made it to screens, Marvel’s first family had already been through the cinematic wringer. A notorious low-budget 1994 version produced solely to retain the rights lingered in legal limbo and bootleg purgatory, while the characters themselves were quietly being eclipsed by a newer breed of superhero cinema. By the time 2005’s Fantastic Four arrived, it wasn’t just a chance to finally bring these icons to a mainstream audience – it was an effort to reclaim a flagship property from punchline status. What we got was something almost obliviously out of step with the then superhero zeitgeist; a silver-age throwback that treats superheroism not as grim destiny or burden, but as a kind of cosmic mid-life crisis where instead of hitting the gym and buying a sportscar you catch fire or turn to stone.

Brilliant but socially awkward scientist Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) persuades his old friend and reluctant financier Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) to fund a space mission to investigate an approaching cosmic storm. Accompanied by Reed’s ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), her hotshot brother Johnny (Chris Evans), and loyal pilot Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), the crew is exposed to the storm’s cosmic rays but instead of debilitating radiation poisoning, they return to Earth changed in ways that defy physics, reason, and wardrobe departments. As they grapple with newfound powers and unwanted fame, old tensions resurface, especially with Doom, who has plans of his own.

Fantastic Four isn’t trying to be epic. That alone makes it feel almost radical by the standards of the mid-2000s, when Batman Begins was growling in the shadows and X-Men was brooding its way toward an allegorical overload. Fantastic Four plays everything at a street level – albeit shiny, idealised New York street level – where the stakes are mainly interpersonal and the climax feels like a group project. It’s a film that assumes the audience doesn’t need their heroes to be haunted, just goofily relatable, mildly dysfunctional, and ideally shirtless from time to time.

Chris Evans, not yet Captain America but demonstrating the warm clean-cut charisma that would see him become a foundation for the MCU, gleefully treats Johnny Storm like a Top Gun audition filtered through a Calvin Klein ad. He’s charming because he never pretends to be anything else while Michael Chiklis, mostly buried under animatronics and orange prosthetics, finds the tragedy in Ben Grimm without turning it into misery. The film gets that his transformation is the only one that feels like a loss – and while it doesn’t clobber the audience with that pain, it never trivialises it either.

Ioan Gruffudd leans into Reed’s social clumsiness, playing him not as a distant genius but as someone who lives inside his head and occasionally forgets other people exist. It’s an interpretation that doesn’t chase coolness, or edginess, and is stronger for it; he fits within this incarnation of the Fantastic Four in the way that some of the later comic book iterations wouldn’t and let’s all be very grateful they didn’t try to give us the aloof, Illuminati Reed Richards just to blend in with the dark tone of their contemporaries. Of the four, the most neglected is Jessica Alba’s Sue Storm, but it’s not for lack of trying on Alba’s part. Often unfairly maligned, she works with what she’s given – which is mostly exposition, titillation, and blue contact lenses – but finds enough warmth in Sue Storm to hold the team together emotionally even when the script doesn’t quite manage it structurally. It’s actually quite an achievement to make any kind of impression at all when your character’s whole deal is fading into the background. She and Gruffudd also manage to kindle a sweet romantic chemistry, perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone even if it doesn’t quite capture the deep bond of their comic counterparts.

Fantastic Four‘s main failure it it never puts in the time and effort to build Doom properly. The late Julian McMahon has presence, but his Victor Von Doom is trapped in a play-it safe equivocation: too suave to be grotesque, too petty to be terrifying. His blandly corporate evil is augmented by an ill-defined cosmic consequence as he slowly becomes a form of living metal, the scissors to The Thing’s rock. Aligning his origins to those of the Fantastic Four themselves robs us of the comics’ megalomaniacal sorcerer-scientist, content to wrap him in board meetings and stock options, rather than a suit of armour to hide his disfigurement by hubris. He doesn’t don the mask and cloak to strike fear into the hearts of men; he puts them on because the script knows he has to at least look like Doctor Doom by the third act but doesn’t really want to engage with the journey to get him there. The film’s too squeamish to fully commit to the body horror and despotic grandeur of the comics’ Doom so it just nudges him there by degrees until he’s arbitrarily dressed for the part.

The effects are decent enough by the standards of the time, but it’s the tone that keeps the film buoyant. It isn’t in a rush to prove anything. The characters bicker, pose for magazine covers, test their powers in controlled settings, and wrestle with their new public status. The finale involves teamwork rather than individual vengeance, and even at its most chaotic, the film never loses track of the group dynamic. It’s not just about saving the world, it’s about family, something that Dominic Toretto would come to realise, perhaps inspired by this very movie?

For all its unevenness, Fantastic Four wears its affection for the source material proudly. It doesn’t try to twist it into post-modern irony or darken it by dragging it to Cronenbergian depths, it just tries, earnestly and sincerely, to be a good Fantastic Four film. While it never threatens to tap into the pure core of the concept in the way The Incredibles managed to, it’s breezy and likeable even if its almost sitcom-like structure in the second act, and the stakes remaining resolutely local in the third felt like flaws at the time. Nowadays, its very straightforwardness feels like a virtue. No multiverse, no world-ending skybeam, no straining efforts to link itself to a dozen other films (a cameo by Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was filmed but cut). Just four people trying to stick together through thick and thin. With a stronger villain, this could’ve been fantastic. But pretty good isn’t bad.