On the Fantastic Four: First Steps Zero-Gravity Birth Scene

Warning: This post contains light spoilers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I knew, based on the title The Fantastic Four: First Steps, that Marvel’s latest superhero movie would introduce a pregnant superhero, Sue Storm, and deal with the birth of her super-baby, Franklin Richards. I did not expect, when I stepped into a screening eight months pregnant myself, an exegesis on the anxieties of pregnancy and early parenthood. I certainly did not anticipate (spoiler alert) a zero-gravity birth scene during a high-speed space chase that played like an extreme version of my nightmare of giving birth in a taxi en route to the hospital.

And yet the film, from its opening scene, is preoccupied with all the worries that come with parenthood. In the first minutes, Sue (Vanessa Kirby) takes a pregnancy test and shows it to her husband, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal). He is shocked. They had tried for years without success. His shock turns to elation, and then the wheels start spinning. Sue and Reed, along with Sue’s brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and their pal Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), were exposed to cosmic radiation in space that altered their DNA and gave them superpowers. But what if their altered cells impact the baby in some way? Will he be OK?

Sue calms Reed’s nerves, but the brilliant scientist’s tendency to spin out will be familiar to anyone who has struggled to conceive, dealt with a disquieting diagnosis for their child while they were still in utero, or, as I have, had a miscarriage. I’m all too familiar with the quick succession of hope and panic when a positive sign pops up on a pregnancy test, a joy that after a loss cannot be trusted. Reed obsessively runs tests on Sue and the fetus, building his own machine to do so. Whether these efforts soothe his anxiety or exacerbate it is unclear, like those smart devices that monitor your baby’s breathing overnight—but may cause heart palpitations when they deliver a false read or disconnect from WiFi. Meanwhile, Sue keeps repeating, “nothing is going to change,” the delusional mantra of the expecting parent.

Reed and Sue argue throughout the movie about Reed’s catastrophic thinking. Sue accuses him of conjuring up the worst case scenario for every circumstance, including the health and safety of their child. He shoots back that he is preparing for the worst and protecting their family. By contrast, Sue’s insistence that everything will be all right is so plainly unrealistic that the audience is waiting for some actual catastrophe to shake her out of her stupor. Again, it’s a fight familiar to any couple who has disagreed about how much prenatal testing to do or the best way to prepare for challenges in pregnancy and parenthood.

Ultimately, Reed’s fears aren’t totally misplaced. When the big bad of the movie—a planet-eating giant named Galactus—sets his sights on Earth as his next snack, the Fantastic Four fly to space to try to negotiate. In a Rumpelstiltskin-esque turn in the story, Galactus offers to spare earth if Reed and Sue will give him their baby. Galactus senses some sort of universe-bending power in the little one and wants to take him on as an apprentice. Sue and Reed reject this offer, only for Sue to immediately go into labor. They run back to their ship, with Galactus’ minion, the Silver Surfer (a shimmery Julia Turner), in hot pursuit.

The birth scene that comes next is not exactly traumatic, but it is not what I would choose to watch shortly before my own labor. Sue begins having contractions on the ship in zero gravity. The Silver Surfer at one point is able to actually get her hand onto Sue Storm’s belly (perhaps even into it—I didn’t follow the physics of this villain’s powers) during labor—an unimaginable bodily violation. Sue screams at her brother, Johnny, to kill the Silver Surfer because she’s trying to murder his unborn nephew. Fair enough! Meanwhile, Sue has to use her powers to make the ship invisible between her contractions in order to hide it from the baddies. Johnny tries to shoot the Silver Surfer; Reed pins Sue down to a table so she can use gravity to push; Ben stands at the ready to catch the baby; and their handy robot sidekick Herbie pilots the ship. 

If I had to stretch this metaphor, and I did while watching the movie because I couldn’t help myself, I would say this scene is akin to giving birth in a Waymo while your husband coaches you, your brother fights someone trying to murder your unborn child, and a good friend (but still just a friend) watches your baby emerge from your body, a sight you would prefer to reserve for only people wearing scrubs. Oh, and you have to perform intense pilates maneuvers between contractions, because why not? 

Points for originality: I don’t believe I have ever seen a baby born in a Marvel movie before, let alone one born in space. Honestly, I can think of very few space births off the top of my head besides the body-horror versions in various Alien movies, and this one thankfully ends more happily than the self-imposed C-section to remove an alien from Noomi Rapace’s character in Prometheus.

I do have some notes. It seems to be a specific male fantasy that women can perform immense physical feats while also in labor, especially without an epidural. I was reminded of an interview I once conducted with the brilliant James Cameron about (among other things) the choice to feature a pregnant Na’vi played by Kate Winslet going into battle in Avatar: The Way of Water, a decision I found at once empowering and unrealistic. Cameron told me—and this has stuck with me for years—“Pregnancy is treated as a condition or affliction as opposed to a natural part of the human life cycle.” He went on to muse that women have been delivering babies in precarious circumstances for centuries. “They might be giving birth, and 10 seconds later spearing a saber-toothed tiger that happened to attack the camp. They don’t have a choice. That’s how we evolved,” he said. “If people don’t buy it, they need to do their research.” I gave birth for the first time myself about a year later and was fortunate to experience a relatively smooth labor. I also lost a lot of blood, vomited, and needed medication immediately after they placed my daughter on my chest. I was not prepared to take on a tiger, saber-toothed or otherwise. 

James Cameron is a man, and all of the credited screenwriters on Fantastic Four: First Steps are men. While I respect their admiration for the strength of a woman bringing forth a new life, and perhaps many of them have personally witnessed childbirth, I suspect had they gone through the experience themselves, their creative license on the multitasking and supreme energy levels of women in labor might be tempered. For that matter, the writer of Rosemary’s Baby was a man. So were the writers of Knocked Up and Children of Men and many of the most famous birth scenes you know from film. 

Once Reed and Sue’s baby is born, the drama centers around questions of whether the baby does have superpowers and the fact that, if he does, he’s in peril of being kidnapped. You didn’t think Galactus was going to give up on raising a fellow planet killer that easily, did you? I didn’t personally love that either, but more because The Incredibles did it first—and better—with baby Jack Jack. But children in danger seems to be a new superhero trend: Superman recently featured a scene in which the hero played by David Corenswet must hold an alien baby aloft in a time-bending stream of death. In Thunderbolts* (a.k.a. The New Avengers), David Harbour’s Red Guardian saves a little girl only for the villain to disappear her into a dark void seconds later. In all three cases, I knew these children weren’t actually going to be (permanently) hurt. But I wondered why I was sitting through the unnecessary agony of watching helpless babes in peril.

Perhaps the point is to forge new ground in an increasingly tired genre. The Fantastic Four does actually capture well many of the anxieties of pregnancy and early parenthood, even if the stakes are exaggerated because it is a superhero movie. At a moment when the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in desperate need of new ideas, focusing on family and parenthood in particular feels novel. Matt Shakman, the director of First Steps, produced and directed WandaVision, the only other MCU property that has dealt with the challenges of parenthood in an emotionally significant way. In that Disney+ show, as in this movie, a mother (Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff) goes to extreme lengths to create and protect new life—she forms her twin boys with magic—and come to terms with what she can and cannot control as a parent. (Though much of that emotional work in WandaVision was unfortunately undone by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which transforms Wanda into the least subtle version of the crazed mama-bear trope imaginable.)