"I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler."

-Tony Stark, Avengers: Age of Ultron

This summer's The Fantastic Four: First Steps may be the 37th entry in the storied Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it could also be the first to really drive home one of the uglier facets of the franchise: Namely, that the valiant gallery of heroes who populate the increasingly vast comic book world of these films don't need us. Us, meaning… normal average people.

The (Royal) First Family of Marvel

Yes, the name of the genre is "superhero," meaning a hero who has exceptional ability, either natural (Tony Stark, Clint Barton, Frank Castle) or scientifically/supernaturally enhanced (Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Thor). Some of these heroes embrace the larger world that helps them "fight the battles that we never could" ala T'Challa in 2018's Black Panther when he is taking a tour through the well-populated laboratory of his tech genius sister Shuri. There's also Doctor Strange, who operates within a community of sorcerers based in Kamar-Taj. Even though Peter Parker had his endowment for the superhero arts thanks to Stark, he also relied on his normie pals MJ and Ned.

However, in the new movie, the Fantastic Four are frequently depicted within the enormity of their skyscraper, the Baxter Building, essentially doing it all for themselves. Reed only needs a big blackboard and a few rudimentary computers to accomplish his numerous wonders, including teleportation. Their assistant is a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., while the CEO of Sue's Future Foundation Lynne Nichols (Sarah Niles) has so little impact on the events of the story one couldn't be faulted for thinking she's simply there to coordinate the group's public appearances.

Perhaps the most egregious scene involves the team orchestrating a worldwide effort to teleport the entire planet Earth to another part of the universe. It's just the four of them with cute little headsets in a control room trying to sync up dozens of teleportation bridges around the globe, and even Johnny Storm casually arrives for this event late! One bridge failure is shown to be cataclysmic for the whole operation… so where were the dozens/hundreds of personnel you would think would be needed for this complex operation? The NASA of this era in our IRL timeline required a score of technicians sitting at computer consoles in Mission Control just to facilitate the launch of one little lunar module with three guys inside.

While this may be an alternate 1960s on Earth-828, it's still hard to imagine Reed and Ben and Johnny and (pregnant) Sue building/operating all the tech they need as Earth's protectors all by themselves… yet no one else is seen helping them. Why have a whole giant Baxter Building if it's just the four of them? (Yes, the portals are briefly sceen being constructed across the globe by other people, but the guys running the op are just these four.) If the answer to this question is it's simply not cinematically compelling to entertain how the FF's sausage is made, it still makes the group seem isolated and out of touch when so many other scenes of the outside world are heavily populated (mostly to worship the four like graven idols). If it's a deliberate choice to showcase the existential loneliness of these heroes, that's not necessarily coming across; there's a difference between loneliness and chosen self-isolation. If the explanation is "all those scenes with real human interactions wound up on the cutting room floor"… maybe they shouldn't have been cut?

Besides a brief moment of Ben cheering on construction workers erecting New York's teleportation portal, the one scene where the FF truly reach out to the common folk is the part where Sue addresses an angry mob outside the Baxter Building while holding the baby she refuses to sacrifice to save humanity from Galactus. She gives an impassioned plea that is moving (and seemingly 180's the crowd immediately) but ultimately doesn't hold up to scrutiny since the team's alternative plan involves draining the entire world's resources in order to spare their baby… as if that would not also have a devastating effect on millions. It's similar to another major emotional ploy in the MCU that doesn't hold water, i.e. the scene in Avengers: Infinity War where Captain America refuses to sacrifice the Vision (which could arguably have saved trillions of lives across the galaxy) with the tossed off line "we don't trade lives." But – at minimum – it's okay to put thousands of Wakandans at risk on the front lines to save one (admittedly handsome) robot?

Stark Contrast

Looking back to older entries in the MCU makes this issue in First Steps become a more retroactively insidious aspect of these films. In the solo Iron Man trilogy, Tony Stark is portrayed as a super genius relying on a handful of mechanical arms and 3D printers to build all his incredible Iron Man suits, with most of the heavy-lifting calculations run through his A.I. buddy J.A.R.V.I.S. (the Earth-616 counterpoint to 828's H.E.R.B.I.E.). His Stark Tower in the first Avengers is "a beacon of self-sustaining clean energy" that apparently needed only Tony in his suit and Pepper Potts at a computer to turn on. A whole building.

Once said building is transformed into Avengers Tower for Age of Ultron, there are quite a few scenes where the cavernous space they operate in is eerily empty, which contrasts with the huge party held there later. During a montage in the tower Stark and Banner (alone) run groundbreaking tests on an Infinity Stone-powered artificial intelligence system which eventually takes on a life of its own and nearly destroys the world. Those two guys. Not an army of qualified technicians. If anything, the lack of oversight and collaboration only drives home them being Frankenstein-like mad scientists, an influence writer-director Joss Whedon admitted to on the film's commentary track.

At least that choice was owned as deliberate, as is the scene at the end of that movie showing off the brand new Avengers Compound in upstate New York. We see hundreds of personnel setting up all the gadgets and weapons that will fill the enormity of the former Stark Industries warehouse. There are soldiers in marching formation, and even as the new configuration of the team is introduced alone inside a hanger, there are other people (extras… remember extras?) milling around outside through the big glass windows.

Skip forward to Captain America: Civil War where the Russo Bros. depict that same exact Avengers Compound as entirely deserted save for the main heroes and, for one scene, a single, solitary Secret Service guy accompanying Secretary of State Ross. There's no security force emerging when Hawkeye causes an explosion in order to free Wanda from U.S. oversight. Just from a set design standpoint, every scene in this space appears to have layers and layers of livable work environment visible through big panes of glass, yet you couldn't even find Waldo in the background if you paused the movie and squinted. Nobody is there. These might as well be scenes from the 1974 TV movie Where Have All the People Gone? Once the filmmakers get to the facility in Bucharest where Bucky Barnes is held prisoner, that non-Avengers headquarters is teeming with official-looking people, contrasting strongly with Avengers Compound. Ergo, the emptiness of the team's HQ was clearly a creative choice rather than a budget constraint.

It was even pointed out verbally in 2015's Ant-Man, where Scott Lang flies toward the Compound saying, "Doesn't look like anyone is home." He then proceeds to fight the Falcon, who only communicates with some unseen people through his wristwatch… people who might even be remote/not in the building. Sam could just as easily be speaking to an A.I. ala F.R.I.D.A.Y. and the like.

Even if we the audience should simply assume real people are providing support for these characters in the background, it would be nice to see that on film, and the lack thereof arguably has a cumulative distancing effect on the audience. Of course, when we move forward to Ant-Man and the Wasp, rich industrialist Hank Pym has constructed a Quantum Tunnel inside his own portable building using all-ant labor (probably for security and/or union issues). This was "the largest physical set that's ever been built for a Marvel movie," and one of its emptiest.

The decision to make Avengers Compound a virtual desert barren of life after Age of Ultron is reinforced in the Russos' Avengers: Endgame, where it is once again depicted as totally empty save for our core superheroes. When Tony Stark returns to Earth, we never see one medical staff aiding him, just Carol Danvers' promise of Xorrian elixir when she gets back. Can we replicate that elixir for the rest of us, please? Skip forward five years in the story and this echoing vacancy does not change even as they go about the business of building and operating an incredibly complex time machine, which only Tony and Rocket Raccoon are shown doing any kind of work to make. It may take a village to raise a child, but apparently it only takes one small raccoon with a hammer to build a gigantic quantum platform. Although the movie takes place after Thanos' snap disappears half the population, that still left roughly four billion folks on Earth who might need work as an official Avengers janitor, maintenance guy, or human resources gal.

Business Ac-Human

That is what makes these scenes truly jarring now. We are living in a world where the same people who once sold us on Trickle Down Economics (corporations make the billions, we in turn get the hundreds) are turning off that faucet by rapidly replacing paid human beings with A.I.-driven software that can in theory do people jobs cheaper and "better." We all saw most of these Marvel films before the pandemic changed the equation about which jobs could now be handled remotely, away from the Baxter Buildings and Stark Towers of the world. It was also before an incident in 2021 where corporate overseers asked this author to fire other writers and replace them with ChatGPT (he didn't, he doesn't work there anymore). That practice, shocking at the time, is now normalized with plenty of shoddy content to show for it.

Unfortunately, we are now living in a world where jobs are increasingly becoming either impersonal (email and Zoom-driven) or non-personal (A.I.-driven). The world's richest man (who also exists as canon within the MCU) recently took it upon himself as an unelected official to initiate the firing of a huge portion of federal personnel with the end goal of reportedly “replacing the human workforce with machines.” Hence, seeing a movie like The Fantastic Four: First Steps – despite its good intentions to be an escapist showcase – can feel a little oppressive. Who wants to see a bunch of elites in an empty skyscraper operating without any compensated workforce?

Marvel heroes have always been complicated, even incredibly flawed, but at the end of the day they are put on a pedestal in these cinematic iterations. They are mythic saviors, and when systems fail (S.H.I.E.L.D., Military General/President Ross, the TVA, etc.), they are there to pick up the slack. Whether conscious or not, characters like Tony Stark and Reed Richards relay a poisonous message that billionaires are self-contained geniuses who make miracles happen all by themselves, not off the backs of hundreds of well-educated employees buoyed by thousands of experienced/skilled laborers. Looking back at the vacancy of places like Avengers Tower or Avengers Compound with the hindsight of the real-time economic devastation happening now makes some of these movies retroactively creepy in the same way comics writer Alan Moore once warned about.

All this conspicuous visual emptiness has been visible in this whole year's MCU lineup, with Captain America: Brave New World revealing the new Cap's spacious headquarters staffed with only Wilson and Torres, who might as well exist in the Batcave. Thunderbolts gave us a nearly-refurbished (but empty) Avengers Tower which Valentina Allegra de Fontaine apparently only planned on holding one hero (the seemingly unstoppable Sentry). When the actual team occupies the space a year or so later, Sentry has reverted to regular human Bob, unable to transform into Sentry without wrecking havoc as alter ego Void. He even makes a joke about how he did the dishes, echoing a Tony Stark quip about no one doing the dishes in Civil War. Is there no such thing as paid cleaning staff in the MCU?

The Distinguished Competition can be just as guilty, with Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne shown single-handedly soldering together a goddamn spaceship in Justice League. Both the Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder versions of that film often feel visually bereft of any sign of humanity besides the main heroes and their sparring partners, which may have been a choice in some places or a result of under-budgeted reshoots in others. At least Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins implies that Wayne's company and other human sources are supplying him with the gear he needs, as opposed to simply him and Alfred with a couple of screwdrivers and infinite time. By the time we get to this year's Superman, the Man of Steel – like seemingly all of the MCU and corporate America – has also outsourced his labor to robots, but at least he's shown as needing help and interacting with real people.

Übermensch Fatigue

Still not convinced this depiction of "superheroes as defiantly self-reliant beings in no need of the human support systems we rely on in real life" is problematic? Let's look at a much older film from a long-running franchise: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. In that entry, Kirk and most of the above-the-line crew of the Enterprise hijack their ship to go on a mission to save Spock's soul… like ya do. The five of them (Uhura stays back on Earth to run interference) are able to stealthily steal this gargantuan spaceship normally operated by hundreds of crew people thanks to Scotty's trusted automation… except it ultimately fails. When the ship goes into battle with some nasty Klingons, it overloads the automation and leaves our heroes as sitting ducks. The emptiness of the vessel is shown as not only scary, but the lack of experienced human workers is a genuine liability. Any sociopath in the audience wondering, "Gee, why don't they just automate all these ships all the time?" need not wonder that anymore.

Conversely, there are very few scenes across the entire MCU that show the heroes winning battles thanks to on-the-ground human beings. This year's Superman addressed that directly by making Lois Lane just as integral to the plot as the big blue Boy Scout. Even though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has been well-received and was at the top of the box office for a second time this weekend, it is not keeping pace with Superman or many of the MCU entries of yesteryear. It will likely lose money. Brave New World and Thunderbolts were outright tanks, and when people point to the catch-all phrase "superhero fatigue" they aren't getting to the core of why audiences are getting tired of seeing these movies.

Even if your typical Joe and Jane Lunch Pail haven't figured it out yet, they may be subconsciously responding to movie after movie showcasing exceptional specimens with enormous financial backing who don't need us mere mortals to thrive. It all comes down to this: We can't look up to our heroes if they can't even look across at us.