Warning: Spoilers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps ahead
The film trope of a villain beefing with a defenseless child needs to be studied. The trope of a mother willing to sacrifice herself and die to save said child needs to be studied even harder.
This self-sacrificing mother archetype is familiar to anyone who’s watched Bambi’s mom, Lily Potter or Queen Amidala (among many, many others) — moms who love their children so much that they take the (proverbial, in most cases) bullet in their child’s place. It’s a story as old as time, but I also wonder if perhaps its time is up. Why do so many stories feature moms whose main superpower is to lay down their lives for their children, even when they’re actual superheroes?
This occurred to me The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Though I can honestly say it’s the best of all the Fantastic Four films that have been released in this franchise, my main gripe with the film was that Sue Storm, a.k.a. the Invisible Woman, sacrificed herself to save her baby. And while the move made her that much more extraordinary, I just feel like there should have been another solution.
The premise of the film is that after years of trying to have a baby, Sue (Vanessa Kirby) and her husband Reed Richards a.k.a Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) find out that she is pregnant.
Not long after, the Fantastic Four — which also includes Sue’s baby brother Johnny Storm a.k.a the Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and their friend Ben Grimm a.k.a The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — get a message from an alien called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) that a big bad cosmic villain named Galactus has marked Earth as his next conquest and is coming to destroy it.
courtesy of Marvel Studios/20th Century Studios
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’
Hoping to stop this from happening, the four superheroes travel to space to try and negotiate with (or destroy if necessary) Galactus. But when the larger-than-life villain finds out Sue is pregnant, he turns his focus on the magic baby and says that if the Fantastic Four want to save the Earth, all they have to do is hand over the magical child. Of course, that’s a hard pass, and the whole trip ends with Sue giving birth in a space shuttle escape back to Earth.
Knowing Galactus isn’t going to let up, they set up a plan to trap him, using the baby as bait. When the plan falls short and the fiery powers of Johnny, the superhuman strength of The Thing and Reed’s superelasticity can’t keep him at bay, Sue is able to generate a force field so strong she accomplishes the four-person task of sending Galactus into the void, by herself. The feat comes at a high cost, though, as she overexerts herself and ends up dying.
The battle scene is well-done and scored so perfectly, even The Thing would shed a tear. But once I left the heartstrings-tugging movie magic in the theater, I had to wonder: Why does the mother always have to die to make a point?
20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios
Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman in ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ (2025).
Both Sue and Reed love baby Franklin unconditionally; his uncles are crazy about him too. In a lot of scenes, we see the little guy being comfortably passed around from one family member to the other, with Uncle Johnny regaling him with terrible jokes and Ben serving as the unamused straight man. It’s cute.
And while I can be fair and say each of the other characters offered up their services to make sure Galactus didn’t get to the little boy, I just hate that Sue was the one who gave up her life in the end.
The implication there is that a mother’s love knows no bounds, and is powerful enough to destroy an entity that predates even time. I love that for Franklin. I actually love that for those of us who are fortunate enough to have mothers, in real life, who will go to the ends of the earth to make sure we’re out of harm’s way. I, however, just wish that maternal sacrifice didn’t always mean death.
20th Century Studios / MARVEL
Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm and Ada Scott as Franklin Richards
Is there a way to depict a mother’s love as something as other than completely self-sacrificial? Could it not be creative and clever, able to outsmart the most powerful foes? Perhaps it’s just powerful enough to destroy an enemy? I’m not an avid comic book reader, nor am I versed in Fantastic Four lore, so these may not be plausible motifs to incorporate within the universe, but Sue, specifically, has the power to render anything invisible; she couldn’t have cloaked her son in invisibility to save both of their lives?
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Further driving the point that there’s no force stronger than a mother-child bond, Franklin — at barely a year old, by the way — manages to bring her back to life, and we realize that he’s far more powerful than anyone thought. Again, it’s fine that he’s a magical baby. And it’s really sweet that he already loves his mama enough to rescue her back, but did we need Sue to die in order to show how mighty he was? I still say no.
Ultimately, I just feel there has to be a better way to show how much a mother is willing to do for the sake of her child’s well-being without having to lose her life.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters now.
Read the original article on People
