The stakes of the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe installment, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, involve the familial superteam figuring out how to save the Earth by defeating the godlike adversary Galactus (now available in non-cloud form) — an expected development for a superhero movie. What audiences may not be expecting, however, is the Star Trek-like moral dilemma powering the movie’s second half, forcing its do-gooders to question whether it’s worth involuntarily trading one life for billions of others.

By posing this dilemma, First Steps accidentally calls into question whether the MCU has the emotional nuance necessary to treat family as a present-tense condition, in all its glories and setbacks, rather than as past-tense backstory. If Marvel is going to make its most family-forward superteam a cornerstone of its on-screen universe, it should take the opportunity to explore the new storytelling avenues that a family of superheroes offers.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the nature of the big question First Steps revolves around.]

When the movie’s seemingly overmatched superheroes first face Galactus, he actually offers an out from the impending impossible showdown over whether he gets to eat Earth. When the Fantastic Four first encounter the massive being in his vast spaceship, he senses immense power (the Power Cosmic, in fact) emanating from the unborn child of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby). Galactus therefore makes them an offer: Hand over the baby to take Galactus’ place as a nomadic consumer of worlds, and Galactus will spare the Earth.

Sue Storm’s response is immediate, and the rest of her super-family agrees: Absolutely not. In spite of her certainty, the question lingers throughout the second half of the movie: Are these superheroes making a super-selfish gamble on the fate of the human race?

A lot of the human race sure seems to think so. When Reed, Sue, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) return to Earth without defeating Galactus, they face scrutiny for their failures — and honestly, they don’t do much to help their case. First, Reed engages in some compulsive honesty by immediately informing the entire world about the Galactus offer they turned down. Then the quartet avoids making the most obvious argument against the exchange: Turning baby Franklin into the next Galactus will spare the Earth while presumably dooming countless other planets in other galaxies. (For that matter, how could Galactus guarantee that Franklin wouldn’t circle back to consume Earth at some point in the future? How much of a Galactus bargain can an infant be expected to honor?)

Weirdly, Reed doesn’t seem to have considered those calculations at all when he – intending to speak purely objectively and hypothetically, in private with Sue – describes giving up Franklin as “ethical.” He agrees that they would never do it, but he acknowledges it as a logical choice.

Regardless of unexplored loopholes in the possible Galactus agreement, though, this story turn is the most thought-provoking element of First Steps, laying bare a major difference between this team of heroes and other MCU team-ups, whether major (like........

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