In the quest to make more money through its streaming services, Disney has diluted its Marvel content to such an extent that when a film appears in the cinema you need to have watched umpteen seasons of mediocre content to understand what’s going on.

Thankfully Disney have chosen to keep things simple this time and boy does it pay off in spades as The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the first Marvel film in years that you can watch with little or no knowledge of The Marvel Universal.

Much like the recent released Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps pretty much dispenses with any origin story, a brief 10-minute opening scene gets us up to speed on The Fantastic Four, and throws us straight into the action.

Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, The Fantastic Four, Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm/The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), are forced to defend the earth against a space God called Galactus (Ralph Ineson) who, along with the help of the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), has marked the earth for destruction.

In one of the films best action scenes, The Fantastic Four travel across the galaxy to confront Galactus where, after realising that they are no match for the space god, they must decide, in order to save the earth, if they are willing to give up Reed Richards and Sue Storm’s newly born son.

Unlike some of the stale offerings that we’ve had from Marvel over the past few years, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, with its cracking pace and likable characters, feels like a breath of fresh air. Yes, it sticks to the usual narrative that’s blighted all of the recent super-hero films in that the journey ultimately ends up with a massive CGI boss battle at the end. But that is a small complaint The Fantastic Four: First Steps is easily the best Marvel film since Avengers Endgame and that came out 6 years ago.