The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not a Star Trek movie, obviously. Nonetheless, both franchises have a lot in common. Both were born out of the space race of the 1960s, and both have an emphasis on science and discovery over straight-up action (though both have a fair bit of action). This shared DNA made it that much more exciting when First Steps paid homage to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
In First Steps, an idyllic Earth faces its looming destruction at the hands of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds. In hopes of stopping this, the Fantastic Four travel into space to intercept Galactus. If all of this sounds familiar to Trek fans, it’s because that’s very similar to the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the impending threat of V’Ger.
These shared plot elements are probably coincidental for the most part, seeing as the original Galactus story, by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, was published in comic books several months before the premiere of the original Star Trek TV series. Still, the parallels were clearly not lost on director Matt Shakman, and others when making First Steps.
The direct homage to Star Trek: TMP comes midway through the film, when the Fantastic Four arrive at Galactus’s massive planet-harvesting ship. They are stopped, and the entire ship is bathed in a bright, red light. A thin, white, vertical light then scans and probes the FF’s ship, followed by the appearance of the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), like Ilia in TMP, saying that Galactus will speak to them.
Watching this scene in the theater lit up all of the nerdy, TMP-loving parts of my brain, recalling the scene in that film, when V’Ger is scanning the bridge of the Enterprise and abducts Lt. Ilia before returning her as a probe to learn about the “carbon units.”
This scanning scene in First Steps is a clear homage, but the walk through Galactus’s ship, to speak to the cosmic entity, also shared a lot of visual design elements in common with the journey through the bowels of V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Although it still has plenty of action, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is much more of a sci-fi adventure drama than the action comedy common with most Marvel films. This, too, makes it similar to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which eschewed the more thrilling action moments found in later Trek films for a more contemplative story of space exploration.
With the structural and narrative similarities of First Steps and TMP, it is only appropriate that Shakman & co. offered some visual callbacks to the work done by Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, and so many others to bring Star Trek to the big screen in 1979. (Also, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is better than a lot of people say, especially the director’s cut. I swear!)