There would be no Marvel Cinematic Universe without Fantastic Four. Legend has it that comic book scribe Stan Lee was irritable about the bland fare he was forced to churn out to keep spinner racks spinning. He’d once dreamed of writing the Great American Novel, and now he was tapping out inane dialogue for romance comics and the like. When Lee’s bosses told him to come up with team of superheroes to try to steal a little of the success of the recently launched DC Comics title Justice League of America, the assignment filled him with dread until his wife, Joan, told him to stop griping and just write the characters the way he wanted to, expectations be damned. Lee and Jack Kirby dreamed up the Fantastic Four, a group who gained their powers after an encounter with cosmic rays during a illicit mission to space. Lee tried to write the characters more realistically than any comic book superheroes he’d seen before, emphasizing their emotional vulnerabilities and interpersonal conflicts. Released in late 1961, Fantastic Four #1 was the the first publication of what would soon become Marvel Comics and it set the benchmark for all that would follow.

Between the characters’ venerated place in the offscreen Marvel mythos and the perception that the previously dominant Marvel Studios has been a little wobbly of late, there’s a mighty weight on the shoulders of the costumed quartet in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. These characters have made it movie screens previously, in woeful affairs. This new film, directed by Matt Shakman, is meant to be the turnaround. Scattered movie rights prevented Kevin Feige and company from providing the guidance that long worked wonders in translating Marvel characters from the page. The theory is that the time has come to do right by the Fantastic Four. Mostly, they have, though I acknowledge that my own deeply embedded affection for the characters had me inclined to round up.

There are a couple of sound decisions right from the jump. As with James Gunn’s Superman, the filmmakers show no interest in telling an origin story, freeing the audience from the tedium of learning at length about how the characters got their powers when a in-narrative recap accomplishes that just dandy. The other shrewd choice is to circle back to the era in which the original comic series started. The film takes place in a retro-futuristic version of the early nineteen-sixties that taps the imagination of the art directors, costume designers, and other craft artists to a degree that hasn’t been seen in a Marvel movie since Ryan Coogler insisted on making a firm cultural statement with the look of Black Panther. In every moment, the film is a pleasure to look at.

Whether the story itself has any emotional impact — or sometimes even makes sense — might depend on the outside reading commitment of the individual audience member. I’ve consumed plenty of the comics, so I have a strong working knowledge of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby, who gives the film’s most fully realized performance), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and bashful, blue-eyed Benjamin J. Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The Fantastic Four: First Steps feels reliant on that background study, as if the Marvel Studios team has now spent so long shuffling around characters who’ve already made umpteen appearances on screens of varying sizes that they’ve dulled their knack for making introductions and developing the characters until a threat to their mortality or the bellowing of a previously avoided catch phrase has real resonance.

If the pleasures of the film are largely surface level, I also found the entertainment value to be pretty undeniable. There’s a welcome zippy energy to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the filmmakers are adept at trafficking in the sort of ornate quasi-science that’s long been the lifeblood of the four-color sagas starring this particular band of heroes. The film’s adversaries — the cosmically mighty Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and sleek space soarer the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) — are effectively realized. The screen design and rendering of Galactus, in particular, properly convey the foreboding grandeur of the character. And Michael Giacchino’s score (he basically established himself as the only person for this job with his extraordinary efforts on The Incredibles) buoys the whole endeavor with its bounding jubilation.

The Fantastic Four started the Marvel revolution in one medium. Closing in on two decades into the Marvel takeover of global cinema, the first family is finally properly present and accounted for on their other platform. If it took some time, it’s a welcome relief that Marvel mostly did it right.