The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a briskly paced superhero adventure that, like the current Superman, tosses viewers into the deep end of the pool from frame one and expects them to swim. The filmmakers provide water wings in the form of a little film-within-a-film, explaining how four intrepid heroes – married scientists Reed Richards, aka the stretchable Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm, aka The Invisible Girl (Vanessa Kirby); Sue’s kid brother Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch (Joseph Quinn); and Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, aka The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) – were altered by cosmic radiation during a space mission and returned to earth as superheroes. But for the most part, this is a production that expects viewers to understand the world it creates by paying attention. That’s the source of much of its charm, because The Fantastic Four is such a treat to look at that it might’ve been worth seeing even if the rest of the production were merely OK. The dazzling setting evokes a jumbled-up amalgamation of things we’ve seen and things we’ve only dreamed of.

How much do you want to know about the story? If the answer is “not much”. The short version: this is a solid, intelligent, occasionally inspired comic book movie that delivers most of what a popular audience demands from the genre (including interstellar voyages and massively scaled action sequences) plus a little bit more, mainly through thoughtful and grounded lead performances and production design that deserves its own section in this review – and gets one further down. It’s probably a three-star movie in terms of nuts-and-bolts achievements, but the acting and the visuals elevate it far beyond the baseline of the genre, which is often blandly lit and indifferently composed screensaver images with CGI-enhanced people in them.

The Fantastic Four gets down to business in its very first scene, which finds Sue telling Reed that she’s pregnant. The rest of the film revolves around this event, which ought to be a blessed one but seems cursed the moment that the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) arrives on Earth and rips through New York City, along with everyone’s expectations for what the future will hold.

The Surfer bills herself as the “Herald of Galactus,” which means she’s the intergalactic version of a real estate scout looking for properties for a mega-rich client. This would be awful news even if Galactus (Ralph Ineson), like so many comic book villains, just planned to rule Earth. Alas, he travels to Surfer-approved worlds in his planet-pulverizing machine and eats them, to satiate what he admits is a “relentless eternal hunger.”

But this time, to the quartet’s surprise and horror, Galactus proposes a swap: Sue and Reed will give up their soon-to-be-born son, a superhero-in-the-making, in exchange for not treating Earth the way Cookie Monster treats cookies. Apparently, Big G is tired of a life of perpetually unsatisfied longing and wants to download his personality into the baby, who he says is powerful enough to handle it, and have him take over Galactus-ing. This story is as old as time itself. It summons a primal terror that’s embedded more deeply in the human mind than comics lore.

All this movie needed to do in order to succeed was not stink up the screen like the 2005 and 2015 film adaptations (though the no-budget 1994 version, produced by Roger Corman, at least has some charm). This one goes beyond that, letting the four lead actors create a dynamic that is so believable that at times it feels like you’re making your first visit to the home of a family that has lived together forever and genuinely enjoys one another’s company.

Pascal, who became an international star playing sensitive heroes, at first takes some getting used to as Richards, who despite his flexible physique and moral compass can come across as a bit of a cold fish: a man who lives in his imagination and has to remind himself that knowing the answers to things is not a personality. But the chemistry between him and Kirby is so strong that you not only believe Sue and Reed’s relationship, but absorb their anguish at an obscene proposal that transforms them from heroes to villain in the eyes of a populace that thinks it’s worth considering. The deeper the movie sinks into its plot – which boils down to the Four trying to find some way around giving up the baby, only to have each new plan go wrong and compel them to improvise – the more achingly human Sue and Reed become. There are lot of tears in this film, and they’re all deserved. The artists just have to tell the story and hope that their belief in the material makes it new again. That’s what happens here.