Warning: Contains mild plot spoilers

After watching a good film as a family, I like to ask, ‘What do you think the main message was?’ ‘Teamwork!’ my sons’ chime and it’s almost always true. We kicked off our summer holidays by watching Fantastic Four: First Steps at the cinema and we closed it with a home viewing of Thunderbolts*. These wildly different teams from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) spotlight our hunger for a different kind of hero, for a deeper sense of team, and for the chance to be discipled.

Superhero fatigue

The days when a superhero movie was a guaranteed blockbuster are gone. Marvel has evolved, embracing diversity, experimenting with different genres and overlapping its various worlds, but audiences seem to be growing tired of the multitude of characters, realities and extended CGI battles (maybe that last one is just me!).

Thunderbolts, which underperformed in cinemas but doesn’t disappoint, uses superhero fatigue ironically in its opening scene. Yelena (Florence Pugh) has grown bored of her work as a secret assassin and is struggling to process grief and depression. The general public has lost its Avengers and with them, its hope. Nobody is coming to save the day. Enter: the Void (Lewis Pullman), a Jekyll and Hyde character, who proclaims, ‘You can’t outrun the emptiness’.

You have the wrong people 

The villain behind the Void is the Director of the CIA, Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Her guns for hire are the rejects of the superhero world, including Yelena. Valentina’s discipleship goal is to reach one’s full potential for greatness and she rolls her eyes at anything less: ‘Good girl? Good enough? ... Don’t you want to change the world?!’

When Yelena and a few other anti-heroes are called on to save the world, it is their goodness she questions: ‘You have the wrong people. We have all done bad things… No one here is a hero.’

Last summer, my youngest asked a car full of adults his favourite question: ‘If you were a superhero, what power would you choose?’ Grandma’s answer surprised us all: ‘Discernment’. If Valentina were in the car, she would have argued that ‘righteousness without power is just an opinion.’ But our culture has very strong opinions about power without righteousness, and the media is well practised at vilifying our heroes. We want to discern between good and evil, genuine and fake.

It’s interesting that Jesus wasn’t given with super strength like Samson (or Bucky). He wasn’t gifted Solomon’s wisdom or his wealth, long life or social platform. He wasn’t given Moses’ staff or David’s harp (or Silver’s Surfer’s board).

But these ‘heroes of faith’ all had character flaws, where Jesus did not: they strayed away from God, tasting the bitter emptiness of life apart from him. Jesus performed miracles to introduce people to life with God, and to set people free from things that overpowered them.

Behold: family

Jesus was entirely righteous, and yet he didn’t pride himself on his goodness (Mark 10:18). Instead Jesus defined himself by his relationships (Matthew 3:17, Matthew 26:63-64, John 17:21). Family relationships are front and centre in Fantastic 4: First Steps.

Its backdrop couldn’t be more different from Thunderbolts; it is bright, hopeful and nostalgic (a charming tribute to 1960s ideas of the future). This world has long been protected by a trustworthy, superpowered family.

We get to know the Fantastic 4 through the ordinary rituals of family life: gathering round the dinner table, chiding each other like siblings, juggling the work-life-balance at home and in space.

Their decisions aren’t motivated by greatness, but by goodness – a desire to make things right. And, when push comes to intergalactic shove, it is love that determines their choices.

Perhaps some of the disillusionment with the superhero genre stems from it showing us that we aren’t as mighty or as moral as the kind of hero the world needs and so we question whether we are worthy of love.

The way the Fantastic 4 wrestle with their priorities, all whilst being scrutinised by the public eye, hints at an unseen reality. In Jesus’ kingdom, the ‘natural’ order of greatness is reversed. We don’t take our first steps into this kingdom by proving ourselves as heroes or forcing our way in as villains; we are welcomed in, like children. We are adopted into the family of the trinity and of the church. This family then transforms us into the kind of people who display God’s love, goodness and greatness.

Facing it together

The Fantastic 4’s Invisible Woman, Sue (superbly acted by Vanessa Kirby), who has a baby with Mister Fantastic, senses how love defies human logic. She says, ‘Family is about connecting to something bigger than yourself… We’ll face it together, as a family.’ Yelena experiences a taster of this supernatural love too, albeit from a father figure who has failed her profoundly: ‘Yelena,’ he says, ‘when I look at you, I don’t see your mistakes... That’s why we need each other.’

God wants to change the world through our relationships – to flood the darkness with light, to fill the voids with love. As we marvel at Jesus, safe within his family’s love, we can fall in step with a few others and we can face the challenges of life together. Being an alongsider doesn’t make us immune to relational struggles, but we can trust the Holy Spirit to empower us to love those people well, and to grow us and them in the process – it’s a promise from Jesus (John 17:22-23). As a community of alongsiders, we can bring each other to God too:

‘And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.’ (Philippians 1:9-11)