The New Fantastic Four Offers Representation, But Not Liberation?

In Fantastic Four (2025), Marvel introduces a gender-swapped Silver Surfer, a post racial Times Square, and what appears on the surface to be a progressive reboot. But for all its cosmic scale and aesthetic updates, the film is a quiet reaffirmation of a very old formula: women exist to choose between the world and their children, and in doing so, die for both.

Directed by Matt Shakman and written by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, and Jeff Kaplan, the reboot attempts a modern facelift for one of Marvel’s earliest superhero ensembles. It features a visibly more diverse cast and visually inclusive world building. But beneath this cosmetic upgrade, the narrative reverts to a patriarchal imagination of womanhood: the mother, the martyr, the moral centre. That the two central female characters; Sue Storm and Shalla-Bal (the new Silver Surfer), are both written as saviours but that does not make them powerful. It makes them sacrificial.

Sue, now a mother, spends the film torn between saving her son and saving the world. In a key scene, she declares, “I won’t sacrifice my son to save the world, but I won’t sacrifice the world to save my son either.” It is framed as heroic balance, but functionally it becomes an impossible bind. Her male counterparts; Reed Richards, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm, all observe from the side-lines as she faces Galactus, nearly dies, and ultimately is revived not by her own strength, but by her son’s.

Glorification of sacrifice

The film positions this mother-son resurrection as emotional payoff. But what it really offers is a neat, sentimental closure to a deeply gendered expectation: women die for their children, and if they’re lucky, their sons will carry their legacy forward. The fact that the son’s superpowers emerge through his mother’s death is not incidental. It reflects a long-standing trope in which women’s suffering becomes a catalyst for male awakening.

Shalla-Bal, as the gender-flipped Silver Surfer, offers a faint promise of subversion. But her fate mirrors Sue’s. She sacrifices herself to save her home planet, after a scene that shows her parting from a young girl; perhaps a daughter, or perhaps just another symbol of who she must leave behind in the name of duty. Even Johnny Storm, on the verge of a redemptive arc, is spared the burden of sacrifice. The responsibility of dying, once again, falls to the women.

What Fantastic Four (2025) reveals is that progress in representation is not the same as progress in narrative. While racial diversity is foregrounded in the film’s world building, gender remains stuck in old binaries. Women are caretakers, moral arbiters, and ultimately martyrs. Men are flawed, fun, and forgiven.

It’s tempting to view these stories as harmless. After all, superhero films are hardly paragons of realism or nuance. But when pop culture keeps rewarding male detachment and heroism while glorifying female sacrifice, it shapes how audiences imagine strength, love, and justice. In a genre obsessed with origin stories, the ones we keep retelling matter.

Fantastic Four (2025) may have swapped genders, updated costumes, and diversified the scenery. But it remains firmly rooted in a familiar worldview: that the future is male, and that women are welcome, as long as they die first.

Authored by Uttara Das | Views expressed by the author are their own.