Ten years after a “Fantastic Four” movie that wasn’t, Marvel Studios and 20th Century Studios have given us “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” a much better couple of hours.

It takes place in the mid-1960s, albeit a sleekly otherworldly jet age streamlining of that time. Result? Extras in fedoras share crowd scenes with a Manhattan skyline dotted with familiar landmarks like the Chrysler Building, alongside some casually wondrous “Jetsons”-esque skyscrapers and design flourishes. Typically a production designer working in the Marvel movie universe doesn’t stand a chance against the digital compositing and effects work and the general wash of green-screenery. “The Fantastic Four” is different. Production designer Kasra Farahani’s amusing visual swagger complements the film’s dueling interests: A little fun over here, the usual threats of global extinction over there.

In contrast to the current James Gunn “Superman,” worthwhile despite its neurotic mood swings and from-here-to-eternity action beats, director Matt Shakman’s handling of “The Fantastic Four” takes it easier on the audience. Having returned from their space mission with “cosmically compromised DNA,” Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm adapt to their Earthbound lives with some new bullet points for their collective resumé. Richards, big-time-stretchy-bendy, goes by Mister Fantastic, able to out-Gumby Gumby. One Storm’s alter ego is Invisible Woman, while the other Storm is the flying Human Torch. Grimm returns to Earth as a mobile rockpile, aka The Thing.

So what’s it all about? It’s about a really hungry tourist just looking for one last meal before he “may finally rest.” So says Galactus, devourer of worlds, for whom noshing involves planets, and whose herald is Silver Surfer. Galactus wants Sue Storm’s soon-to-be-newborn baby in exchange for not devouring Earth. How the Fantastic Four go about dealing with Galactus culminates in an evacuated Manhattan, in the vicinity of Times Square, while the New York throngs hide away in the underground lair of Harvey Elder, the infamous Moleman.

One of the buoying aspects of Shakman’s film is its avoidance of antagonist overexposure. You get just enough of Paul Walter Hauser’s witty embodiment of auxiliary more-misunderstood-than-bad Moleman, for example, to want more. And Galactus, a hulking metallic entity, is such that a little of him is plenty, actually.

The Fantastic Four run the show here. Not everyone will love the generous, relaxed amount of hangout time director Shakman’s film spends setting up and illustrating family dynamics and medium-grade banter. Others will take it as a welcome change from the 10-megaton solemnity of some of the recent Marvels, hits as well as flops.

While Pedro Pascal, aka Mister Ubiquitous, makes for a solid, sensitive ringleader as the ever-murmuring Mister Fantastic, the emotional weight tips slightly toward Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm, as she weathers the travails of imminent parenthood, wondering along with her husband whether the child of DNA-scrambled superheroic parents will be OK. I wish Ebon Moss-Bachrach had better material as The Thing, but he’s ingratiating company; same goes for Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm, a boyish horndog once he sets his sights on the metallic flip of the screen’s first female Silver Surfer (Julia Garner).

Michael Giacchino’s excellent and subtly rangy musical score is a big plus. The costumes by Alexandra Byrne are less so. This is where indefensible personal taste comes in. There’s no question that Byrne’s designs fit snugly into the overall retro-futurist frame of “The Fantastic Four.” But holy moly, the palette dominating the clothes, and picked up by numerous production design elements, is really, really, really blue. Really blue. The movie works bluer than Buddy Hackett at a ’64 midnight show in Vegas.

Few will share my aversion to the no-doubt carefully varied shades of French blue prevalent here, but what can I do? I can do this: be grateful this film’s just serious enough, tonally, for its family matters and knotty world-saving ethical dilemmas to hold together. It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

“The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action, and some suggestive content)

Running time: 2:05

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 24

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. 

By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain’s greatest contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97.

The Stables, a charity and venue Laine founded with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, said Friday it was “greatly saddened” by the news that “one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has passed away.”

Monica Ferguson, artistic director of The Stables, said Laine “will be greatly missed, but her unique talent will always be remembered.”

Laine’s career spanned the Atlantic and crossed genres: She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on film, and even played God in a production of Benjamin Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde.”

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Laine’s life and art were intimately bound up with band leader Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage name in 1951, and married her seven years later. Both were still performing after their 80th birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82.

In 1997, Laine became the first British jazz artist to be made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight.

“It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me,” she said when the honor was announced. “It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do.”

Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who loved opera and earned money during the Depression as a street singer. Despite hard times, her British mother, Minnie, made sure that her daughter had piano, voice and dance lessons.

She began performing at local events at age 3, and at age 12 she got a role as a movie extra in “The Thief of Bagdad.” Leaving school at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and faced repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer.

A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. “Clementina Campbell” was judged too long for a marquee, so she became Cleo Laine.

“John said that when he heard me, I didn’t sound like anyone else who was singing at the time,” Laine once said. “I guess the reason I didn’t get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody else.”

Laine had a remarkable range, from tenor to contralto, and a sound often described as “smoky.”

Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Independent, recalled Laine’s audition.

“They were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. ‘Something?’ he said, ‘She’s got everything!’”

Offered 6 pounds a week, Laine demanded — and got — 7 pounds.

“They used to call me ‘Scruff’, although I don’t think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn’t know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day,” she told the Irish Independent. “And anyway, I didn’t have the money, because they weren’t paying me enough.”

Recognition came swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker’s “girl singer” category in 1952, and topped the list in 1956 and 1957.

She married Dankworth — and quit his band — in 1958, a year after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth’s band prospered, Laine began to feel underused.

“I thought, no, I’m not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn’t going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise,” she said in a BBC documentary.

“When I said I was leaving, he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ That was a good ploy, wasn’t it, huh?”

They were married on March 18, 1958. A son, Alec, was born in 1960, and daughter Jacqueline followed in 1963.

Despite her happy marriage, Laine forged a career independent of Dankworth.

“Whenever anybody starts putting a label on me, I say, ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ and I go and do something different,” Laine told The Associated Press in 1985 when she was appearing on stage in New York in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

Her stage career began in 1958 when she was invited to join the cast of a West Indian play, “Flesh to a Tiger,” at the Royal Court Theatre, and was surprised to find herself in the lead role. She won a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her performance.

“Valmouth” followed in 1959, “The Seven Deadly Sins” in 1961, “The Trojan Women” in 1966 and “Hedda Gabler” in 1970.

The role of Julie in Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat” in 1971 provided Laine with a show-stopping song, “Bill.”

Laine began winning a following in the United States in 1972 with a concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York. It wasn’t well-attended, but The New York Times gave her a glowing review.

The following year, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, launching a series of popular appearances. “Cleo at Carnegie” won a Grammy award in 1986, the same year she was a Tony nominee for “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

A reviewer for Variety in 2002 found her voice going strong: “a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste.”

Perhaps Laine’s most difficult performance of all was on Feb. 6, 2010, at a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the concert venue she and Dankworth had founded at their home, during which Laine and both of her children performed.

“I’m terribly sorry that Sir John can’t be here today,” Laine told the crowd at the end of the show. “But earlier on my husband died in hospital.”

Laine said in an interview with the Boston Globe in 2003 that the secret of her longevity was that “I was never a complete belter.”

“There was always a protective side in me, and an inner voice always said, ‘Don’t do that — it’s not good for you and your voice.’”

Laine is survived by her son and daughter.

Associated Press writer Jill Lawless contributed. AP journalist Robert Barr, the principal writer of the obituary, died in 2018.

By KWIYEON HA and BRIAN MELLEY, Associated Press

TURNBERRY, Scotland (AP) — It may not be typical golf attire, but one of the most ubiquitous outfits seen on U.S. President Donald Trump ‘s golf course Friday ahead of his visit was the reflective yellow vest worn by Scottish police.

The standard issue garb that is far removed from the traditional Turnberry tartan was highly visible on the dunes, the beaches and the grass as thousands of officers secured the course in advance of protests planned during the president’s visit to two of his Scottish golf resorts.

Trump was expected to arrive Friday evening to a mix of respect and ridicule.

His visit requires a major police operation that will cost Scottish taxpayers millions of pounds as protests are planned over the weekend. The union representing officers is concerned they are already overworked and will be diverted from their normal duties and some residents are not happy about the cost.

“Why isn’t he paying for it himself? He’s coming for golf, isn’t he?” said Merle Fertuson, a solo protester in Edinburgh holding a hand-drawn cardboard sign that featured a foolishly grinning Trump likeness in a tuxedo. “It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with public money, either U.S. or U.K.”

Policing for Trump’s four-day visit to the U.K. in 2018 cost more than 14 million pounds ($19 million), according to Freedom of Information figures. That included more than 3 million pounds ($4 million) spent for his two-day golf trip to Turnberry, the historic course and hotel in southwest Scotland that he bought in 2014.

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Police Scotland would not discuss how many officers were being deployed for operational reasons and only said the costs would be “considerable.”

“The visit will require a significant police operation using local, national and specialist resources from across Police Scotland, supported by colleagues from other U.K. police forces as part of mutual aid arrangements,” Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond said.

Scottish First Minister John Swinney said the visit would not be detrimental to policing.

“It’s nonsensical to say it won’t impact it,” said David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, the officers’ union.

Kennedy said he expects about 5,000 officers to take part in the operation.

He said a force reduction in recent years has police working 12-hour shifts. Communities that are understaffed will be left behind with even fewer officers during Trump’s visit.

“We want the president of the United States to be able to come to Scotland. That’s not what this is about,” Kennedy said. “It’s the current state of the police service and the numbers we have causes great difficulty.”

The Stop Trump Scotland group has planned demonstrations Saturday in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dumfries. The group encouraged people to “show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.”

Trump should receive a much warmer welcome from U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to meet with him during the visit. Swinney, the left-leaning head of Scottish government and former Trump critic, also plans to meet with the president.

Melley reported from London. Will Weissert contributed from Edinburgh.