In 1968, amidst the high-stakes Space Race, brilliant lead scientist Dr. Reed Richards (Dev Patel) convinces his team—expert pilot Ben Grimm (Logan Marshall-Green), sharp research assistant Sue Storm (Elizabeth Lail), and her hotheaded younger brother Johnny (Edvin Ryding)—to perform a covert orbital test on an experimental cosmic engine. Designed to breach sub-space, the reactor malfunctions when struck by an anomalous wave of cosmic radiation.
Rather than crashing, the ship is pulled through a tear in space-time and plunges into the Negative Zone—an anti-matter dimension outside normal time flow. While the crew barely survives their altered biology and discovers their astounding new abilities, back on Earth, the incident is classified, wiped from public records, and forgotten.