I’m not looking for the answers to life’s questions in a Marvel movie, but I do want any film to have anything to say. A point of view.

That point of view could be something approximating what the first Deadpool was doing - poking fun at the bloated self seriousness of superhero movies and (minimally) subverting the safe, corporate ecosystem the super genre enjoyed. It provided a (minimally) absurdist ebb to the unstoppable flow of the MCU.

But this is…

In my earlier years, I'd often say "prequels are an inherently doomed enterprise" as a sputtering qualifier to my opinion that the STAR WARS prequels, specifically Episode 1: THE PHANTOM MENACE, were good, actually. I'd say that to acknowledge that ~any~ prequel thrusting characters that would appear in later installments into life-or-death stakes neutered a prequel film's own climax. All to obscure my belief that a prequel CAN stand on its own terms - as long as it satisfies a…