This is the last film before Doomsday and the last post in this rewatch, which makes it the natural place to ask what all of it was for. Watching First Steps again with everything else fresh in my head, the answer is clearer than I expected. This is the film the whole run has been walking toward, not because it’s the best of them, but because it’s the one holding the pieces that actually matter.
I barely mentioned the separate-universe thing in my 2025 review. The film is set in its own world, distinct from the main MCU, and at the time that seemed like a creative convenience, since it let the retro-futurism exist without having to explain why nobody in New York had noticed a chrome 1960s next door. It isn’t a convenience at all. A separate universe is the precondition for an incursion story, and an incursion story is what’s about to happen in a few weeks. Everything I liked about the film’s self-contained world, the reason it felt coherent in a way almost nothing else in that era did, is the same property that makes it necessary. The film gets to be its own thing and carry the weight at the same time, which is a trick nothing else in this run pulled off. It reframes the retro-futurism too. That’s not a style choice, it’s the visible evidence that this is somewhere else, and the more distinct it looks the more the eventual collision is going to cost.
Reed and Doom is the oldest fight Marvel has
My period review ended on the Doom tease with a careful note that there was nothing to go on yet. There’s plenty to go on now, and what I’d add is that the film had already done the important work before the tease even arrived. Reed in this version is anxious, over-prepared, and visibly carrying the weight of being the person everybody expects to solve everything. That’s the correct Reed and it’s the one that makes the rivalry function. Doom against a serenely brilliant Reed is just two clever men arguing at each other. Doom against a Reed who is quietly terrified of failing the people who depend on him is a real fight, because Doom’s whole proposition is that he would do the job better. I said in 2025 that the version of Doom that works is the one genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things, and Reed is written here as the exact counterweight to that argument, before anybody watching knew what shape the argument would take.
Franklin I gave almost no attention first time round, which in hindsight was a mistake. He’s the loaded gun on the mantelpiece, because anybody with a passing knowledge of the comics knows what that character can eventually do, and the film puts him carefully on the board and then leaves him completely alone. On a first watch that looks like restraint. On a second, knowing an event this size is coming, it looks like patience. Whether December uses him is the single most interesting open question going in. He’s either the answer to a problem nobody else can solve, or a temptation the writers ought to resist, and the film has kept both doors open, which is more discipline than this franchise usually manages.
Nothing has changed my mind about Galactus, though. He should have been bigger. If anything the rewatch made it worse, because the rest of the film is so confident about scale in every other respect: the world is enormous, the tech is enormous, the ideas are enormous, and then the world-eater turns up at a size you can comfortably fit inside a wide shot and the air goes straight out of it. I compared it to Infinity War at the time and I’d make that comparison harder now, because that film understood a cosmic threat has to feel unanswerable before the answer arrives. First Steps skips the beat entirely. Galactus shows up as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be survived, and a lot of carefully built dread leaks away. The Silver Surfer still works and is still the best version we’ve had, so the herald landed even when the god didn’t.
Ranking the run, and what it taught me
Something I noted approvingly in 2025 and still undervalued: the domestic scenes are doing real work rather than just providing warmth. An incursion story is, underneath everything, about two worlds where only one gets to continue, and that’s an abstraction. Abstractions don’t generate dread. What generates dread is having spent two hours in somebody’s kitchen. The film’s patience with ordinary family business, the arguments and the meals and the easy competence of people who know each other well, is what turns a cosmological event into something with an actual price tag. It’s also why the Galactus problem stings so much, because the film did the hard half correctly and then undersized the thing threatening them.
Since this is the last post, here’s where the rewatch left everything. Guardians Vol. 3 is the best film of the group and it isn’t close, because it’s the only one allowed to be about something other than the franchise it belongs to. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most fun and the most confident, and the one I’ve gone back to most for pleasure rather than homework. First Steps is third, and the gap between it and those two is more about ambition of subject than execution. Then Thunderbolts*, which tried something real and fumbled it, and Brave New World, which mostly ran errands for later films.
Doing this in order changed my view of the whole stretch more than any individual film did. Watched one at a time, across years, these read as a series of disconnected disappointments with the odd highlight. Watched close together with the destination known, a pattern shows up: almost every one of them was carrying weight for a plan that changed underneath it while it was being made. That doesn’t make the weaker ones good, and it does explain why so many of them feel oddly shaped, like rooms built for furniture that never turned up. The films that hold up best are the ones that were carrying the least, which isn’t a coincidence and is probably the most useful thing I’ve taken from nine months of this.
First Steps is the exception and I don’t think that’s an accident either. It’s the one made after the plan changed, with the destination already known, so everything in it points somewhere real. That’s also its limitation: it’s a very good setup and a slightly thin film, and the 3.5 I gave it in 2025 still feels right. What’s changed is that I now think the setup was the job, and it did that job well. The reception was solid and I suspect it’ll look better still after December.
Doomsday arrives in a few weeks. Of everything I’ve rewatched over these nine months, this is the one to watch last and the one most worth watching twice. The world is separate, Reed is scared, Franklin is waiting, and Doom is coming. That’s a better position than this franchise has been in for years, and after everything above, I didn’t expect to end this project feeling optimistic.