Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather join X-forces to overthink Deadpool 2 as a bromance, as a rewrite of Plato’s Republic, and as an allegory of the soul. They do not forget to mention the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
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Further Reading
- X-Men films
- Onslaught
- OK Go Videos
The other female characters do not redeem or soften Deadpool 2’s fridging of Vanessa, because the female characters in this movie aren’t full characters: that is, they don’t have drives of their own that the audience is asked to identify with. Domino, Negasonic, and Yukio might be fun to have in a scene, but we are never seeing the scene from their point of view, (e.g. we aren’t supposed to be annoyed with Deadpool like Negasonic is). This is important because it means the Deadpool movies, like maybe most movies, reinforce the idea that female characters are important because of their effect on the male characters, rather than as agents themselves.
The time travel element raised further meta questions for me. Is the reason why the X-Men film franchise has such a fractured timeline because Deadpool went back to the Wolverine Origins and shot himself? Did that cause a time paradox? Does the fact that the time machine is fixed mean Deadpool can travel to any time period at will and play god whenever he wants? Can Deadpool break the fourth wall because he has power over time itself?
Did Josh Brolin really play two different Marvel characters in films released in the same month in which his character alters time in order to undo a death in the last act?
That last one is unrelated, but that seems like a huge coincidence that should be unpacked more.
The only thing that would be altered by Deadpool killing his other self would be that the whole Three Mile Island disaster would have never occurred (we’re assuming in the X-Men universe that the meltdown was a cover story for the place going kerblooey during the Logan/Sabertooth/Deadpool fight, right?). Would that really alter the X-men timeline that much? Stryker probably still would’ve shot Logan in the head, scrambling his brains, Logan probably still would’ve encountered Xavier to no real effect, and at this point I honestly can’t believe I remember this much about X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yeesh.
Also unrelated (but still somewhat related), Deadpool 2 is the first of two movies this summer in which Josh Brolin goes on a mission with the intent of killing a child. The other being Sicario 2, and if we want to reallllllllly want to stretch that definition, we could add Infinity War to that as well.
Josh Brolin is having one killer summer.