A Marvel film so good it makes all the others feel like a prologue, gushes Raja Sen. (Also, stay for the two end-credit scenes.) 

“War, what is it good for?” 

Despite the existential disgust expressed by Edwin Starr in that song all those years ago, there exist far too many affirmative answers to that question: it’s good for gunrunners, media outlets, separatists, posturing Presidential candidates and, clearly, for Marvel Studios -- whose superheroes have never, ever looked better. 

Why, though,  are earth’s mightiest heroes fighting each other in the first place? 

The idea of critiquing collateral damage from battles in superhero movies, considering all the computer-rendered rubble and skylines toppling in 3D, is almost as old as the genre itself, with examples on every level of the quality spectrum -- from The Incredibles to Batman V Superman -- and the new Captain America film deals with the politics of this crisis.

A Superhero Registration Act is proposed, with a United Nations squad to control if and when to deploy super-powered heroes.

Considering that the Avengers can’t get through breakfast without an argument -- or without some philistine pouring coffee grounds in the garbage disposal -- it isn’t surprising that this leads to debate, but nobody quite anticipates an impasse this formidable. 

Ding!

In the red tights stands Tony Stark, Iron Man, the billionaire egomaniac who, after his own significant fumbles in the face of adversity, seems all too keen to relinquish responsibility and make superheroes answerable to a neutral body who, he trusts, should know better than, say, Earth’s Most Impulsive Heroes.

In the star-spangled corner stands Steve Rogers, Captain America, a soldier who once socked Hitler and who feels that heroes should take responsibility for their own actions and, given governments and their contrary agendas, “obeying orders” may not always be the best course of action. 

Heavy stuff to chew on, and while naturally avoiding the obsessive level of discourse favoured by the comics in Marvel’s Civil War series 10 years ago -- an 11-issue series called Frontline, for example, featured two journalists locked in deep conversations about ethics, responsible reportage and the greater good -- this film, after a fantastic opening action scene, does indeed feature a lot of serious talk. 

Yet, preposterous as it may seem, this approach works wonderfully, thanks to the eight years and 12 films Marvel has released before this.

Over the course of the last few years, characters -- like Cap himself -- have grown from stereotypes to heroes with fully-fleshed personalities with well-defined conflicts, paranoia and neuroses.

Marvel’s men and women have always had issues, and we’ve seen their powers and weaknesses gradually come to light as they’ve struggled with inner demons and vanquished old fears -- sometimes to replace them with new ones. We’ve met (most of) the gang, and this is the film where all those years of setup really pay off. 

Here’s the deal: All the old Marvel films -- Even the ones you’ve loved. Even the great superhero sandwich Joss Whedon made us. All the films before Captain America: Civil War are prologue. 

We’ve seen earlier Marvel productions nail some or the other aspects of superhero movies, but this new film, by Joe and Anthony Russo, ticks all the boxes in astonishingly fine fashion. Every character’s presence is justified, every comic-trope used is deployed perfectly, and there is so much goddamned personality to the choices this film makes. Rarely do all the stars align this masterfully in a franchise, and, as a lifelong Marvel fanatic, I finally feel the way I imagine Star Wars fans would have done the first time they watched The Empire Strikes Back. 

The film opens with a clothesline in Lagos, delivered by a metal wing.

The badassery continues as Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow kicks serious butt, with the cinematographers keeping us perched close to the action.

We’re following along because we can’t look away, and the action setpieces in this film are remarkably clear and, mostly set in broad daylight, free of shadowy ambiguity.

The coherence is jawdropping, a result of the Russos calling in directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch -- helmers of the kinetically ingenious, near-lyrical ultraviolence in John Wick -- to help them shoot the fight scenes. It shows. Each sequence contains not merely a couple of gasp-worthy moments but also moments that define each individual superhero’s strengths and chinks. It’s all striking, a joy in IMAX 3D, and the big airport scene it all builds up to is a giddy masterpiece.