Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
In this third and final installment to the Captain America series, things get surprisingly intense. Not that Winter Soldier wasn’t intense, but… every other movie with a whole bunch of Avengers in it has been pretty lighthearted. And Civil War definitely has (probably too many) moments of levity, but there are a lot of complex feelings here and it’s really well-executed.
The main purpose of Civil War is to ground the Marvel Cinematic Universe in reality again- something it lost touch with around the time the Avengers came out. None of those movies make sense without Civil War to tie them together. They blew up Manhattan, Harlem, that one town in New Mexico, D.C., Sokovia, and wherever the final fight in Thor: The Dark World was with almost no public backlash? The movie glosses over the fact that the Avengers prevented damage rather than cause it, which goes un-addressed, but that’s a pretty real depiction of how real world politics would be. How would you feel if the same costumed folks were at the center of every explosion in the world? I’d demand accountability too! They blew up a country in the last movie.
While that may be the movie’s thesis, the brilliance is that it’s all misdirection. We focus so much on the Sokovia Accords that we get swept up in the spectacle of the Avengers half-assedly fighting each other on the tarmac and we don’t even notice that Tony Stark is about to completely lose his cool and beat Captain America and Bucky to a bloody pulp.
Tony Stark, man. Ever since the first Iron Man he’s been pretty unbelievable as a human being. He’s been such a dick since 2010’s Iron Man 2, and if Iron Man hadn’t been a near-perfect film, I would have given up on this whole franchise long before Civil War came out. He’s just… the worst. Civil War turns that all around. It doesn’t erase his past actions, but it gives him new context and makes him a human being again. He’s fundamentally broken, and the Russo brothers turned that into something compelling instead of a nuisance. They saved him from what Whedon and Black had done to him, and we’re all the better for it. Doing this recap project, I’ve been thinking, “Why do I like these movies so much? So many of them are trash”, and Civil War reminds me that you can have real character pieces and big explosions in the same movie. You don’t have to choose. I love spectacle. My favorite movie is The Empire Strikes Back. But too many people think that a big action flick can’t also be high drama, and that’s just gatekeeping nonsense.
There are a few moments, like the airport scene, where the dissonance between serious and jovial dialogue isn’t very effective. Tonal dissonance has been a hallmark of the franchise, I.E. bathos, and while it usually works, Civil War stumbles a couple times during scenes that should be more dramatic than funny. Fortunately, the ultimate fight of Cap & Bucky vs. Iron Man doesn’t make this mistake. The scene where Tony learns that Bucky killed Howard and Maria Stark is easily the best scene in Marvel to date.
But there is one egregiously bad scene I have to bring up: The kiss. What in the world was that? Nobody likes Steve Rogers getting with Sharon Carter.
Nobody.
It’s weird and they have no chemistry. Captain America actually has a whole host of interesting romantic interests: Bucky, Black Widow, Bucky, Tony Stark, Bucky… Sharon is not on that list. It was dumb and I hated it.
Much of Marvel’s Phase 2 felt like jogging in place until the next big event movie, in this case being Age of Ultron, but Phase 3 kicks off with real, permanent change to the universe: When Civil War ends, the team formerly known as The Avengers consists of Iron Man, War Machine, Vision, and… that’s it.
And I haven’t even talked about Spider-Man and Black Panther. Christ, this movie is big. Peter Parker is a breath of fresh air into the Spider-Man character, and the audience leaves Civil War wanting more. But T’Challa… that’s where the movie really shines. The hyper-rich king of an isolationist country deep in the heart of Africa is probably the most relatable character in the whole movie. God, he’s just so, so good. In a genre filled with revenge porn, T’Challa steps up and decides that vengeance is not the answer, justice is. Typically this conclusion is forced on the hero, but T’Challa made a choice, and it was goddamn brilliant.
Speaking of the villain, welcome to convoluted Marvel villain #72. I like that Zemo strays from the source material and is ambivalent to Hydra instead of leading them, and his plan… almost makes sense, as long as you assume much of it was improvised in the moment rather than being meticulously thought out from the start. Personally, I think he’s underrated. He doesn’t carry with him big charisma, or an ideology that the heroes can adopt, but he is incredibly effective at accomplishing his singular goal: To destroy the Avengers from within. Ultron said he had that goal, but we’re going to pretend that didn’t happen and focus on the much better bad guy instead.
All in all, Captain America: Civil War accomplishes what it sets out to do: It steers the franchise back on course. There’s so, so much more here than I commented on- I could write a paragraph or two about every single Avenger- but for brevity’s sake, I’ll cut myself off here. Good job, Russo brothers!
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