Civil War: A Spoilery Review

[djgray]

Given the flaming dung heap that was AOU, this wasn't as bad continuity wise, but it also wasn't nearly as good as it could have been. Because AOU left a HUGE mess to clean up after it and I think patching up some of those holes took away from the story that they actually meant to tell.

This is really a sequel to AOU then it is a sequel to TWS and that's...that's very offputting. I was disappointed in it since it was obvious where the Civil War stuff had been grafted onto the Cap 3 movie stuff. And my joke from years ago was actually true. Cap 3 really was "Up All Night to Get Bucky" (TFA was Ice Ice Bucky, TWS was Electric Buckyloo, etc ) which would have worked in a solo Cap movie, but Bucky as the motivating factor driving something like Civil War?

It makes no sense at all. The fact that it's been 2-3 years since Bucky's been out of cryo and the fact that those code words still apparently work? Doesn't make any sense, especially not with the events in TWS where Pierce had him wiped because Steve spoke to him and it jolted stuff loose. The only way that kind of conditioning works is with repetition. There's a reason they kept him in cryo when they didn't need him and when he was out of cryo, they continually wiped him.

It was the only way to keep him under their control.

We know it's at least 2 years after the fact because Sam says that they'd been looking for him for two years and couldn't find him. So this is at least 2 years after Winter Soldiers and some indeterminate time after Age of Ultron (probably not more than 12-18 months). So out on his own, still sorting through the fragments of his own very fractured brain, but those trigger words should not have had the same effect on him that pressing the reset button on your computer does.

The idea that suddenly he comes out of hiding where not even Steve and Sam, armed with whatever resources they could steal/beg/borrow could find him, only to bomb the UN? That also makes no damn sense and the whole furor as for why the manhunt is suddenly started etc etc - why didn't anyone ask the question right then, why would he have done that? What possible motive does he have for it? Why precisely was there a shoot on sight order sent out rather than a "we really need some intelligence here, let's take him alive."

But I'm getting ahead of the supposed plot here. So Nigeria happens and it doesn't go as well as it could have, so dum da daaaaa, someone decides that they need more control and supervision over these "Avengers." Tony in particular gets a massive guilt trip laid on him from the mother of someone who died in Sokovia, after a speech he gives to MIT students about one of his latest creations (which the acronym for it is BARF and Tony, this is why Pepper refuses to let you name things) which portrays for us the last time that he saw his parents alive.

And if that wasn't already a red flag right there, then I don't know what is. We see Howard and Maria and Tony on the last moments they shared before the accident that took Howard and Maria's lives. It's supposed to be gutwrenching. My interal reaction was somewhere between "Oh you assholes." and "well we already knew it was canon, now we're just hammering the nail in further to be really assholeish clear about it."

So Tony is already in a not great mental/emotional shape, having relived that fun little memory and then given a speech where we find out that he's apparently broken up with Pepper and isn't that a kick in the pants. All of this before the gut punch of the other mother dealing with having lost a son, who's waiting right here so she can specifically tell him that.

He's already got so many guilt issues on top of guilt issues that are piled high and deep on his savior complex and his PTSD. The way he's handling all the trauma tossed at him is to try and control everything he can. To try and save everyone close to him so he doesn't have to lose anyone like that again. After Afghanistan, he doesn't ever want to be that vulnerable again, where someone can strip him of his agency like that.

Enter the Sokovia Accords...

But first, someone please tell me how Thunderbolt Ross got to be Secretary of State? Especially since there is absolutely zero acknowledgement of what he did to Bruce Banner? Why is he the liaison to the Avengers when he has a notable bias against people with superpowers? Why does he still have a job? Literally anyone would be better than Thunderbolt Ross here.

Ross' argument also makes no sense/holds no water. The four things he mentions - New York, DC, Sekovia, and Nigeria have the lowest possibly casualty counts for such major battles. New York was an external threat from aliens in the sky and then also from the world security council deciding to drop a nuke on Manhattan. The Avengers are able to resolve both of these threats with the minimum amount of damage to the city and it's residents.

DC? That one was all SHIELD spearheaded by Pierce. Despite it's proximity to the White House and Capitol Hill, the Insight cluster could have been much much worse and it was handled probably in the best possible way it could have been, short of Steve actually calling the Avengers in to help (and I am still not convinced that they shouldn't have been called in to assist with that - a lot of the drama from Civil War might have been avoided if Tony had been with Steve and Nat and Sam). The battle was mostly over the Potomac with some debris falling on some of the Monuments and the Triskellion coming down also in the Potomac. From Fury's first assassination attempt, the traffic in the city is fucked for months and there's going to be some high costs for all the property damage? But again that's nothing compared to what it could have been - had the Triskellion been closer to the center of town or the Insight helocarriers not hovering over the Potomac but taking up stations around DC. I'm willing to wager a good guess that most of the people actually working at the Triskellion got the hell out of the building when they heard Cap's speech.

Sekovia? Okay, yeah a lot of that could have been avoided but at the same time you could make the case that Tony and the team were being adversely affected in weird ways by Loki's Scepter. Ultron was... an anomaly complicated by Strucker and his experiments. Also the casualties here were also way more minimal than they could have been. A good bulk of the population was rehoused and evacuated out from the part of the city in the sky and you can't tell me that someone forgot about the people still on the ground. Someone made a phone call somewhere telling people to stay in their homes/evacuate the areas closest to the crater/get as far away as you can.

Nigeria? How exactly is this any different from suicide bombers in our present reality? They did the best they could in that instance and they also kept some really bad biochem weapons out of the hands of some very very bad people. I'm not crying over Crossbones killing himself.

So the examples he's using to try and convince them over to his side of things is flawed to start with. The massive guilt trip that Tony got hit with and the idea that he's still got in his head about protecting all of them is still there and this seems to him to be one of the best ways to do that.

Rhodey is military and automatically has that ingrained response to oversight committees. It's how the military runs and he's fine with it. Nat may not totally agree with the entire thing as it's put but she's also the only person not holding the idiot ball, just poking it with a finger briefly, in this film and she knows that either way, it's a crappy situation, but signing might give them, at least, some say in who the oversight committee might be.

They're not wrong either, but the ways that Ross is going about it is wrong. Giving them a firm ultimatium isn't something that is ever going to fly well with Steve Rogers. The man exists to be contrary like that. If you don't believe me, go back and rewatch the first two Cap movies. I'll wait. We, like Steve needed more information that what we got on the Sekovia Accords, and we needed better reasoning for what they were and how they would work. The MCU is a different beast than the comics so we can't really assume that the Accords are the same thing as the Superhero or Mutant Registration Acts.

By all means, you want to have a conversation about oversight and superheroes and who watches the watchers, and the impacts that superheroes have on regular life and society? Go ahead, but then you have to have those conflicts have casualties that have an actual impact more than what your average multiple car wreck/police raid would have.

Zemo, is the overarching villain that's manipulated his way into getting what he wants most, which for the moment is confirmation that Bucky was the one that was sent to kill Howard and Maria Stark. Granted the way that they show Bucky killing them flies in the face of what technically the Winter Soldier is there for. He's supposed to be this invisible ghost assassin, a legendary sniper, so why kill them like he did? HYDRA had to have known that Howard would recognize Bucky, why wasn't two bullets from a safe distance away and a different team to collect the super serum in the truck utilized? It's remarkably way more low risk than sending Bucky alone.

While we're on that subject, why the hell was Howard transporting that material by himself with his wife in the car, and no additional safeguards on him or the material? Congress wasn't that stupid and even HYDRA within SHIELD had to know that if anyone found out that the last person to sign out that material was Howard Stark, questions would start being asked? What was the purpose of transporting it in the first place?

Zemo orchestrates the entire thing down at the UN for the sole purpose of getting them to flush out Bucky and bring him in so that he can ask him these questions. The dedication is admirable, but at that point, why didn't Tony and Nat start asking more questions about what was going on and why? Both of them are good at spotting set ups and this was a very obvious set up.

For all the Manchurian Candidate references (most which were badly done too), I came away thinking that they were applying them not to Bucky, but to Zemo himself (down to the last scene with him holding the gun etc) and it's smacking of them setting him up for a kind of villain to hero sort of arc. Which apparently is a thing that will happen, according to some of the news I'm seeing here source.

I don't know where these people were getting their Steve Rogers characterization from, but a Cap movie should probably not leave me wanting to punch Steve in the face repeatedly. The writers just seemed to take Whedon's one note characterization of Captain America and run with it, which was surprising and very disappointing from some of the same people who gave us Winter Soldier. Steve had a death grasp on that idiot ball too, refusing to bend even a little bit and just...so much of this movie could have been solved by Fury and Pepper locking the two of them in a room to yell at each other until they started making more sense. Which is probably why neither Fury or Pepper was in this movie.

I did enjoy that Sam, T'Challa, and Rhodey have separate arcs and very different personalities. It's easy to distinguish between the three of them and I do like T'Challa's characterization, how he's presented in this film. Sam and Redwing made me grin and I adore the Tony and Rhodey banter back and forth.

I'm not a fan of Rhodey's paralyzation because it seems like the only purpose it serves is to cause more pain and guilt for Tony and some additional pain and guilt for Sam ("like he was up there just to watch" anyone?) - other than that, it's not necessary.

The "epic" showdown comes down to Steve fighting to protect the family he still has (since Peggy died and he's found out that her niece is his former neighbor and they kissed, which isn't supposed to be weird at all?) and Tony fighting to avenge the family that he lost and it's just really extremely stupid. Pretty, well-coreographed, but stupid.

Though not as stupid as the post-credits scene in Wakanda where Bucky, all in white "voluntarily" goes back into cryo to save everyone else from having to deal with him and the "mess" that is his brain. The black costume switch to the white is too on the nose, the helping him find peace is admirable in theory but I have to wonder how much peace being on ice really gives him. Also he's repeatedly treated not like a person with agency but as a thing. A weapon that talks, a thing. Steve really isn't any better than Pierce in his treatment of Bucky in this film which is one of the most appalling things about it. It gives off the vibe that they are putting him down for his own good, which is reprehensible.

But then again given that the writer's themselves have said that "Well. . . [he is] give or take his intellectual capacity, 100% guilty . . . . This is not a guy who should be running around happily, he may not be a 100% guilty but he’s damn sure not a 100% innocent." With regards to James Buchanan Barnes, this line of thinking is completely and utterly crap. It's disgusting and shows just how out of touch the writers are with the characters they are portraying, well attempting to portray.

It's like they've forgotten that every single legal system that is based on English common law or on Continental civil law literally defines when someone can be held responsible for an action and when they cannot be so held, because it's like we've actually figured out that free will is a thing that can actually be impaired (by any number of means, even in Real Life!) source

Like from that, I'm getting that these writers have a worse grip on moral agency than Joss Whedon and that's just a new and terrifying low bar that I just moved.

So yadda yadda, the team is broken up, Bucky's back on ice, and Steve Rogers has/is liberating his compatriots from the Raft Prison they were shoved in - setting it up for Infinity Wars no doubt.
Congrats, Marvel, you've officially killed the last bit of interest that I had in continuing along with this universe. I'll stay over here with the Netflix stuff that doesn't make me bitterly angry at all the wasted potential I see.

ETA: This Tumblr Meta is spot on