Theatrical Captain America: Civil War (2016) (1 Viewer)

[Sam Favate]

Just watched this on blu-ray, which I thought was a wonderful presentation. I caught something I missed when I saw it in the theater: During Bucky's escape from the Berlin facility, when he grabs Black Widow by the neck, she says "You could at least recognize me." Is that a reference to the romantic affair they had in the books? Or to the fights they had in The Winter Soldier? Some other back story that's hinted at in the movies? Something else I missed?

Oh, and how fired is Agent 13? She gave out so much classified information and gave Steve and Sam their confiscated equipment. I like the character, but I hope Steve has a job for her, because she's unemployable in government now.

 

[Citizen87645]

I took it as all their fights in Winter Soldier.

 

[Sean Bryan]

She's likely referencing their confrontation in Winter Soldier, but they also crossed paths when he assinated his target and shot him straight through her (from the story she told Steve in WS). But there could be more of an untold backstory as well. The way she said it at least "felt" like their could have been more familiarity than from just those two encounters.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I agree about the presentation on Blu-ray. This looked really nice, and the airport scene was especially nice. The special features weren't bad either. Though I'd love to see Marvel give one of their big films a Lord of the Rings type treatment on disc.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I was also struck by what a great looking presentation this was on Blu-Ray.

Still feels overstuffed, and increasingly like a soap opera with a high barrier to entry, but there's a lot of fun in the concept and some great character moments. And the action sequences are phenomenal.

 

[Tim Glover]

Need to re-visit this. I liked it but just LOVED Winter Soldier. And that one set the bar pretty high.

Worth a revisit.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Every time I've watched this there is a bit that jumps out at me that I wonder about, but I usually forget about it by then end.

When Zemo activates Bucky and he is fighting T'Challa, there is a moment where there is some type of reaction between his metal arm and T'Challa's ring. They both seem to acknowledge that something odd happened there, but then his escape continues.

What do you make of this? The ring was his father's so it is new to T'Challa. It's been suggested online that it may be made from a special variety of vibranium that has an interesting effect on other metals.

The Russos were recent,y asked about this, and they played coy but indicated that the answer is something we'll likely see explored in Black Panther's solo film.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Some interesting comments from the Russos at Quora:
https://www.quora.com/session/Captain-America-Civil-War-2016/1?srid=u1jok&share=4c83be05

"We always thought of this movie as the start of the war. It's not over yet."

"At the end of Civil War Cap drops his shield because Tony tells him he doesn’t deserve it any longer, and perhaps he doesn’t. His responsibility to himself is now in conflict with his responsibility to others, and he will struggle to resolve that. His road forward involves figuring out who Steve Rogers is without the shield."

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Every time I've watched this there is a bit that jumps out at me that I wonder about, but I usually forget about it by then end.

When Zemo activates Bucky and he is fighting T'Challa, there is a moment where there is some type of reaction between his metal arm and T'Challa's ring. They both seem to acknowledge that something odd happened there, but then his escape continues.

What do you make of this? The ring was his father's so it is new to T'Challa. It's been suggested online that it may be made from a special variety of vibranium that has an interesting effect on other metals.

Well, the world's supply of vibranium is sourced from Wakanda, and the Wakandans' mastery of working the metal helped them repulse the colonizing European powers and remain independent through the Scramble for Africa during the 19th century. So my guess is that it ties into that.

 

[darklight00]

I like Captain America Civil War very much, but I sort of not liked how it ended. I wanted a more ambiguous conclusion especially in respect to the incarcerated Avengers. I never really liked how their rescue happens almost off screen. In fact I felt that the whole rescued should have been left for the next movie.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Road to Endgame Revisit #14:
And now we come to Captain America: Civil War, which is really Avengers 2.5 and the Russo Brothers' trial run for the actual Avengers double-header to come.

The animating force of the movie is the rather bold decision to center a film around a conflict between the Marvel Cinematic Universe's two biggest heroes, with the other heroes being forced to choose sides and the unforeseen consequences starting to pile up quickly.

There are two poles driving this schism: one is sort of abstract and philosophical, while the other is intensely personal. The movie works really hard to balance the viewpoints of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, so that the audience sees merit and flaws in both characters' positions.

Since this is a Captain America movie, he's the protagonist and Iron Man is the villain. If the filmmakers had completely succeeded in balancing their positions, Marvel could have told the same story in an Iron Man 4 and have Tony Stark be seen as the protagonist and Steve Rogers be seen as the villain. For reasons I will discuss later on, I'm not so sure that would have worked.

Like Iron Man 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War suffers a bit under the weight of its obligations to the greater MCU. It's an extremely dense movie, weaving in characters from multiple sub-franchises while creating some runway to launch two new franchises in future movies. There is enough here to follow the movie if you haven't seen any of the MCU movies that came before it, but the emotional investment in these characters and their growing estrangement depends entirely on what the audience brings into the movie from the previous movies.

The cold open establishes an immediate tonal shift from Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The glimpses we get of the decades between Bucky's apparent death in Captain America: The First Avenger and his reappearance in The Winter Soldier don't contradict anything we've been told so far, but they do paint things with a more comic book-y brush. In The Winter Soldier, the Winter Soldier's resets and recalibrations take place in a bank vault and feel like they exist in the real world. Here, we see the same contraption, but it's been placed in a massive set that is very reminiscent of the Weapon X facility from the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies.

From those flashbacks, we leap ahead to "Present Day". That identifier has always been a pet peeve of mine, because it instantly dates a motion picture; at some point, somebody's going to be watching this movie from a point far enough into the future that his or her present day isn't going to look anything like the present day of the movie. I find it to be even more of a problem here, because the Marvel Cinematic Universe fits together in a very specific way. If the identifier had instead indicated "2016", it would have accomplished the same thing but would have been much more useful to future audiences trying to figure out where this movie fits into the MCU timeline.

The battle in Lagos is a sufficiently exciting action sequence, but it's also very effective at revealing character. The Avengers have deployed a four-person team with very different backgrounds and skillsets. Captain America is team leader, and he's very adept at utilizing his available resources to maximum effect. Falcon was highly trained special forces. Black Widow is an incredible spy and a phenomenal one-on-one combatant. But Scarlet Witch was a teenager in an economically depressed country, and then she was a science experiment kept locked up in a lab. This is a serious mission, but it's also a training opportunity for her; she's a lot more skilled than she was at the end of Age of Ultron, but she's still got a lot to learn in a lot of areas before she's as versatile and seasoned as the other members of the team. Cap is a patient and effective mentor. Seeing the four of them work together as a cohesive unit is an effective reminder of what is being lost as the movie progresses.

The ending of The Winter Soldier seemed to set Crossbones up to be a major villain going forward. If they had made a third Captain America movie rather than Avengers 2.5, he probably would have been. But here, instead, he's dispatched in the first act. The circumstances of his death propel the rest of the movie; when he blows himself up, there isn't any time to plan or react. In her desperation to protect the people on the ground, Wanda accidentally kills a few hundred people in one of the nearby office towers. A delegation from Wakanda is among the victims, drawing Black Panther and his father into the story.

From that disaster, we jump to MIT, and what appears to be a flashback to Tony Stark's childhood. The deaging process on Robert Downey Jr. is far from Lola's best work, falling pretty deeply into the uncanny valley. But that quickly becomes okay, as it's revealed to be a hologram; not a factual rendering of that moment, but Tony's digital recreation of that moment. After wowing the crowd by doing the academic equivalent of throwing cash from a helicopter, Tony is confronted by Alfre Woodard (a rare Marvel double casting; she would later be a series regular on "Luke Cage"), playing a grieving mother who blames Tony Stark and the Avengers for her son's death in Sokovia. A career staffer at the State Department, she is matter of fact, smart, composed, and brutally direct. She forces Tony to see her dead son in the same terms as all of those college students he just showered with money. She is appealing to his morality, but she's also appealing to his ego.

So when William Hurt appears (marking the first appearance of an Incredible Hulk character appearing in the wider MCU played by the same actor), Tony is unusually amenable to oversight and boundaries. There are two ways to look at what has transpired since Iron Man first appeared on the world stage in 2010:

1. That the Earth has faced extraordinary new challenges, which required extraordinary new heroes to rise up and meet them.
2. That the rise of extraordinary new heroes on Earth has attracted extraordinary new challenges. And over time, the collateral damage from those challenges has accumulated rapidly.

The truth is a complex intermingling of the two. But around the world, 117 countries represented by Secretary Ross fall solidly into the latter camp and propose the Sokovia Accords as the solution.

And Tony Stark, still reeling from the consequences of having created Ultron, sees the Accords as a means for personal atonement. He understands that creating Ultron was an act of hubris, and embraces the Accords as a necessary check on that hubris. The problem is that it's still fundamentally an act of narcissism; because he feels like he needs to be reined in, he wants to impose his solution on all enhanced individuals, even though many of them have exercised significantly better judgement than he has.

But Steve Rogers has spent the majority of his adult life working within institutional frameworks, following orders. He was an instrument of the United States Army during World War II, and -- once he was thawed out -- he was an instrument of SHIELD in the twenty-first century. But the events of The Winter Soldier left him disillusioned with institutions. He put his faith and trust in SHIELD, only to discover that it has been irreparably corrupted by Hydra. He is no longer willing to substitute the political and institutional agendas of a technocratic bureaucracy for his own judgement.

Because Iron Man and Captain America are the leaders of Avengers, and their positions are irreconciable, the rest of the team is forced to take sides:

• For War Machine, it's a pretty straightforward decision. Colonel Rhodes has served in uniform his entire adult life. He follows the chain of command, and he respects that the might of the military must fall under the purview of civilian leadership. He sees the Accords as an extension of those checks and balances. He's also Tony Stark's best friend, and Tony's pro-Accords.
• Black Widow is, as always, a pragmatist. She understands that if the Avengers start to be seen as a threat to established global order, eventually the powers underpinning that world order will take steps to neutralize that threat. She sees signing the Accords as a necessary step to keep the Avengers together and at full strength for the next crisis. She's no less disillusioned with institutions than Captain America is, but she has far fewer qualms about acting under false pretenses to accomplish her objectives. She thinks the strategic move is to sign now, and then abandon the Accords later if they prove impractical or an impediment to what needs to be done. Captain America's honor doesn't allow him to think that way.
• For Falcon, the decision is less straightforward. He went on the journey with Steve and Natasha in The Winter Soldier, and had a front row seat for what happens when institutions are left to operate unchecked. He also resented the fact that, after all of they had sacrificed in service to the world, they were being treated as common criminals. Underpinning his military service was a certain belief in American ideals: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Accords represented a dramatic curtailment of liberty. He is also Steve Rogers's comrade, and Steve is anti-Accords. But he doesn't share Steve's personal loyalty to Bucky, and for a long stretch of the movie it looks like Bucky has committed an unspeakable atrocity in Vienna.
• Vision is an artificial intelligence, and approaches the debate like a mathematical equation. At the end of Age of Ultron, he had stated with near-certainty that humanity was doomed to destroy itself. He sees institutions as a means of imposing order and providing stability. Liberty is essential to people like Steve and Sam, but from Vision's unfathomably big picture perspective it is dangerous and selfish. Vision also understands just how much of a threat he represents to the world, and sees the Accords as a way of signaling the world his good intentions.
• Scarlet Witch ultimately doesn't get to make a choice. Even as Tony Stark is making a big show of submitting to a new global consensus, he is still substituting his own judgment for that of others. Because Scarlet Witch was ultimately responsible for the deaths in Lagos, Tony sees it as prudent to take her off the board and out of the public eye until the Accords are signed. But he doesn't ask her to lie low, he doesn't meet with her to discuss his reasoning. Instead he imposes house arrest upon her at the new Avengers facility, and he conscripts Vision as her warden. That decision makes it impossible for Wanda to work with Tony, which means she's Team Captain America by default.
• Hawkeye is alive because Wanda's brother sacrificed himself at the end of Age of Ultron, his body riddled with munitions that were headed straight at Hawkeye. The Maximoff family is the reason Clint's wife still has a husband, and Clint's children still have a father. That is a debt that he takes very seriously. Tony's attempt to confine Wanda brings Clint out of "retirement" and into the fray. By helping Wanda escape the Avengers facility, he makes himself a fugitive and then in turn makes him Team Captain America.

The team debate is interrupted by the news that Peggy Carter has passed away at the age of 95. The funeral sequence feels like an interlude of Captain America 3 in the middle of Avengers 2.5. It offers a moment of reflection, a moment for Steve Rogers to be a human being rather than Captain America the superhero, and it also reintroduces Emily VanCamp into the proceedings and confirms that she's playing Sharon Carter. Sharon has an interesting role within the fabric of the movie. Now working for the CIA, she is the law enforcement presence in the movie. She's responsible for investigating the coming attack on the United Nations meeting in Vienna, and for leading the United States's part of the manhunt for the Winter Soldier in the aftermath of that attack. She takes her responsibilities seriously, and publicly toes the company line. But emotionally, her allegiance is to Steve. Even as she's hunting the Winter Soldier, she's feeding Steve intel.

So much of this film is driven by the flow of information; who knows what when. Arguably Zemo's greatest and most devastating weapon is his control of the flow of information. He leads Captain America and the Winter Soldier down one path. Because Iron Man is desperate to bring Captain America and the Winter Solder into custody, he is lead down another path. The events in Siberia at the end of the movie are carefully orchestrated.

One of the best action sequences in any of the Marvel movies comes in the middle of this one. Captain America has tracked Bucky Barnes to a rundown apartment in Bucharest. He tries to get Bucky to turn himself in. But a joint anti-terrorism strike force is minutes behind him, and they quickly storm the apartment. The fight moves from the apartment into the confined verticality of the stairwell, to the streets and tunnels of the city. This movie had the same stunt team as The Winter Soldier and one of the distinguishing factors in the fights from both movies is that there is a real visceral quality to them. They don't feel like a beautifully choreographed dance; they feel brutal, with hits that really land. Cap and the Winter Soldier are fighting carefully to disable and not kill, but they're up against highly trained police in full tactical gear who have been authorized to use lethal force. The two superhumans in this fight can't take the risk of not aiming for at least unconsciousness. Once the fight has spilled out into the city at large, there is a wonderful novelty that comes from combatants on foot fighting amidst cars and trucks moving really fast all around them. There is one stunt in particular, where Bucky grabs one handlebar of a moving motorcycle, knocks the driver off, rotates the bike 180 degrees, and hops on -- all in one fluid motion -- that is among the greatest I've ever seen in any movie for sheer awesomeness.

The sequence also marks the costumed debut of the Black Panther, another example of flawed information driving action. T'Challa had just, a few scenes before, endured having his father brutally murdered in front of him at a conference that was supposed to usher in a new era of world peace. And the evidence seems pretty conclusive that the Winter Soldier is the person responsible. Black Panther is actually threaded pretty lightly through this movie, but his defining quality in this story is that the warrior is in control and not the king. I question a little bit the decision to have him take his helmet off at the end of the fight, when he and Steve and Bucky are being taken into custody. There is a practical reason for it -- he need to establish his diplomatic immunity with the authorities as the sovereign king of Wakanda -- but it boxes in later decision making a bit, since he secret identity isn't so secret.

The sequence in Berlin argues strongly for Captain America's position in the philosophical argument. The governments of the world finally have the Winter Soldier in custody, and one of the first things they do is put him in an enclosed space with a person who has nefarious goals and the means to reactivate his programming. Zemo was able to take advantage of the institutions' predictable operating procedures to put himself in that room. The Winter Soldier's reactivation and escape is a failure of the bureaucracy that is supposed to control the most powerful beings on the planet. Despite that, Steve fully realizes that Bucky is safer in custody than on the run, where lots of people (including potentially Bucky) are likely to get injured in future attempts to apprehend him. In the ensuing struggle, the helicopter that the Winter Soldier is using in his escape attempt crashes, and the collision snaps him out of the Winter Soldier conditioning.

The next scene, with Bucky held captive by Steve and Sam through the use of an industrial vice to keep his arm pinned -- excepted as the mid-credits scene of Ant-Man -- is the pivot point of the movie. Bucky finally remembers everything -- or at least the most he has since he was reintroduced in The Winter Soldier. He first shares something that Steve has suspected since Natasha gave him the file in the graveyard at the end of the second Captain America movie: The Winter Soldier was the one who killed Tony Stark's parents back in 1991. He then shares that he isn't the only Winter Soldier, that the Soviets had a whole team of them who were even stronger and more powerful than he, and without his moral reservations. In another case of flawed information driving plot, that revelation changes the stakes for Steve. It's not just about protecting his friend any more. It's about saving the world from the threat of these other supersoldiers who may or may not still be on ice in Siberia. This conviction drives Captain America and his teammates to take far more drastic action than they would if it were just Bucky whose fate was at stake.

After a rather dark and serious stretch of the movie, the tonal shift to Queens and the introduction of the MCU's version of Peter Parker is extremely welcome. If the Sam Raimi trilogy brought to life Peter Parker more or less faithfully represented as he was depicted in the 1960s comics, and the Marc Webb duology only tweaked that formula slightly, Civil War imagines what Peter Parker's life would really be like in 2016. The Forest Hills of those comics, full of detached single-family homes and overwhelmingly white populations enforced with restrictive housing covenants, makes way for a more generalized and diverse Queens in this movie. Instead of the quaint little mid-century home, Peter and Aunt May live in a large apartment building -- in a unit that is large for New York City but quite modest by most of the country's standards. Peter's origin story, and Uncle Ben's death, have already happened and are only obliquely alluded to. Marisa Tomei is far more believable as Peter's aunt than someone old enough to be a grandparent. One can quibble about the morality of drafting a high school sophomore into a fight with immensely powerful beings and potentially life and death stakes. But there's no question his appearance gives the movie a shot in the arm.

The airport battle is the movie's marquee sequence, and the one that really makes it Avengers 2.5, even though I prefer the earlier chase in Romania. There's a lot going on here, with a lot of characters and a lot of different motivations. What sets it apart from other battle scenes is that, at least initially, everybody is trying to hurt the other side as little as possible while accomplishing their objective. Captain America and his people think they need to get to Siberia to stop the other winter soldiers from being woken up and unleashed upon the world. Iron Man and his people think they need to take the fugitives into custody and try to salvage the Accords. Both sides are strongly motivated, but both sides have a great deal of respect and even affection for those on the other side.

The exceptions are Spider-Man and Ant-Man, who don't really have any stakes in the fight whatsoever. Spider-Man came along because he is awed by Tony Stark and he trusts Tony Stark. Ant-Man came along because Falcon recruited him, and he is awed by Captain America and trusts Captain America. At the same time, both of them are geeking out about everybody else on both sides. I do feel a bit bad for Peyton Reed, though, since he got robbed of the chance to introduce the Giant-Man side of the Ant-Man technology.

The thing that shifts the movie into a different intensity is Rhodey's brutal crash and subsequent spinal injury. I think it was a really smart move having his injury be the result of friendly fire, since having any of Cap's people intentionally cause it would have been out of character and stacked the deck a little too much in Tony's favor. I think it was an especially smart choice to have Vision's laser being the culprit, since up until this point he has been so confident about his ability to predict outcomes and predetermine results. He's starting to learn that no plan survives contact with the real world. I also thought it was a smart character choice to have Sam stay behind to make sure Rhodey's going to be okay, even though it results in his incarceration.

I think the final battle between Tony and Steve is the weakest part of the movie. I buy Tony's sense of betrayal upon learning that Steve knew about the circumstances of his parents' murders and kept it from him. I don't buy Tony flying into a murderous rage at Bucky when he knew that the Winter Soldier was brainwashed and that Bucky didn't have any control over his actions. He's too smart to behave this stupidly. On the other hand, I think it's a wonderful affirmation of character that even when pressed to the absolute limit, there are lines Steve Rogers won't cross. Tony's trying to kill him and Bucky, but even so Steve pulls back. And then, after the fight, when Tony's on the ground defeated, his petulantly demands that Steve leave the shield behind because he no longer deserves it. And Steve does, this one thing he can give Tony when Tony's at his absolute lowest.

I do appreciate that Black Panther learns at the outset that Bucky wasn't actually responsible for his father's death, rather than being thrown into the fray for the sake of spectacle. I also liked how T'Challa responded to this information: He rightly recognized Zemo as a cautionary tale of what he could become if he allowed his anger and resentment to fester unchecked. And I think he saw that Zemo was on a suicide mission, that Zemo didn't want to live after succeeding in putting the Avengers on a path toward self-destruction. Sometimes having to live with what you've done a much worse punishment than dying.

I love Steve's letter to Tony. Not because it heals all of the wounds opened during this movie; it doesn't, and it doesn't try to. Steve still believes he's right at the end of the movie. It's not a letter about the divide between Captain America and Iron Man. It's a letter from Steve to Tony, apologizing for not being an honest and forthright friend. Amidst everything else going on, Steve recognizes that it was wrong to keep the circumstances of Tonys' parents' deaths from him and he feels the need to express that to him. And because he's a man from the 1940s, he choose to do that in a letter.

Cap's prison break on the Raft at the end of the movie is also revealing. It highlights the futility of what the Accords were trying to accomplish, since people like the Avengers can be persuaded but not coerced. It addresses one of the more troubling dangling threads of the movie, which is that the Accords authorized indefinite detention without habeas corpus. And it spoke to the conditional nature of Tony's own adherence to the Accords; by putting Ross on hold, he is rejecting the very authority which he thought he so desperately needed.

Connections to other parts of the MCU: This movie introduces Spider-Man and Black Panther, who would go on to have their own MCU standalone movies in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The fallout from the Accords continues to divide and paralyze the Avengers headed into Infinity War. The mid-credits sequence reveals that Wakanda is giving Bucky asylum, and will try to rid him of the Winter Soldier programming. The aesthetic doesn't have much in common with the Wakanda revealed in Black Panther, but the film is very careful to reveal as little as possible about Wakanda, so that discrepancy isn't as glaring as it could be. The final beat with Peter Park in the end credits sequence reveals that the Spidey suit might have a bit more Stark tech in it than Peter at first appreciated, something that becomes quite a double-edged sword in Spider-Man: Homecoming.