Breja: Ah, shit. It's time to be the lone crazy guy again.
Nah, you're not alone.
Breja: This is not a good movie. It's not terrible, but it's not good either. It's mediocre at best. Better than Age of Ultron, but not nearly as good as Winter Soldier and yes, vastly inferior to Batman v Superman, to which the comparisons are unavoidable.
I dunno...I found it a good movie, and I found BvS just a touch better.
Breja: This movie is a mess. It has too many characters, to many plot points, it can't even decide on what the characters are actually fighting about. Is it about the Sokovian Accords? is it about getting/protecting Bucky? Because those two things are tangentially related at best. In the last 15 minutes of the movie we switch gears yet again, when Tony admits he was wrong, makes peace with the Captain and Bucky, but then it turns out Bucky (while a brainwashed Hydra agent) killed Tony's parents, and we're back to fighting, only now Tony just wants revenge, and the Accords have shit all to do with the movie's climax.
Yep. That was one of my biggest problems with the movie.
Breja: Black Panther is really the only character here with a clear motivation. Other than that it really feels like the movie is distorting everything, events and characters from the previous movies, to accomodate the premise of the heroes punching each other. Captain America and Tony find themselves on the exact opposite sides of the "responsibility" debate then they were in Ultron. Now, Tony's actions in that movie should could easily have been the reason for him to go all " we need to be controlled", but the way he played god and laughed while doing so barely gets a single sentence of mention. It really makes no sense whatsover for Tony not to listen when Cap explains about Bucky being framed and Zemo awaking a squad of evil supersoldiers. There is no reason for this hostility, just as it makes no sense for Cap of all people, a goddamn soldier, to just outright refuse the idea of taking orders from anyone.
Not to mention that Iron Man was also pretty poorly written here. Much work has been done in three Iron Man movies and two Avengers movies to establish Iron Man as a very multi-faceted character: a borderline sociopath, a master manipulator, an OCDist who is paranoid about not being in control of a situation. The three Iron Man movies and Age of Ultron were basically storylines about how Iron Man creates his own demons through his own arrogance and insecurities.
Civil War inexplicably reduced him to a sycophantic wreck who spends most of the time pining over Pepper Potts (whose absence is due to no other reason than Gwyneth Paltrow couldn't be signed on), sucking up to Thunderbolt Ross, and lashing out irrationally without any consideration of the circumstances, all of which basically toss away everything that the past MCU set up so beautifully.
Breja: The tone of the movie is all over the place. Spider-Man's introduction is just cringe worthy. Just as things are finally picking up, and some tension between the characters builds, we 're suddenly in this quirky "Tony meets Peter" scene, with a character who no one in this universe knows and has no stake in any of it whatsoever, joking about Spider-Man's homemade costume and Aunt May being hot. For a good ten minutes the movie just grinds to a halt, to accomodate introducing him into the MCU. Black Panther has a similiar problem. He should have had a solo movie before. When his father dies, I couldn't help but think about Star Trek into Darkness. When in that movie Captain PIke dies (in a very similar scene by the way) the audience feels that as a loss, and really gets Kirk's anger, because we know the character, and their relationship. Here, we're told it, but it doesn't have the same effect. The big airplane fight scene just feels off, there is plenty jokes, it's hard to say if we're supposed to treat this as some tragic breaking up of the Avengers, when everyone keeps joking about it.
Spiderman and the airport scene were fun though. In the general context the scene made little sense other than to pit all the superheroes against one another, but Spiderman's running commentary almost had me on the floor laughing.
Breja: Winter Soldier was just a much more focused, consistant movie.
Agreed. Also, aside from the much more intelligent and focused storyline, Winter Soldier had something that the rest of the MCU lacked to date: set pieces that felt weighty and intense. Part of that was down to the production team achieving a decent balance between CGI and practical effects, but Civil War just tossed it away for a CGI-fest again.
Breja: What really saves the movie is the final act. It may throw the Accords thing entirely out the airlock, but at least in Tony's anger over his parents (I love how RDJ delivers the line "It doesn't matter. He killed my mom") and Captain's stubborn refusal to abandon his childhood friend there finally is a conflict between them I get and can belive. Even Zemo, who up to that point is a villain even lamer than BvS Luthor, with almost zero presence, finally gets a scene that gives him proper motivation and ads some much needed gravitas to his scheming. I applaud the actor, who made that one scene really work. As he talked about taking two days to dig up the bodies of his family in Sokovia, I really felt for him.
I will say that Daniel Brühl put in a great performance, especially given the poor role that he had to work with. He had two standout scenes: the torture scene at the start, and his tete-a-tete with Black Panther. But beyond that, the overly convoluted nature of his plan and the rather idiotic way the heroes just fell for it rank and file went beyond suspension of disbelief. Lex Luthor may have had a similarly convoluted plan, and his reasoning may be extremely vague in BvS, but the way it was carried out was such that you could actually believe that Batman and Superman would both fall for it.
Breja: And in the end, none of it really seems to matter. Everyone fought, but it's pretty much spelled out in the end, that we'll all be friends again, because Infinity War. No one died, even Rhody's injuries are going to be handwaved away. Again, it's more about setting up the future movies, Spider-Man in particular, but also Infinity War, then about doing this one really well. BvS had a shitload of set up for the future movies, I won't deny that, but compared to this it was subtle and well integrated into the story.
Christ, I fucking hated Civil War's ending. That letter scene at the end was just so contrived in such a way that it basically made the entire movie worthless. The whole point of Civil War was to change the dynamic of Cap's and Iron Man's relationship. Not only was the final battle ridiculously petty (and not only did the actual dispute over the Accords vanish into thin air), but the whole forgiveness angle just felt unnecessarily forced and typically MCU.
Funnily enough, one of my favourite MCU movies after the Iron Man trilogy and Avengers 1 is Thor: The Dark World, despite it having the second-worst villain in the stable. There's one scene where it looked like the MCU was finally taking a risk: Frigga's death. OK, she was a comparatively minor character, but the loss was felt, the funeral scene was beautiful, and the way it changed (perhaps a little heavy-handedly) the dynamic between Thor and Loki was outstanding. It didn't matter that Malekith was about as interesting as a Windows manual - the film was never about him. It was about Thor's relationship with his family. MCU characters need to suffer genuine loss to make the lasting relationship dynamics more interesting.
Were it not for the very last shot of BvS (which strangely reminded me of the final "Phoenix" shot of X2) and WB's sloppy marketing that made it clear that Henry Cavill had already been cast as Superman in Justice League Part 1, the ending of BvS would have been incredible. Nobody could have imagined that a movie would have dared to kill off Superman. It was a film that took a clever risk that, for various reasons not directly related to the film, didn't quite pay off.
