REVIEW: "Captain America: Civil War" is Everything We Want in a Superhero Movie (and More)

[Striderblack01]

I found it to be weird that Tony in the movie would support any kind of control over being super human, in the MCU. Then I watched the movie and I felt all this happened at a time when he was pretty vulnerable mentally. He created Ultron, Pepper had left him and a woman comes up to him and only him to say that he's responsible for her son's death.

Confluences of all that made his decision a lot easier to accept than if this movie had come at the end of Iron Man 2.

Just the way saw it, of course.

Here, here.

To be fair though, we got an entire movie of Tony dealing with PTSD after the first Avengers, but we only got a few scenes here of him dealing with these issues (this being a Captain America movie and all). I can see how some people might not have made the connection or bought into notion.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the role-reversal precisely because my expectations were subverted.

[Da Boat]

I wonder how did Zemo get a tape of BUCKY KILLING TONY'S PARENTS. A little convenient don't you think. At least have a post-generic scene where you see Zemo depressed and suicidal in a room and someone give him the tape, an Hydra agent, somebody. Maybe Strucker is not dead and he's behind it, etc...

[AJBopp]

I wonder how did Zemo get a tape of BUCKY KILLING TONY'S PARENTS. A little convenient don't you think.

I'm not sure why anyone would think he didn't find it at the Siberia lab. Finding proof was pretty much the reason he went there.

[Doctor Know]

I wonder how did Zemo get a tape of BUCKY KILLING TONY'S PARENTS. A little convenient don't you think. At least have a post-generic scene where you see Zemo depressed and suicidal in a room and someone give him the tape, an Hydra agent, somebody. Maybe Strucker is not dead and he's behind it, etc...

Civil War is filled with conveniences like that. It was The Force Awakens all over again.

[Tofali]

I wonder how did Zemo get a tape of BUCKY KILLING TONY'S PARENTS. A little convenient don't you think. At least have a post-generic scene where you see Zemo depressed and suicidal in a room and someone give him the tape, an Hydra agent, somebody. Maybe Strucker is not dead and he's behind it, etc...

Zemo getting the tape is much more rational than the existence of the tape IMO. Where did it come from? Who was videoing the whole thing while Bucky was killing the Starks? Was there CCTV camera in 1991 in the middle of nowhere? (I guess i need to rewatch to confirm the "nowhere)

[The Cool Thatguy]

I wonder how did Zemo get a tape of BUCKY KILLING TONY'S PARENTS. A little convenient don't you think. At least have a post-generic scene where you see Zemo depressed and suicidal in a room and someone give him the tape, an Hydra agent, somebody. Maybe Strucker is not dead and he's behind it, etc...

As Zemo said, he had skill and patience. He decrypted some of the Hydra files, and since he was targeting the Avengers, would have done backgrounds on all of them. Stark's would have been the easiest to do. All he would have to do is find a Hydra report dated the same day that Howard died, and do the math from there. I never got the impression that Zemo didn't know what exactly happened, but rather he was looking for proof.

More than that, why wouldn't Howard's place have cameras? Shield investigates, and boom! Problem solved.

[AJBopp]

Zemo getting the tape is much more rational than the existence of the tape IMO. Where did it come from? Who was videoing the whole thing while Bucky was killing the Starks? Was there CCTV camera in 1991 in the middle of nowhere? (I guess i need to rewatch to confirm the "nowhere)

It was at the gated entrance to the Stark property.

That's a bit of an assumption, since it isn't explicitly said where the gate was, but given that Tony immediately recognized the road and we see the gate in the film, it's a pretty safe assumption I think.

[Star_Jammer]

It was at the gated entrance to the Stark property.

That's a bit of an assumption, since it isn't explicitly said where the gate was, but given that Tony immediately recognized the road and we see the gate in the film, it's a pretty safe assumption I think.

Eh. Tony could have recognized the street from seeing photos of the accident, or even from having visited the place of the accident (for his own version of a memorial service or whatnot).

I think we're supposed to assume the road was on Stark property, however, which lines well with having a camera there.

[Mark Thrust]

Tony is controlling, and it's exactly that trait that has always made him leery of putting control in anyone else's hands other than his. After his "awakening" in that cave, he doesn't trust traditional power structures to do what's right with the power of his creations, be it the military, Congress, or SHIELD. We've seen that played out, again, ion every previous movie. He's steadfastly resisted giving control over his creations to someone else. His response to menaces of his own making is for him to make something to deal with those menaces precisely because he made them. Age of Ultron underscores this, as he was still gung ho to unleash the Vision on the world even after he'd made the colossal blunder of unleashing Ultron on the world. He's just not a "sit back and let this be someone else's problem" kind of guy, and Civil War never really gives us any credible, character-based reason to explain his sudden shift in worldview, personality. Like he tells Banner in AoU "We're mad scientists, buddy. We gotta own that."

If the Accords had been his idea and he were running it, then I could see him being all in, but Thaddeus Ross is exactly the kind of guy he'd never want pulling his strings.

Moments before Alfie Woodard's character hit him with the picture, you could tell that Stark was already vulnerable and shaken. Given the actions of AOU and coupled with the fact of Pepper leaving him- presumably due to his need to control- you can see where his worldview would be turned upside down.
The real life encounter most likely solidified his thinking at the time.

[kalorama]

Moments before Alfie Woodard's character hit him with the picture, you could tell that Stark was already vulnerable and shaken. Given the actions of AOU and coupled with the fact of Pepper leaving him- presumably due to his need to control- you can see where his worldview would be turned upside down.
The real life encounter most likely solidified his thinking at the time.

I don't see that at all. I particularly fail to see how Pepper leaving him made him decide to completely abandon the principles he'd been doggedly adhering to for the previous 8 years when it came to the untrustworthiness of bureaucratic authority.

All of this talk about Stark being shaken by what happens in AoU ignores the fact that 2/3 of the way through that movie--after he'd already created Ultron, after he knew that his creation was responsible for extensive destruction and loss of life with his actions, and after he knew that Ultron was planning on trying to extinguish the human race (but before he knew exactly what the plan was)--Stark, without the slightest bit of hesitation and with more than a little determined, fuck-what-anyone-else-thinks arrogance, embarked on a plan to, essentially, create Ultron all over again, but better. He did it because he arrogantly believed that he'd figured out what went wrong the first time and how to fix it. And here's the thing . . . he was right, the Vision was the answer he was looking for. He knew well before Sokovia what his arrogance had wrought with Ultron and wasn't the least bit swayed in his worldview. In fact, he basically doubled down on it when he created the Vision. So it's hard to see why just the scale of the fallout from Sokovia--because that's the only thing he knew at the end of AoU that he didn't know when he dove head first into bringing the Vision online--would be enough to make him do a total 180. It certainly wasn't the first time one of their battles--individually or collectively, had resulted in sizable collateral damage. And he certainly didn't look like a guy who'd been severely shaken in his core beliefs at the end of AoU.

[Calighoula]

The fights are a distraction, as they were for the most part in Winter Soldier. The story is what holds your attention in this movie.

Are you saying TWS' story was flimsy, or that Civil War's story was less flimsy? TWS held my attention all the way through. This one was more a case of "Okay, how do we get to the next fight?"

[Calighoula]

Alfre Woodard. It's a terrible reason, but you can either let it stick in your craw and hate the movie or go with it. I tend to go with it, though I admit it's a flaw in the plotting. I suspect that between Ultron, AIM, and Alfre, as well as the mental instability from the Chtari and his breakup with Pepper, that we are meant to believe it all added up to a shift in Tony's worldview. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a cut scene that helped establish it all.

I doubt it. The scene that's meant to "establish it all" is the one you're talking about, with Woodard. FYI, that was the last scene filmed, even after principal photography had been completed, and it was an add-on. They've must've watched a rough cut and saw a gaping void and that scene's meant to patch it.

[Tazirai]

Zemo getting the tape is much more rational than the existence of the tape IMO. Where did it come from? Who was videoing the whole thing while Bucky was killing the Starks? Was there CCTV camera in 1991 in the middle of nowhere? (I guess i need to rewatch to confirm the "nowhere)

Umm Bucky videoed the assination? It's really not that hard. Camera and recording tech has existed for nearly 100 years. So him setting up the spot to kill them isn't that hard to understand. There are tons of films where killers, and assisns do this exact thing.

[AJBopp]

Are you saying TWS' story was flimsy, or that Civil War's story was less flimsy? TWS held my attention all the way through. This one was more a case of "Okay, how do we get to the next fight?"

I'm saying the stories in both were good but flawed. The fights were, for the most part in both films, distractions from the really interesting parts, but necessary candy for most of the audience (including me)

[kalorama]

To me it all comes down to one basic question, asked from Tony Stark's perspective: If the Accords had been in place prior to the events in AoU and all of the Avengers (including Cap) had been operating under its provisions, how would that have prevented what happened in Sokovia? As a guy who claims to be a futurist, Stark would have to know that it almost certainly wouldn't have. At the beginning of AoU, the Avengers had actionable intel on the location of Loki's staff. Is there some reason to think that the UN wouldn't have allowed them to go retrieve it? It seems unlikely that they'd be willing to just let Hydra keep it. And once the Avengers put boots on the ground with Strucker, the staff, and the Maximoffs, everything else would have flowed naturally from that, Accords or no Accords.

So there's really no credible story or character-based foundation by which the outcome in Sokovia would be enough to spin him in the opposite direction. The only way Sokovia (or something much worse) could have been avoided would have been if Tony had never created Ultron, and there's no reason to think that the Accords would have prevented that.