"In a lot of ways [superhero registration] can be a political issue, and we didn't want the conflict of the movie to solely exist on that level. We wanted to figure out very personal reasons why everyone's relationship to the idea of registration is going to become complicated."
-Co-director Anthony Russo explains why the film is so much better than the comic: it's about character, stupid!
This post will contain SPOILERS for the first 30 minutes or so of Civil War.
Captain America (3): Civil War, the thirteenth (!) film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is utterly brilliant, working on almost every level. Nothing in the entire plot feels forced; it's all organic, with characters reacting to events exactly as you could reasonably expect them to. That may seem like an odd way to start off a review, but really, the film feels like a Greek tragedy, where the downer ending is baked into the characters' DNA and everything that happens is an inevitable consequence of their personalities.
This film has a unique place in the franchise. Not only is it the third (and likely final) "standalone" Captain America film, it's also the middle part of a trilogy of MCU films the Russo brothers are directing, starting with Captain America (2): The Winter Soldier, and ending with Avengers (3): Infinity War. How does the film handle this dichotomy of being both the third film in one trilogy and the middle, Empire Strikes Back-style film in another? With surprising ease, actually.
I'm not sure whether to credit the behind-the-scenes strife that saw the Creative Committee (a batch of executive meddlers who helped wreck Avengers (2): Age of Ultron and Ant-Man) kicked to the curb, or perhaps the superior writing and directing talent of this team over the Ultron team, but the fact of the matter is that this film just feels so easy and natural, like everything just comes together so brilliantly. It can't have been as simple as writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and directors Anthony and Joe Russo make it seem.
The solution to the conundrum I presented above is, as I said, surprisingly simple: it's treated as the final Captain America film for purposes of Cap's character arc, bringing him full circle (there's a direct call-back to an early scene in his first film during the final fight), but it's treated as the Empire of the Russo Trilogy for purposes of story, right down to the fact that, like Empire, it lacks a "traditional" ending but doesn't have a "traditional" cliffhanger either.
But enough gushing. Here's the first 30 or so minutes of the plot: Tony Stark is in a pretty bad place. He and his girlfriend Pepper Potts are "taking a break" (a likely consequence of Gwyneth Paltrow's reluctance to return to the franchise) and his idea of coping with this is to re-create the last time he saw his parents alive as part of a technology demonstration to a graduating college class. So, not coping. Shortly afterwards, he runs into a woman whose son died in Sokovia (the town that was destroyed in Age of Ultron) and who blames him for it. Tony regrets that, and what happened with Pepper, and that his relationship with his parents ended the way it did. A lot of guilt piling up on the guy who's all about responsibility. This'll end well.
(Way back around the time the first Avengers film came out, I speculated that Iron Man wouldn't be on the pro-government side if they ever did Civil War because in Iron Man 2, he's all "I have privatized world peace," and "you can't have the Iron Man suit, it's mine." But the basis for those lines is not some libertarian ideology. Stark is all about accountability - in the first film he shuts down the weapons development at Stark Industries and constructs the new arc reactor and the Iron Man suits by himself because he can't trust anyone else to do it. In the Phase One films, he's not anti-government; he's pro-Tony, because he thinks Tony can be a responsible person. He says "you can't have it, it's mine," but he also points out that nobody else is close to having an Iron Man suit and the technology is safe in his hands (a thesis his reckless behavior in Iron Man 2 arguably disproves anyway). After Sokovia is destroyed by a murderbot he created in Ultron, he can no longer hide behind that old mentality, and has to accept that he needs someone to hold him accountable when he screws up. So him being pro-regulation is actually perfectly in keeping with his character.)
Meanwhile, Steve Rogers, who as of Winter Soldier has some very good reasons not to trust the government, goes on a mission to capture Brock Rumlow (the HYDRA agent who got a building dropped on him at the end of Winter Soldier). But that mission goes sideways and there are civilian deaths, with both him and Wanda Maximoff blaming themselves.
It turns out that there is a Big Complicated Evil Villain Plot, but what it boils down to is this: create a string of incidents with Joker-style perfect timing, and ultimately turn Cap and Iron Man against each other. Is the villain's scheme overly complicated? Oh hell yes. Is every hero's reaction to it completely in-character? Oh hell yes (with one very, very minor quibble).* See, the writers actually get that their characters are more than just the vehicles for moving the plot from checkpoint to checkpoint. So they should probably go write the next Star Wars film and the next season of Game of Thrones. I mean, the characters are vehicles etc., but it actually, you know, makes sense.
*I'm sorry, I don't believe that a professional like Black Widow would be the one to recruit a loose cannon like Black Panther. But as I said, very minor.
For their part, the directors understand how to shoot action like nobody else, and edit it as though the ghost of Peter Hunt is possessing them. This is, simply put, one of the greatest superhero films ever made. Kick anyone who says otherwise.
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