One of the biggest events in Marvel Comics in the early part of the millennium was “Civil War,” a storyline that ran through almost all of its superhero comics, as well as the Civil War miniseries by Mark Millar & Steve McNiven. It pitted hero against hero as a battle in Stanford, Connecticut that kills 600—including most of the hero team the New Warriors—turns public opinion against heroes. This led to the passage of the Superhero Registration Act.
Heroes were divided in terms of support of the SHRA, with Captain America against and Iron Man for, and various other heroes taking sides. The Marvel Cinematic Universe followed suit for Captain America’s third film, with Iron Man facing off against Cap in the wake of the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
The comic-book story was polarizing, but popular. Personally, I could never get my arms around it, because superheroes were so well established and the friendships that were sundered were so well rooted, that I couldn’t bring myself to entirely buy it. It’s the sort of story that works if superheroes are relatively new, but not when they’ve been around for at least a decade (given the sliding scale of comics time, but we’re still talking about forty-plus years of stories).
However, that makes it a perfect fit for the MCU, especially given the destruction that has been wreaked on New York (in both Incredible Hulk and Avengers), Puente Antiguo, New Mexico (Thor), Los Angeles (Iron Man 3), Washington, D.C. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Johannesburg, and Sokovia (both in Age of Ultron). There is no deep abiding friendship between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark that the comics have—hell, the MCU versions can barely stand each other.
And so the same team that wrote the previous two Cap movies, as well as Thor: The Dark World, Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, tackled the script, working it both as a sequel to The Winter Soldier and to Age of Ultron. The Russo brothers returned to direct.
Three major comics characters make their first MCU appearance in this film.
T’Challa, the Black Panther, was introduced in Fantastic Four #53 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby in 1966, the first African superhero in mainstream comics. A sometime member of the Avengers, the Panther starred in Jungle Action, with some great stories written by Don McGregor in the early 1970s, then he got his own title in 1977 written and drawn initially by Kirby. Writer Christopher Priest wrote the character in his own title that debuted in 1998, and which leaned into the Panther’s status as a head of state, creating many aspects of the character that have remained central. In the twenty-first century, Reginald Hudlin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nnedi Okorafor have been among the Panther’s chroniclers.
Baron Helmut Zemo was introduced as the son of Baron Heinrich Zemo, a Nazi operative established in Avengers #6 by Lee & Kirby as the one responsible for sending Captain America into suspended animation and seemingly killing his sidekick Bucky (later revealed as surviving and being brainwashed into the Winter Soldier). Zemo survived to the post-war period and formed the Masters of Evil that harassed the Avengers on many occasions, before dying in Avengers #15. Helmut, his son, showed up initially as the Phoenix, fighting Cap and the Falcon, in Captain America #168 by Roy Thomas, Tony Isabella, & Sal Buscema. He seemed to die in a vat of super-adhesive, but was instead merely disfigured, his insulated uniform protecting him. He returned in Captain America #275 by J.M. DeMatteis & Mike Zeck, interested initially not in ruling the world, but revenge on Cap. Later he would form a new Masters of Evil, and still later form the super-team the Thunderbolts, a long con designed to win the world’s trust before taking it over, as the team was made up entirely of villains posing as “new” heroes (Zemo was Citizen V).
Finally, the abject failure of Amazing Spider-Man 2, the Sony hack of 2014, and a growing desire among fans for Spider-Man to be part of the greater tapestry of the MCU led to Sony and Disney agreeing to have the web-swinger appear in the MCU continuity, starting in this film. The character would also be in the next two Avengers movies. Any solo movies must also feature at least one major MCU character—it’ll be Iron Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming (which we’ll cover next week) and Nick Fury in Spider-Man: Far from Home (which we’ll get to down the line).
Back from Ant-Man are Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, and John Slattery as Howard Stark. Back from Age of Ultron are Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff, Don Cheadle as James Rhodes, Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton, Paul Bettany as the Vision, Elizabeth Olson as Wanda Maximoff, and Kerry Condon as the voice of F.R.I.D.A.Y. Back from The Winter Soldier are Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter and Frank Grillo as Brock Rumlow. Back from The Incredible Hulk is William Hurt as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (now Secretary of State). Introduced in this film are Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa, Tom Holland as Peter Parker, Marisa Tomei as May Parker, Daniel Brühl as Helmut Zemo, Martin Freeman as Everett K. Ross, John Kani as T’Chaka, Hope Davis as Maria Stark, and Alfre Woodard as Miriam Sharpe, the mother of a person who died in Sokovia.
Holland, Downey Jr., Tomei, Evans, and Condon will next appear in Homecoming. Boseman, Freeman, Kani, and Stan will next appear in Black Panther. Johansson, Mackie, Cheadle, Bettany, Olson, and Hurt will next appear in Avengers: Infinity War. Rudd will next appear in Ant Man & the Wasp. Renner and Slattery will next appear in Avengers: Endgame. Brühl is said to be appearing in the forthcoming Falcon & the Winter Soldier TV show on Disney+.
The holographic technology used by Stark early on will return in Far from Home. The reverberations of the Sokovia Accords will primarily be seen on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
“For the record, this is what making it worse looks like”
Captain America: Civil War
Written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Directed by Anthony & Joe Russo
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: May 6, 2016
In 1991, we see the process by which the Winter Soldier was activated: he was taken out of suspended animation, and his current Hydra handler—Vasily Karpov—activates him with a series of key words, then sends him on a mission to retrieve an item. He crashes a car and takes the item from the trunk.
Present day, Lagos: the Avengers are going after Brock Rumlow, who has become a mercenary since Hydra’s fall. He and his team put up a good fight, and almost get away with a biological weapon, but the Avengers do finally stop him. However, Rumlow gets under Steve Rogers’s skin by mentioning Bucky Barnes, and then tries to take him out with a grenade that will kill them both. Wanda Maximoff manages to levitate Rumlow off the ground so the explosion doesn’t kill everyone on the street, but it goes off before it can get above the buildings, and there are still casualties.
The backlash is considerable. Public opinion turns against the Avengers, and it was already shaky after Sokovia.
At MIT, Tony Stark is giving a speech and announcing a scholarship initiative, and also demonstrating holographic technology that is based on thoughts and emotions and memories. He shows an entire auditorium full of people his last night with his parents before they went on a trip, during which they were killed in a car crash. After the speech, he’s confronted by a woman whose son died in Sokovia.
Stark then brings Secretary of State Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross to the Avengers Compound. The United Nations feels there needs to be a control on the Avengers, and 117 nations have signed the Sokovia Accords. Secretary Ross wants the Avengers to sign it, and be beholden to a UN council that will dictate what missions they can go on. (One of the arguments the secretary makes is to rhetorically ask where Thor and Banner are, and then to remind them that if he lost two thirty-megaton nukes, there’d be hell to pay.)
Rogers and Sam Wilson are completely against it. Rogers doesn’t want to be subject to political whims. When Stark says that he stopped making weapons when he saw what they were being used for, Rogers reminds him that that was a choice. If they sign the Accords, they lose that choice.
The argument goes on for some time, with Rogers, Wilson, and Maximoff—who feels guilty for what happened in Lagos—against signing, Stark, James Rhodes, and Vision for. Natasha Romanoff argues that they should sign because having one hand on the wheel is better than nothing, while Stark points out that if they don’t do this willingly, it’ll be forced upon them before long.
Rogers gets a text that Peggy Carter has died, and he ends the argument and flies to London for the funeral, where the eulogy is delivered by Sharon Carter (a.k.a. Agent 13, Peggy’s niece). Afterward, Romanoff shows up offering friendship and support—and also urges him to come to Vienna, where the UN is meeting to ratify the Accords.
One of the speakers is King T’Chaka of Wakanda. Several Wakandan citizens were killed in Lagos when Rumlow went boom. Romanoff has a pleasant conversation with T’Chaka’s son T’Challa. During T’Chaka’s speech, T’Challa notices something and tells everyone to get down.
But it’s too late—a bomb goes off, killing several, including T’Chaka. T’Challa is devastated—and so is Rogers, when he finds out. Carter is part of an anti-terrorist unit of the CIA and flies to Vienna immediately, with Rogers and Wilson joining her secretly.
In Cleveland, a man named Helmut Zemo captures, interrogates, and eventually kills Karpov, who has been in hiding. Zemo retrieves the Winter Soldier codebook, having learned of it from the Hydra files Romanoff released on the Internet in The Winter Soldier.
The prime suspect in the bombing is the Winter Soldier, as Barnes has been captured on surveillance as being in the area. Rogers and Wilson realize they need to find him first, as the various international forces all have orders to shoot on sight. And T’Challa wants very much to kill the perpetrator as well.
Barnes is in Bucharest, knowing nothing of any of this. Rogers and Wilson show up just ahead of the Bucharest police—and T’Challa, who is wearing the suit of the Black Panther. A merry chase through Bucharest ensues, with Rhodes arriving to punctuate the point that they’re all under arrest.
All four are taken into custody by the CIA, in the person of Everett K. Ross. He sends for a psychiatrist, who arrives and starts asking Barnes questions.
Meanwhile, Rogers and Wilson are brought to Stark and Romanoff, who have managed to convince Secretary Ross to not put them in a cell. (T’Challa isn’t either, but he has diplomatic immunity.) Stark almost convinces Rogers to sign the Accords—and then discovers that Maximoff is being kept in protective custody in the Avengers Compound by Vision. Rogers is livid; Stark points out that she isn’t even an American citizen, and they have to play ball. Rogers refuses.
An employee of Zemo’s delivers an EMP device to the power station in Bucharest, which takes out all the power in the city—including the facility where Barnes is being held. With the power out, we see that the psychiatrist questioning Barnes is actually Zemo, who starts to read the key words that will activate the Winter Soldier.
A brutal battle follows, as Wilson, Rogers, Romanoff, and Stark (who doesn’t have his full Iron Man armor) get their asses kicked by Barnes, but Rogers and Wilson manage to escape with an unconscious Barnes after Rogers finally takes him out.
When Barnes wakes up, he tells Rogers and Wilson what Zemo asked him: the location of the Hydra base in Siberia, where there are five more Winter Soldiers in stasis. They need to get to Siberia, and they’ll need help. Rogers calls upon Clint Barton, and Wilson suggests recruiting Scott Lang. Barton picks up Maximoff after the pair of them take out Vision, and then they and Lang meet up with Rogers, Wilson, and Barnes in Leipzig/Halle Airport. From there, Barton has arranged for a plane to get them to Siberia.
However, Stark and Romanoff have some recruits of their own. T’Challa has joined them, at Romanoff’s suggestion, as has Rhodes, obviously, and Stark also conscripts a young man from Queens he has seen YouTube videos of: Spider-Man, a powerful, athletic young man who is really Peter Parker, a high school student who lives with his aunt. Stark brings him to Berlin, giving him a fancy new costume.
The heroes confront each other. Stark says he has to bring Barnes and the rest of them in. Rogers won’t let him. The fight goes on for some time, with several of the heroes getting hurt. Barton and Wilson declare that they are willing to let themselves get captured so Barnes and Rogers can get to Siberia. Lang grows to giant size to distract everyone, though Spider-Man comes up with the idea of taking him down the same way the AT-ATs were taken out in that “really old” movie The Empire Strikes Back.
Even with Lang’s distraction, Rogers and Barnes only get away because Romanoff lets them, holding off T’Challa, because she knows that Rogers will never stop.
Stark and Rhodes fly after the quinjet that Rogers and Barnes have taken, but so does Wilson. Stark orders Vision to take Wilson out, but he misses and hits Rhodes, whose armor is trashed. Both Stark and Wilson try to catch him, but fail.
Wilson, Barton, Maximoff, and Lang are taken to the Raft, a supermax for super-criminals. Meanwhile, F.R.I.D.A.Y. has found evidence that the psychiatrist who questioned Barnes was not who it was supposed to be, that the real psychiatrist was found dead in a hotel room, where they also found a kit that would disguise someone to look like Bucky Barnes. Secretary Ross isn’t interested in hearing anything Stark has to say, so he goes to the Raft and wipes out the security feed long enough to ask Wilson where Barnes and Rogers went, as he now belatedly believes Rogers. Wilson isn’t thrilled, but tells him as long as he’ll go alone and as a friend.
Rogers and Barnes arrive in Siberia, as does Stark—and, unbeknownst to all of them, T’Challa, who followed Stark. Everyone thinks that Zemo’s going to activate the other five Winter Soldiers, but instead he’s killed them. He’s not interested in conquest, he just wants revenge on the Avengers. Turns out Zemo is a Sokovian, and his entire family died during the battle against Ultron.
He also finds video footage (on VHS!) of the Winter Soldier’s mission from 1991 that opened the movie. Turns out that Howard and Maria Stark were in that car, and the items he was retrieving were the serums used for the five other Winter Soldiers. Barnes killed Stark’s parents with his bare hands.
Stark is devastated, especially when it turns out that Rogers knew (from his time in S.H.I.E.L.D.) that his parents were assassinated. Until that moment, Rogers didn’t know that Barnes was the assassin, but Stark doesn’t care about that, or that Barnes was brainwashed. A brutal fight ensues among the three of them, and in the end, Barnes’s artificial left arm is ripped off and Stark’s armor is trashed. As Rogers and Barnes walk away, Stark says that his father made the shield and Rogers doesn’t deserve it.
So he leaves it behind.
Meanwhile, T’Challa finds Zemo, lamenting that he killed the wrong man. T’Challa originally intended to kill the person responsible for the death of his father, but he sees in Zemo—and in Stark—what the cycle of vengeance does to someone. He won’t succumb to that. He also doesn’t let Zemo kill himself—he doesn’t get off that easy.
Zemo is put in the same type of tiny cell that Barnes was put in. Rogers breaks into the Raft to free the prisoners. At Avengers Compound, Rhodes is rehabbing his shattered legs, and then Stark gets a package delivered by a FedEx guy who looks just like Stan Lee.
In it is a letter from Rogers, saying that the Avengers are Stark’s, as he prefers to trust people over institutions. He also includes a cell phone, and says to call if he’s ever needed.
Rogers takes Barnes to Wakanda, where they put Barnes back into stasis, as it’s safer for everyone as long as the key words still work.
In Queens, May Parker gives Peter ice for the black eye he received, which he says he got in a fight with a guy named Steve from Brooklyn. He’s also enjoying the new toys Stark gave him, including a spider-signal…
“I don’t know if you’ve been in a fight before, but there’s usually not this much talking”
Certain movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are focal points, major events that are either led up to by previous movies or have major consequences after the movie, or both. Avengers was one such, as were the Infinity War/Endgame two-parter, but Civil War is one as well.
I despised the comic book “Civil War” storyline for reasons I outlined in the intro above, but it’s really perfect for the MCU because superheroes have only been in the public eye since 2008, so it makes sense that the governments of the world would be twitchy and want to exert some form of control.
And unlike the deep friendship in the comics, the movie versions of Rogers and Stark don’t entirely like each other. They butted heads in each of the two Avengers movies prior to this, and as Stark points out in this very movie, he had to grow up listening to his Dad go on about the great Captain America, so Stark was predisposed to be annoyed by him. The conflict between the two of them is completely believable.
This is totally a Captain America movie, as Rogers is the center of the story, and it picks up on a great many themes from Cap’s previous two films (Barnes, the Carter family, Romanoff’s making Hydra’s information public, etc.). But it’s also very much the next Avengers movie and the next Iron Man movie, as well as doing superb work setting up the forthcoming Black Panther and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Like Avengers, which similarly served several storytelling needs, Civil War balances all its various story and thematic bits very nicely, and unlike Age of Ultron, it doesn’t feel overstuffed. We never get away from anything long enough to forget it, and the diversions are all brief and impressive enough to work. (Tom Holland does more to sell the notion of “with great power comes great responsibility” just from his facial expressions talking to Stark than either Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield were able to do in entire movies.)
As an Iron Man movie we continue the theme of Stark’s attempts at heroism swimming upstream against his narcissism. He knows he can’t control himself—it’s why he and Pepper Potts are taking a break from each other (which also nicely explains the disconnect between him destroying the armors at the end of Iron Man 3 and being Iron Man again with no explanation in Age of Ultron)—and so he is willing to cede that control to someone else.
But Rogers has always been on his own, and he can’t trust institutions. The institution of the U.S. Army wouldn’t let him enlist. The institution of Hydra tried to take over the world, twice. S.H.I.E.L.D. was compromised by Hydra, and the Avengers could easily be compromised as well. And he has always been guided by what he thinks is right.
Just last week, I dinged Thor: Ragnarok for trying to re-create a sequence from the comics and not doing it justice. This time around, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, and the Russo brothers do likewise, but they absolutely nail it, taking one of Captain America’s best speeches (given to Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #537 written by J. Michael Straczynski) and giving it instead to Peggy Carter, as told by her niece at her funeral: when everyone is telling you to move, you should plant yourself like a tree on the river of truth and say, “No, you move.”
And everyone has their own truth. Stark knows he’s a screwup and needs oversight. Vision agrees, citing logic and mathematics to make his point. What’s especially interesting is the disagreement between Rhodes—a colonel in the Air Force, career military—and Wilson—a sergeant who did his bit and is now a civilian again. Rhodes is much more amenable to a chain of command (which he’s currently at the top of), while Wilson, a grunt, is less sanguine.
Then there’s Romanoff. As usual, she’s the only grownup in the room, as she is a realist. She knows that this needs to happen in order for the Avengers to do their job—but when the chips are down, she’s not going to hurt her friends. She signs without hesitating, but she also knows that Rogers won’t stop, so she lets him go. (I also love that she and Barton are on opposite sides but don’t actually hurt each other.) And in the end, she winds up on the outs with the government, because the path of least resistance hasn’t worked. Romanoff embodies part of what Carter said at the funeral: “Compromise when you can.” She’s the only one who isn’t rigid, who is trying to make the best of a crappy situation.
What I love about the script is that both sides get a good hearing, and both sides have value and merit. I honestly think that both Stark (for reasons mostly articulated by Rhodes and Vision) and Rogers (for reasons Rogers himself gives quite eloquently) have good points.
But the best argument for Rogers’s side comes from the plot of the movie itself, when—solely on the basis of one shitty surveillance photograph—Rogers’s childhood friend has a kill order placed on him. And when he’s taken into custody, Rogers’s query as to whether or not Barnes will get a lawyer is met with laughter by Everett Ross. This is the authority that wants to control the Avengers, and Rogers can’t abide by that—and, honestly, neither can I. It’s a completely realistic set of circumstances in a world that postdates both 9/11 and the Chitauri invasion, but still. The evidence against Barnes is incredibly flimsy, and the leap from “we think this guy did it” to “shoot on sight” is too far and too fast, and is exactly the kind of abuse of power that Rogers fights against.
With all that, however, the heart and soul of this movie isn’t the guy whose movie it is, nor is it the “special guest star” who gets second billing. Yes, the Iron Man-Captain America fight is the spine of the film, but the theme is truly seen, not in Rogers or Stark, but in Prince T’Challa. Because in the end he sees that the endless cycle of vengeance accomplishes nothing except adding to the body count. It’s destroyed Zemo, it’s destroyed the Avengers, and he won’t let it destroy him. When it matters, T’Challa is a hero.
Best of all, though, is that this is an Avengers movie that includes some excellent stuff with the Avengers just being the Avengers. The opening with Rumlow is the kind of superhero battle that’s part of the everyday life of being Avengers, much like the takedown of Hydra at the top of Age of Ultron, and I honestly wish we had more of that before the status quo got blown up here. I really hope the next Avengers movie after the Infinity two-parter just focuses on actual superheroing, as the needs of big-ass blockbuster movies keep necessitating big-ass stories that lose sight of what they’re actually doing. (Just as an example, the Avengers were likely the ones to deal with the mess made by Ego on Earth during Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Would’ve liked to have seen that.)
The movie is not perfect. Two rather important facts are never mentioned and should have been. For starters, while the public perception that Maximoff caused tremendous damage when she lifted Rumlow into the air is understandable, the reality is that her doing so saved lives, too. A lot more people would’ve died if Rumlow hadn’t been airborne, and at the very least Rogers should have mentioned that to her during his pep talk early on. And also, Sokovia was entirely Stark’s fault. He created Ultron, and everything that happened in Sokovia was a direct result of his hubris. The undercurrent of guilt is there in Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, but it should have been more overt. Sokovia happened because of Stark, not because of the Avengers. Plus, of course, in the end it all goes to shit not because of the Accords or because of Sokovia or because of the need for oversight, but because Stark can’t get past the fact that Barnes killed his Mommy, and he refuses to even listen to reason. A hero understands extenuating circumstances, and once again Tony Stark has failed his saving roll versus heroism. As with the previous Avengers movie, one of the villains here is Stark’s ego.
This movie is brilliantly acted—everyone brings their A game. I’ll talk more about Tom Holland and Chadwick Boseman when we get to their solo movies over the next two weeks, but they are magnificently introduced, and it’s especially fun to finally get a live-action Spidey who banters! The quips and commentary are part of what makes Spider-Man such a great character, and it was so very much missing from prior versions.
The returning folks are all equally brilliant. It’s fun to see Paul Rudd’s earnest Lang, Scarlett Johansson’s rock-solid performance as Romanoff, Anthony Mackie’s casual excellence as Wilson, Sebastian Stan’s anguished turn as Barnes (and the Wilson-Barnes dislike and banter speaks well of the upcoming Falcon & the Winter Soldier series with Mackie and Stan), and especially Evans and Downey Jr., who perfectly embody the irresistible force and the immovable object.
I also love Daniel Brühl’s understated performance, and I especially like that Markus & McFeely went back to Zemo’s return to Cap comics in 1982, where he was focused entirely on revenge rather than the usual world-domination that we’ve come to expect from our super-villains.
Finally, this movie gives us some of the best superhero action ever committed to film, from the opening against Rumlow to the hero-on-hero fight in the airport to the brutal confrontation among Stark, Rogers, and Barnes at the end.
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be looking at movies whose events are a direct result of what happened in Civil War, starting next week with Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is an author guest at Capclave 2019 this weekend in Rockville, Maryland. He’ll be doing programming, and also spending time at the eSpec Books table. Check out his schedule here.
When Phase 2 of the MCU was announced in 2014, they teased that the next Cap film would be subtitled The Serpent Society, then recanted and said it would be Civil War, and I was actually disappointed. I would love to see an MCU version of the Serpent Society! Get on that, Feige!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I am always completely flabbergasted that anyone is on Cap’s side of this debate. First off, the evidence against Barnes isn’t “flimsy”. For this particular crime, perhaps – but he’s anyway a notorious, wanted criminal who destroyed large parts of DC in open sight in Winter Soldier. To act like Civil War happens in a vacuum and that Bucky is some sort of pacifistic angel is absurd. Yes, he’s brainwashed, we the audience know – world governments don’t, not for sure. And even so, that doesn’t change the calculus – because Bucky can be activated by anyone with the right code, he’s dangerous. He should be locked up. If you don’t want to assign him any blame for what he does while brainwashed, then you logically have to conclude that that lack of free will means he has to be treated differently, or else any crime is excusable on his part.
But moreover, Cap’s argument is absurd on it’s face for this exact reason. His position is “we have a ton of power, and governments can be corrupt, so we should decide how and when we intervene.” And Captain America is a great person to make those calls (that he’s Captain America advocating for the unilateral right to intervene in foreign countries shouldn’t be missed, of course) – but he’s one man. Plato settled this a long time ago – philosopher king’s are great, but the Avengers as a group certainly aren’t such paragons of virtue, so what happens when Cap isn’t the moral center making these decisions. Wanda Maximoff is only a short time removed from helping Ultron cause the extinction of humanity. Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers both get snookered by HYDRA. These are people, fallible people, and yet they want the right to commit acts of astonishing violence in sovereign nations without any oversight at all. As if there was no chance of them ever being tricked, mind controlled (this in a world where Cap knows Bucky has been brainwashed into a super-powered assassin!), or mistaken about the events which they intervene in.
It’s all well and good to look at this as a fundamental question of “who thinks the authorities should be obeyed” and point to Stark and Rhodes, as people of influence and power and position, on one side, and former weak-kid Cap and military grunt Wilson (who, incidentally, has no grudge to bear against the chain of command, presumably) as more leery of simply going along without question. But at the end of the day, the orders being obeyed are a very reasonable demand that a superhero paramilitary group not violate the sovereignty of whatever nation they feel like, simply on a whim (and that’s what it is, of course). If the Avengers knew Rumlow was going for that bioagent, why not alert the Nigerian government, or ask for permission to help. And again, these are mostly explicitly American heroes, located on American soil, intervening.
Iron Man is clearly in the right on this. Because the big issue here isn’t whether Bucky is innocent, or deserves legal representation (obviously he does), but whether the constituent nations who sign the Sokovia Accords have a right to tell the Avengers whether or not they want super-powered battles being fought in their cities or not. The answer to that has to be yes, or you may as well start advocating for HYDRA, but led by the Avengers and not ex-Nazi’s.
I also felt that Cap being a product of his time (1940s) lead to him not wanting to sign. The events of WWII aren’t just history to him, he lived with it.
And nothing against either Maguire or Garfield as actors, but this time they got Spidey right with Holland.
“Nnedi Orakofor” – isn’t it Nnedi Okorafor?
@2 They weren’t talking about locking up Bucky, they were going to shoot him out of hand. Making arguments about the responsible use of force in one scene and then authorizing summary execution in the next is not convincing.
I’m surprised anyone is on Stark’s side. Why should a bunch of dictators and tyrants have any say where the Avengers operate? Should they be expected to ignore a disaster because the national government finds it convenient to have the locals displaced by fire or flooding? Or by the Ten Rings?
Governments are so often bad actors I find the idea they should have veto authority of superheroes boggling.
ETA: I only saw the Civil War storyline in the Marvel Alliance video games and I hope the comic didn’t contain the same amount of spectacular stupidity. “And you thought it was a good idea why?” might as well have been the game’s motto.
Something I’m just noticing for the first time based on the summary here, but how much blame does Natasha deserve for the events if her data dump was the reason Zemo was able to control Bucky and find the Winter Soldier base?
Sam: thank you for catching my metathesis. It’s been fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The registration side in the movie lost the argument the second Ross became the face of it. That is not a face that respects international law, the chain of command, or any variation on the theme of human rights. He launched an unauthorized special forces operation in a friendly nation (Brazil), twice deployed the United States military on U.S. soil without any implication of oversight, injected a foreign national with unstable barely tested drugs, and was directly responsible for millions of dollars in damages to Harlem including several historic buildings. All with the goal of indefinitely detaining a U.S. citizen for use in medical experimentation. Is it any wonder that the rules he is pushing for have only two apparent penalties 1) death or 2) detention without trial. (Notice that the only two who manage to bargain for something other the Raft and definite term of punishment have no inherent powers.) If Ross is making an argument the correct side to be on is the opposite one.
All the movie needed to do to make the Accords look reasonable is make a reasonable person the face of them. But it didn’t. It used Ross.
So far as movie making beyond the story I found this one hard to rewatch. There were a lot of action sequences and they tended to go on too long. Romania and the HQ fight in Berlin could have used about five minutes chopped off of them.
@5 – but the Avengers are no better! As I said, at least one of their number has recently been involved in some seriously illegal, genocidal stuff. And regardless, this isn’t a couple of tin pot dictators – it’s 117 countries, implicitly including the United States and most of Western Europe. That’s a huge number. And again, what happens when someone less perfect than Cap is running the team? As I said, it’s the problem of the philosopher king – when he gets a stomach ache, someone else needs to make the decisions, and that person may not be as sanguine as Cap. And Ross is right to point out that Thor and Hulk being missing presents a massive problem. Thor maybe not so much, but the Hulk is, as far as everyone knows, an uncontrollable destructive rage monster. That’s absolutely of concern to the world.
And none of this BS about “shooting Bucky on sight”. Cap could easily have brought him in, safe and sound, and it’s just a nice lifetime stay at the Raft for Bucky, and a well deserved one.
At the end of the day, it comes down to who you think should decide major issues of state. Sovereign governments, or superpowered individuals. Dictators or not, your average government is far more representative of the the wishes and feelings and best interests of their people than a half dozen folks who swoop in, do whatever the hell they want, and then leave, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces.
@8 –
He launched an unauthorized special forces operation in a friendly nation (Brazil), twice deployed the United States military on U.S. soil without any implication of oversight, injected a foreign national with unstable barely tested drugs, and was directly responsible for millions of dollars in damages to Harlem including several historic buildings.
You realize that this is pretty much a perfect description of the Avenger’s modus operandi as well? The difference being, obviously, that General Ross is ultimately answerable to a higher authority and the Avengers are not.
The thing that irritated me the most about this film was how obvious it is that Stark is massively compromised with PTSD. He is not coping, he’s falling apart, and he has been for a while. And he is surrounded by literal veterans (Cap, Nat, his own BFF) who are seemingly wilfully blind to the fact that their friend and colleague *needs help*. Putting aside the Big Debate of the movie (which I found frustratingly hinged on Bucky rather than the actually compelling moral questions re. oversight and over-reach), it was that that got on my nerves. Partly exacerbated by the fact that Iron Man 3, while not perfect by any means, treated Stark’s PTSD with seriousness and gravitas. Yet apparently nobody thought to even try to take any action on that front, and instead they abandon him, behave like he’s a traitor, or apparently think he’s still good to make leadership decisions, and then the whole thing ends with Cap beating the every living heck out of him. Maybe because I have my own experiences with PTSD, it really sickened me and tbh turned me off to the team up movies entirely. I still haven’t seen Endgame 1 or 2 and don’t feel very inclined to try.
Because supervillains don’t deserve due process or fair trials. Shoot on sight isn’t BS, it’s what the forces intended to enforce the accords were ordered to do.
Out of those 117 countries, there are maybe half a dozen I would be confident that they would reliably act in the best interests of all of their citizens or that they wouldn’t put their own political interests over those of the people immediately in danger. Even in the West most governments are trash to one group of people or another.
So, yeah, as long as the Avengers can legitimately be called a group of superheroes, I trust them over even a much-better-than-average government.
@10-
Considering his punishment was to become Secretary of Defense I don’t know you can claim that Ross is answerable to a higher authority. If anything the fact that he still has a job in the public sector suggests that the government (the same government where the Vice President was part of a conspiracy to assassinate a sitting President and the Chair of a Senate Committee was HYDRA) should be considered untrustworthy and unchecked.
Seriously given the history of the MCU there was no one in the government who could make the argument for registration look strong, and there are good arguments for registration. But they can’t be delivered by Ross without sounding like lies or at best weak justifications.
In Tony’s defense regarding him attacking Bucky at the end, he just found out and isn’t really thinking rationally. It’s not like he spends the next couple of years consumed with finding him. (As far as we can tell) notably he keeps the cap phone on his person, which shows he is always struggling with reconciling with Cap
@13 Not to mention the last group that had oversight over superheroes tried to nuke Manhattan.
I remember going to the cinema expecting to see the next Captain America movie and walking out thinking that I just saw Avengers 2.5. And I was totally loving it! (And the whole movie, though there is not one among the MCU I do not like.) As said in the article, all the acting was marvellous, all of the characters shone bright as stars. And it was impossible to take a side as I could so well see the point both of the sides were making, and the reasoning behind the actions of all of them. (Though, in the end of the day, I lean marginally, just by a fingernail, into Tony’s, and not necessarily purely on objective reasons. So sue me.)
Tom Holland does more to sell the notion of “with great power comes great responsibility” just from his facial expressions talking to Stark than either Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield were able to do in entire movies. -This, so much this. I absolutely adore Tom from the first moments and am extremely happy we get this Peter back for another solo movie and cameos. Chadwick/T’Challa definitely left an impression, as well.
I recently rewatched this and Endgame within days of each other and after seeing the airport scene again, it made me snicker with a whole new appreciation when War Machines says to Scott in Endgame: “What’s up, regular-sized man?”
Both were right, and both were wrong, which was done so amazingly well. I love this kind of thing, the moral ambiguity of the world, the tough choices heroes have to make. Tony was right that there needs to be oversight of people with tremendous powers to affect the world, but Steve is right that the politicization of a super hero team will lead to disaster. We saw this in Watchmen, with the totalitarian bent of the US by using Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam. But they were both wrong as well; Steve was breaking the law, and Tony was wrong in forcing others to make this choice.
I played in a very long-running Champions game, where a central tenet of the world was “if you have the power to change the world, do you have the right to do so?” In it, the US passed a similar law requiring those with powers or technology to register. The leader of one group challenged it by not registering and being arrested. In the end, the tragic events of 9/11, perpetrated still by non-powered humans, turned the tide against the law (that group was based in NYC, and we decided that we couldn’t deny this event happened in the game world).
I was utterly amazed that they kept Giant Man quiet. I thought at first it was dumb to release trailers with Spider-Man, because how awesome would it have been to have him just pop in? Then Lang went big, and I was gobsmacked. So many other brilliant moments.. the bickering between Wilson and Barnes was excellent, and I’m really looking forward to their further adventures (plus Mackie and Stan have amazing chemistry together, so whatever they do together will be fun).
@@@@@ 13 – but in the MCU there isn’t registration. What is being asked is that the Avengers either stop acting like a bunch of vigilantes and accept that nation states have a right to decide who can exert legitimate force in their societies, or hang up the capes and go home. They’re not being asked to surrender secret identities, to be forced to use their powers in a particular way…. no, it’s just that if they want to continue using force to solve problems, they have to collaborate with the governments in whose countries they want to operate.
And again, merely stating over and over that governments are corrupt is a terrible argument. If every government on earth is so bad, maybe the Avengers should just take over, you know? Either you accept that government is, by and large, legitimate, and let them get on with the business of governing, or don’t. But don’t point out exceptional cases of government corruption while ignoring the fact that the Avengers are equally compromised. They have a pardoned war criminal (basically) in Scarlet Witch. They have Cap and Black Widow, who just recently were fighting on behalf of HYDRA to create a world dictatorship. They have the Hulk, nominally, a monster who is liable to go nuts and destroy everything in the immediate surrounding. They have Thor, an alien representing an imperialist civilization that has spawned multiple attacks on the Earth. These are flawed, fallible individuals as well. They mean well, sure, but if they’re tricked or brainwashed then good intentions mean jack shit.
Staying out of the film’s core debate (I feel the movie did a good job of raising valid points on either side), one thing that really stood out to me was Zemo’s plan and how simple its core was. I’ve seen many people criticize the character as seeming to predict and control every event in the movie, but I really don’t think that is the case. His plan basically boiled down to:
A) get tape
B) have Stark view the tape
If his interrogation earlier in the film had gone better (he was asking about the mission report, not the codebook), he probably wouldn’t have bothered with Bucky. He likely would have shoved the tape in an envelope and mailed it to Tony.
What makes the character so interesting to me is that he is able to quickly and efficiently adapt and expand his plan in response to setbacks, while still attempting to complete his simple goals.
Interrogation doesn’t work out? Use the codebook you found to get the information from someone who can’t say no.
Need to find Bucky? May as well frame him for murder and cause an incident/conflict within the Avengers in the process.
Need to interrogate him? May as well send him on a rampage to cover your escape, make the incident worse, AND set up a false identity for yourself that you can dispel when needed to make sure someone comes after you.
Events like the fight in Bucharest or the airport battle weren’t part of his plan, they were just bonuses that he encouraged while trying to find that video. But that’s what makes the conflict so interesting to me: ultimately, the issues that Zemo dragged to the surface were ones that already existed but had been set aside, buried, or ignored. So even once his hand in all of this is revealed, it doesn’t matter. The damage is done.
@18 I keep going back to corruption because it means that, at the end of the day, the Accords are asking the Avengers to be complicit in genocide, at best to stand by and watch when they can save people. All because the people doing the murdering are part of the “sovereign government.” Because that’s what government corruption leads to. Not invariably but often enough that I don’t see why they should be granted veto power over the only people who might be able to stop them.
The idea that the Avengers should take over is absurd. If for no other reason than superheroes can’t hold ground.
In the comics scenario, I’m definitely on Team Cap, because Cap is always trustworthy (which I think the “Secret Empire” storyline was trying to play with), and Team Tony did some reprehensible and out-of-character things.
In the real world, I’d be on Team Tony. People with powers don’t get to run around playing vigilante on real streets with real people.
The MCU splits the difference very nicely, and makes both sides look reasonable. The fact that we’re discussing it so much here in the comments proves that. It’s an imperfect situation without a good solution, and the writers and directors here did a brilliant job of conveying that ambiguity. Better, I’d say, than the comic event it’s based on.
@2 Well said. I agree with you on all your points.
@@@@@ 20 – I keep going back to corruption because it means that, at the end of the day, the Accords are asking the Avengers to be complicit in genocide, at best to stand by and watch when they can save people. All because the people doing the murdering are part of the “sovereign government.” Because that’s what government corruption leads to. Not invariably but often enough that I don’t see why they should be granted veto power over the only people who might be able to stop them.
But this is such an overly simplistic view of the world. These are comic book movies, so the bad guys are always bad and the good guys are always right. The real world is more complex, and the argument is applicable to the real world. These are vigilantes, and not only vigilantes, but vigilantes who aren’t even part of the communities they’re policing. In Lagos, they blow shit up – do they stick around to help? No. They do no clean up, no damage control, nothing. They make no move to operate through legitimate political channels.
And to get back around to it, your argument only works if governments are always or inevitably corrupt, and if all other world governments are complicit in it. For Captain America’s argument to work, the majority of governments all over the world not only have to be corrupt, but need to be actively complicit in acting against their citizens’ best interest. That is far fetched, at best. And even then there are problems, because again, the Avengers are also corrupt or misguided, and also filled with genocidal maniacs.
And by the way, the Avengers pretty clearly decide to help some people and not others. They are willing to accept blowing up half an office building to stop Brock Rumlow (instead of, you know… calling ahead and having the bio-agent or whatever moved to a new place). But that means they explicitly are willing to let all sorts of other atrocities go by. Because while they may be fighting for a better world, in their minds, that means flashy battles with supervillains, not “stopping genocide” or righting wrongs. The strong implication of the Avengers movies is that they are basically in the business of fighting HYDRA and it’s spinoff organizations. Not protecting civil liberties in dictatorships, or preventing genocide. All the negative things you’re worried will occur with the Avengers muzzled happen anyway, without them doing a damn thing. All that would change would be that in order to drop into Lagos and destroy a market and blow up an office building, the government would have to ask them to intervene. Instead of, you know, them showing up and blwoing shit up
@23, “These are comic book movies, so the bad guys are always bad and the good guys are always right.”… this is the whole point here, that the MCU isn’t black and white. Heroes are complex people, as are villains. Both sides in this are right, and both sides are wrong.
Actually, I have trouble seeing how anyone could be on Stark’s side in this debate, as this movie, and most of the previous ones, show how wrong and pig headed, and easily corruptible this position can be. If you’re going to accept the premise of Superheros, you have to accept that they are heroes, trying to do right by their own conscience; not super government agents/enforcers. It’s like having Spiderman be an NYPD officer or some such. In ‘real life’, would this be a good idea? No, but whole premise of the genre is that’s what they do.
That would be the world as it is, yes. I’m 80% sure the only governments that haven’t been complicit in genocide are the ones who never had the power or the territory to do it.
It is simply not true that the Avengers are corrupt or filled with genocidal maniacs. Also, the most misguided one is the one pushing for the Accords. Once the twins found out that Ultron (which the Accords would have done nothing to prevent) was going to kill everyone they jumped ship.
So you’re okay with Hydra being able to set up shop in any part of the world that decides not to let the Avengers in?
The world building in superhero stories doesn’t hold up under close examination — the fact that Stark is responsible for Ultron, and that SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra from the first and nearly launched global surveillance and assassination drones, ought to have turned the world against them long ago. In a realistic world none of them are heroic.
But in a comic book world the characters are allegorical and mythic, and the story works when all the elements are in tune with that level of meaning. This movie puts all that together in the climactic fight. Iron Man is ruled by fear of vulnerability, symbolized by his armor and faulty heart. Cap stands for the best ideals of New Deal and WWII America, which often put him at odds with real American authorities. The shield is a symbol of his idealism. Their fight ends with Captain America shattering Iron Man’s glowing heart with his shield. All the elements from plot to fight choreography reinforce the basic identities of the main characters.
Incidentally, assassination drones came back in Spider-Man: Far From Home, showing that Stark hadn’t really learned anything, or thought that Thanos’s attack had proven Stark was completely right despite all his mistakes.
And once again, Danai Gurira is left off the post(er).
@@@@@ 25 – Actually, I have trouble seeing how anyone could be on Stark’s side in this debate, as this movie, and most of the previous ones, show how wrong and pig headed, and easily corruptible this position can be. If you’re going to accept the premise of Superheros, you have to accept that they are heroes, trying to do right by their own conscience; not super government agents/enforcers. It’s like having Spiderman be an NYPD officer or some such. In ‘real life’, would this be a good idea? No, but whole premise of the genre is that’s what they do.
You hit the nail on the head, which is why Cap is and must be wrong. He’s acting according to the dictates of his own conscience. His alone. Ever heard the phrase “everyone is the hero of their own story”? Well, HYDRA was trying to do a good thing (end world violence) through evil means (elimination of personal rights and freedom, generally). What makes them different? Well, Cap is obviously a good person, and errs on the side of liberty when in doubt. But Cap won’t always be running the team, and it opens up the door for someone else to impose their priorities on the Avengers and therefore the world.
Again, the Avengers are just as corruptible as the governments they refuse to bow down to. No one seems to want to rebut the point that Captain America was literally working for HYDRA for most of his post-resuscitation career. That he did so unwittingly is irrelevant. He holds a ton of power, individually and as the decision maker for the Avengers. If all it takes to get the Avengers to be evil is to trick him… well, not so tough, it seems. The difference is, there is no recourse if the Avengers are bad. Citizens can vote corrupt politicians out of office, or overthrow them. Not so the Avengers. And even if the Avengers are ultimately incorruptible, they simply aren’t capable of being adequately informed in any given circumstance. If they intervene in a brutal civil war, how are they to know all the ways in which the conflict escalated. Usually both sides are in the wrong, in some part. The entire concept of the Avengers only makes sense in two instances; when they are combating genuinely supra-national threats, or when a government invites them in to help with a problem.
@@@@@noblehunter – well, lets look at who is in the Avengers, shall we? Wanda Maximoff was an active participant in Ultron’s plot to wipe out humanity, and indeed most life on earth. IIRC, she hasn’t faced a single consequence for that. Black Widow and Captain America were actively helping to further HYDRA’s aims, if unwittingly. Who is to say they can’t be tricked again? I could go on.
The Avengers generally have good intentions, and that is great. But the argument being posited by Captain America is “our good intentions means we cannot be wrong, so we don’t need a check or balance on our power.” That’s fundamentally untrue, since we have multiple instances of their good intentions being used to further evil aims. And moreover, it posits that the membership or direction of the team can never change. Captain America might very well die in any given engagement, and then someone else might be making decisions – decisions he might not agree with. At the end of the day, the governments of the world are by and large legitimate and it’s not for half a dozen unusually powerful people to assert that their vision of what the world should look like it for everyone else to get on board with or else. That is incredibly paternalistic.
@28: Danai Gurira wasn’t in this movie – that was Florence Kasumba portraying Ayo.
Definitely more the Avengers 2.5 than Captain America 3 but still great.
I have deeply mixed feelings on this movie. I loved the paean to slack-jawed heroism of the First Avenger and especially the amped up spy thriller action of the Winter Soldier but this is where the Marvel Cinematic Universe went from a cool shared setting to subsiding individual characters into its own metastory, and I dislike the movie for that.
However there are so many cool moments as characters interact with far more depth and variety than Joss Whedon’s constant snark.
Just wanted to give shout outs to all those great moments, from Holland’s aforementioned facial expression alluding to the death of Uncle Ben, to T’challa supressing a smile of amusement at the thought of Black Widow and Shiri fighting over him, to the New York-based rivalry between Cap and Spidey, to Scott Lang’s laughter intermingled with terror as he.becomes Giant Man.
The film also proves once again the Russos are the best action directors in the MCU, with the first appearance of T’Challa as the Black Panther getting a HUGE pop from the group of people in front of me (though going from how giggly they were beforehand there may have been some substances ingested beforehand that may have assisted with their reaction).
Wow, something tells me this is quickly going to become one of the most comment-heavy rewatch posts, since there’s a lot to debate. It’s cool that the movie gave audiences something to think about, a question with no simple answers.
My blog review:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/captain-america-civil-war-review-spoilers/
Excerpts:
Overall, it was definitely a very effective and well-done movie, an excellent continuation of the MCU saga and one of the most thoughtful movies in the series. I like it that so much of the conflict over the Sokovia Accords was conducted through the heroes talking to each other in meeting rooms and debating the philosophy and emotion of the issues, rather than just hitting or zapping each other. The comics version of Civil War definitely went overboard with the physical conflict and armed rebellion and superprisons and so forth, and though this movie definitely had its marquee fight sequence taking up a fair portion of the second act, it was just the one.
Still, for all the comic’s excesses in execution, I don’t think the film works quite so well in concept. The comic, in principle, was an allegory for real-world concerns about the compromise of individual freedom in the name of security. It handled the issue badly, but the issue itself was worth exploring. And there was a lot at stake, a threat of the loss of freedom for a whole class of people. Here, though, it’s basically an argument over who among an elite group gets to make the decisions that affect everyone else. The stakes don’t feel like they extend much beyond this immediate group of less than a dozen people, and the only character who ever really feels unjustly victimized by the Accords is Wanda Maximoff. It works well as a personal story, but the sense of larger social commentary isn’t really there. I wish there’d been a way to combine the allegorical weight of the original’s concept with the far superior and less excessive execution of the movie.
As far as the issues go, in the comics, I was pretty soundly on Team Cap — and it was hard not to be, given what a caricature they made of Iron Man and the dictatorial extremes he and his supporters went to. There, it was clearly about defending the rights of the individual against oppression that used security as its excuse. In the movie, though, I tend more toward Team Iron Man. Not only because Tony is portrayed in a far more positive light this time, but because I believe strongly that every powerful entity needs checks and balances to keep it from abusing its power. Cap may have been right that the UN’s agendas couldn’t necessarily be trusted, but the Avengers should have someone to provide a balance to their power, to give them oversight and accountability. The Accords may not be the right solution to that problem, any more than the USA PATRIOT Act was the right solution to terrorism — both were policies forged in haste and out of fear, and thus tending to go to more extreme lengths than were necessary or appropriate. But there should be something. I suppose the best path would be somewhere between Tony and Steve on this issue — Team Black Widow, perhaps.
I loved the airport fight, and it struck me that, in contrast to most action-movie climaxes in recent years, it features very little destruction. It doesn’t have whole city blocks collapsing. It doesn’t indulge in 9/11 imagery or disaster porn. The entire airport isn’t destroyed — just a jet and a couple of trucks, maybe. There aren’t a bunch of bystanders screaming and running for cover, since Team Iron Man had the airport evacuated in advance. And the climactic fight doesn’t go bigger and indulge in an orgy of mass devastation — it goes smaller, more personal, more concentrated. Once again, it’s someplace where no bystanders are endangered. And that’s just why it works. Mass devastation doesn’t matter without a personal impact. If anything, the smaller scale of the destruction makes the two acts of mass violence we do get — the accident in Lagos and the bombing of the Vienna conference — feel more potent. The death of a few dozen people can be felt and grieved over as the tragedy it is, rather than trivialized in comparison to the destruction of whole cities.
@29/andrewrm: “No one seems to want to rebut the point that Captain America was literally working for HYDRA for most of his post-resuscitation career.”
I’ll rebut it, because it’s an oversimplification. Cap was working for SHIELD, an institution that had been massively infiltrated by Hydra but was not entirely controlled by it or synonymous with it. Mostly, Cap worked for Nick Fury, who was not part of the Hydra wing of SHIELD, though at least two of the people Fury answered to (Alexander Pierce, Gideon Malick) were Hydra leaders.
@33, further, once Cap discovered it was HYDRA, he shut it down pretty hard.
The fact that the two sides are both argued for so vociferously shows how well the premise was written, and what makes the movie so fantastic. It’s not written so that one side is so obviously much better than the other, and the viewer gets to inject their own world view and choose a side. Even with it being a “Captain America” movie, people didn’t just automatically side with him.
I come down clearly on Captain Americas side. And the reason I do is because of what happened in the movie. It has little to do with Buckey Barnes, and everything to do with T’Challa. The flaw, as I saw it, in the Accords was that it was relevant only to the Avengers. T’Challa even says to Nat that he’s not big on politics but was in favor of the Accords. But the Accords didn’t apply to his Superhero abilities, and as soon as he had reason to, there he was, in some other sovereign nation, destroying cars airports and chasing down the man who he thought had killed his father. He was acting as a vigilante in the same manner of the Avengers. And at the time he did this, he was the RULER of a sovereign nation (though the official inauguration hadn’t occurred yet.) So he never gets called on it, nor does Wakanda get called out for acting in another nation without permission.
As far as Iron Man goes, I see the entirety of Phases 1-3 of the MCU as a single redemption arc for Stark. It was said here previously that so much of the issues with what happen to the Avengers was due to Tony’ hubris, and him working against that and dealing with it. He made the wrong calls quite often, but always did what he could to correct them. He always worked to be the better man. Cap said in the Avengers that Tony wasn’t the type of man to make the sacrifice play, and the rest of Tony’s story is what led up to him becoming the type of man to do just that.
The MCU has registration. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in “Emacipation”:
“Following the signing of the Sokovia Accords, Talbot visits the Playground to discuss the Sokovia Accords, wanting to register the Inhumans, to which Coulson is strongly opposed.”
Cap was right. Signing it would have just be the start and it would go downhill from there.
@29 “Citizens can vote corrupt politicians out of office, or overthrow them.”
You’ve hit the nail on the head with that one. Just ask China, North Korea, Cuba, and any other corrupt dictator state guilty of Human Rights violations. It’s a simple process.
I also hated the Civil War comic books, and I awaited this movie with trepidation and dread. The politics of the Civil War comics were stupid–sure, there is a cogent case to be made that superheroes should be registered and work within the confines of law rather than as vigilantes. Sure, in the real world vigilantes are rarely good. But the political backdrop of that comic were the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, of waterboarding and crushing the testicles of small boys; the Registration side in the comics were obviously aligning themselves with that political mindset, and were running concentration camps and openly recruiting psychopathic supervillains. But apparently no one organizing the event realized that this was what they had done, because they seemed confused that anyone thought Tony Stark was wrong. Long-Time heroes like Stark and Mr. Fantastic don’t seem to realize they are running concentration camps for superheroes with the help of psychopaths. We are meant to find their dilemmas sympathetic. What. The. Hell.
In some ways the movie interpretation of this story is a relief; the stakes aren’t quite as ridiculous and the stances involved make a certain amount of sense. It makes sense that Tony Stark feels guilty and feels that he should be reigned in–and that he’s happy to let someone else, even someone as untrustworthy as Thunderbolt Ross, take responsibility for telling him what to do. It makes sense that Stark treats the other Avengers like his employees–that he has no boundary between the personal and the professional. It makes sense at a personal level that many of these characters are not as eager as Stark to trust the institutions that want to govern them.
But the further we get away from this film, the less I like it. It completely cops out on the underlying superhero political question and moves the movie to the more comfortable playing field of interpersonal melodrama: when Stark and Rogers ultimately break in the climactic conflict, it’s not over ideology but over their personal feelings about Bucky Barnes. Stark wants to murder Barnes to avenge his parents, Rogers wants to protect Barnes. That is ultimately what breaks up the Avengers. (No, it’s not okay to murder Bucky Barnes just because you think he is a murderer; it’s totally incoherent to argue that vigilantes can’t take the law into their own hands and then turn around and perform extrajudicial executions.)* No real stance is ever taken on whether either side was right about registration, but our heroes trashed a city and an airport and maybe murdered some people*.
Ultimately this movie makes me hate MCU Captain America a bit. It makes sense within the context of the movies that we are given that Captain American might be distrustful of authority. But the Captain America I love is a product of his time–a true believer in democracy and the Four Freedoms, a guy who knows what a Nazi is and will punch them in the face. It’s totally consistent that Captain America might become a vigilante, and might turn against his government if it has betrayed its own values of democracy and liberty–it’s not cool that he does these things just to protect his bro. Chris Evans sells the core of decency in Steve Rogers, but outside of some vague statements in TWS the MCU completely rips out the political core of Captain America in order to not offend anyone. The guy cosplays as an American Flag–to try to make the character apolitical is an act of cowardice.
It’s depressing because in an age when corporations suppress expressions of solidarity with democratic agitators, when the US is running concentration camps and the POTUS flagrantly violates the law on a daily basis, we need the real Captain America.
*Bucky Barnes did totally murder some people right? Like that guy he flips off a motorcycle is Not OK.
Agree with pretty much all the points in the review and also really enjoy this series. However, a couple of minor corrections: the guys trying to bring Bucky in are not the Bucharest police, they are the German special ops branch of the police (SEK) – and they all therefore also end up in Berlin, not Bucharest, when they are arrested. Why the German police/government got involved in this is anyone´s guess, since the original attack happened in Vienna/Austria^^
Steve’s one and only point was that he wasn’t going to stand aside if he saw something that needed doing, or someone that needed to be stopped. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to. And the Accords were telling him he needed to do so. So he didn’t sign them. Like many people from his generation, Rodgers firmly believes in the existence of a higher authority, and that he will be held accountable to that higher authority regardless of whether some government organization told him he could or couldn’t act.
And, ultimately, neither could Stark. He couldn’t stand aside either, and he went behind the government’s back before the end of the movie. And he would probably continue to do so. Tony wasn’t looking for someone to give him permission. He was looking for someone else to blame when things went sideways, because he couldn’t deal with the guilt he felt over Sokovia.
I also always get a kick out of the jokes made about who supposedly convoluted Zemo’s plan was. Except, you know, it wasn’t. It was pretty dead simple. It just went sideways and he started improvising his way to the finish line.
@29 I’m amused that this is connecting to my other big political brawl on this site (Barrayaran political from the Vorkosigan books) but people over institutions. I don’t care about a hypothetical next generation of Avengers because they aren’t who we’re being asked to trust right now. I trust Steve Rogers. That I can say that about a character called Captain America in this particular 2019 says a lot about the writing and performance of that character.
The downside of trusting people is that you have to keep making decisions about whether or not to keep trusting. So if Spiderman takes over the Avengers, then we ask the question of “Do we trust the Avengers?” again.
Suggesting that we should require Steve Rogers to submit to the oversight of people who can’t even follow their own rules during their initiating crisis seems preposterous.
Apart from the airport scene, I thought this movie was a drag. It really wanted to make me care about Bucky and Tony’s parents, but I simply couldn’t. That goes especially for Bucky, whose real superpower appears to be the ability to destroy all charisma on screen. Pair him with Captain America and you have two of the whitest squares of unsalted saltines to ever grace the cinema.
@42 I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who appreciates Zemo’s adaptability.
KRAD:” And also, Sokovia was entirely Stark’s fault. He created Ultron, and everything that happened in Sokovia was a direct result of his hubris.”
Well, there was the business with the Scarlet Witch putting the whammy on Tony in the opening, which led to him wanting to experiment on the sceptre, and it was the AI within the sceptre that took over Tony’s ULTRON project. So, I would say that Wanda deserves at least a little bit of the blame for what happened.
Fehler: as SlackerSpice said, Danai Gurira wasn’t in this movie.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
While this movie made the “limitations on superheroes” question less black-and-white than the comics, it was still weakened by having Ross be the one to present the Accords. I mean, I wouldn’t trust Thunderbolt Ross if he told me water was wet. I can accept Tony trusting him because Tony doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to making wise decisions. But it seemed foolish for people like Natasha and Vision to do so. I can understand that the writers/producers wanted to have a recognizable character present the Accords instead of some rando the audience has never seen before, but it did weaken the pro-Accords position in my mind,
As others have pointed out, I really appreciated that both the villain’s plan and the climactic fight were about small-scale, personal matters. One might expect that to feel like a let-down after multiple movies of “this guy wants to conquer/destroy the world!” and skyscrapers being thrown around like twigs, but it ended up actually being refreshing.
It was also a great intro for T’Challa.
It’s a terrific sequel to Winter Soldier, it’s essentially Avengers 3 (miles better than Ultron), but to me Civil War is above all else, Black Panther – the prologue. T’Challa gets fully established, and we instantly connect with him. T’Chaka’s death is tragic and a little too realistic given the 9/11 parallels.
Both Winter Soldier and Civil War depict violence and death with far more impact than any other MCU entry. You feel every punch, every kick, every explosion and every single consequence from that sheer violence. It’s no wonder Markus, McFeely and the Russos were given the mandate to wrap the Avengers storyline after this. They’re the best, most consistent writers/directors to work at Marvel Studios.
When I first saw this, I sympathized instantly with Cap on the issue of Superhero registration. Three years later, I still take his side, but I’ve definitely warmed up to Tony and his own issues regarding responsibility and guilt.
Krad is right. This is also Iron Man 4, and I’d argue it’s the best depiction of Tony Stark in the MCU right next to Infinity War and Endgame. It’s certainly Downey Jr.’s finest hour, acting-wise. There’s a bitterness, a sense of guilt and pain that wasn’t quite there in previous Avengers and Iron Man entries. When he snaps at Steve, he really snaps.
After having his sense of patriotism turned upside down to betrayal on Winter Soldier, I can totally see Cap seeing any kind of government intervention with the utmost distrust. This is a Cap whose ideals are constantly tested in a world far more complicated than the one he grew up on. Of course he wouldn’t back down, and I don’t blame him one bit.
While Spider-Man’s introduction is very much welcome,w ith the character working beautifully thanks to Holland’s take, I’d argue the recruitment scene doesn’t feel so organic. In fact, it feels rather out of place with the rest of the film on a tonal level. It plays more as an Only You reunion (for Downey/Tomei shippers), more for laughs and setup rather than something organic. It’s almost as if Spider’s adoption in the MCU happened at the 11th hour thanks to lenghty studio negotiations. I do believe Civil War likely started development when Amazing Spider-Man 2 was still in post, which would make sense.
I applaud the film for tackling both sides of the issue in a mostly even-handed manner. I despise Ross for handwaving the idea of legal counsel, but do understand the fear over the absence of people like Thor and Banner.
This is a film that tackles way too many threads and still manages to keep everything coherent. It’s a credit to these writers and also the directors. When I first saw Iron Man back in 2008, this is what I expected out of a shared cinematic universe.
And then there’s the villain. To me, Zemo is the first MCU villain (other than Loki) to finally transcend beyond the archetype and truly become a relatable three-dimensional character, whose motivations you absolutely understand and sympathize, despite his crimes. And they get Daniel Brühl to play him, which is a genius bit of casting. His pain, anger and seething rage are evident in every scene. Between this and Killmonger, Marvel Studios finally got the villains right and did them justice. Bravo! Zemo also retroactively improves Age of Ultron.
Another great bit of casting was Martin Freeman as the other Ross. I still hope he gets to star in a Doctor Strange film, if only for the Sherlock crossover it would be.
A fantastic movie, overall, with some tough stakes and real consequences. Eight years of buildup to a real big bang.
I was kind of dreading this one :) I recently rewatched it with my Mom, and I’ll admit – it’s not really on my list of favories. Yes, it brings up a ton of great questions (and in fact, reading these comments, I STILL don’t know which ‘team’ I’m on – I like the Team Black Widow suggestion ;) ) and also really delves into a lot of the flaws at the core of Stark’s character (one other thing I always had a problem with is how he ropes a TEEN BOY into this mess).
But man, I do find it a bit of a slog, and I do appreciate the breakdown of Zemo’s plan because I also felt it to be a bit convoluted, but I like the way it was explained here.
Everybody’s talking about whether to trust Ross or Cap or whoever, but the whole reason we have laws and institutional checks on power is to take personal trustworthiness out of the equation. A system that only works if you can trust the person in power is bound to fail the moment someone less trustworthy replaces them, which will inevitably happen in time. What you need is a system you can trust, a set of rules and protocols robust enough to resist corruption or abuse and to encourage positive behavior, and whose reliability is independent of any single individual’s integrity. The ideal would be a system that would keep superheroes from abusing their power while also keeping political leaders from abusing their power to limit superheroic action.
@51
Part of the problem is that an unspoken but pervasive assumption of the MCU is that functioning systems of laws and institutions don’t exist. Outside Wakanda, the few times we see the workings of government agencies and politicians in the movies, they come off as ineffectual at best, or literally HYDRA agents at worst.
Some of that is purely functional; there need to be problems that institutions can’t handle and that require superheroes in order for the superheroes to make sense. But part of it feels very cynical; there has been a pretty obvious push to try to depoliticize both the heroes and the villains. For example, HYDRA have always clearly been Nazis, but the MCU has made multiple efforts to try to detach the HYDRA organization from Nazi ideology.
And for that matter, has Captain America of the MCU made even tepid statements about democracy or liberty? All I can remember is a bit of banter in TWS about how Project Insight felt like Fear instead of Freedom. Captain America as a guy who just wants to help people is fine as far as it goes, but the mantle of Captain America should mean more than that–and this movie ends with Rogers turning has back on that.
A world in which institutions are effective is a world in which superheroes don’t exist. (Superpowered cops or government agents might, but not the freelance vigilantes who are the central examples of the concept.)
So Tony has a point in the the real world, where vigilantism generally amounts to lynch law or gang violence. But as others have noted, even he doesn’t really believe in it in the MCU where he’s violating Russian airspace on his own warrant while the ink is drying on the the Accords.
The whole fantasy of superheroes as a genre is of individuals possessed of great power according themselves great responsibility to do things when the police and government are at best helpless and at worst obstacles. Even heroes who work for authorities will reliably find themselves at odds with their employers whether that’s SHIELD or the Guardians of the Universe, and the hero will be right 99% of the time. (Give or take a Parallax style heel turn, which isn’t in play here.)
The alternative may be more realistic, but it’s the sort of realism that shatters the genre sure as questioning why an amateur consulting detective is more reliable than trained investigators with warrants, databases, and manpower. Or why giant robots with huge vertical cross sections reliably beat more sensible weapons. Or how plucky bands of adventurers take down the carefully laid plans of demigods with armies.
None of those things happen in reality. But there’s a reason we want to see them in stories.
I’ve never read the comic story, but from what I’ve read about it, this does seem to be far superior to it. Perhaps the main way it succeeds is that, perhaps surprisingly given it’s a film rather than a comic universe where there’ll be another installment next month, there’s no easy answer, no pat ending, no reinstatement of something resembling the status quo at the end. Whereas the comic storyline ended with Captain America (controversially, and somewhat confusingly for readers who thought the side fighting totalitarianism were the good guys) decided he was wrong and surrendering, here he continues to choose to follow his conscience rather than what the people with power tell him is right, walking away from the corruption with his friends. And whereas Black Widow, Black Panther and possibly Vision (I’ve never been entirely convinced he doesn’t hit Rhodes on purpose, coming as it does right after he’s injured Scarlet Witch and clearly regretted it) seem to realise they’re on the wrong side, Iron Man and War Machine remain committed right to the end. Rhodes’ philosophy is “My country, right or wrong” and as for Stark…perhaps he’s just gone too far to admit he was wrong, even if he does ignore Ross’ call to stop Rogers. There’s something intriguing about the way that Captain America, once the perfect soldier and a symbol of national pride who found himself let down by the institutions he served, is the one favouring autonomy, while Iron Man, the maverick businessman who tends to snark off at authority, is the one who wants to follow the rules.
Zemo’s plan does seem to rely on, or at least benefit greatly from, a lot of things that he has no control over, from the Accords to the massive coincidence of Captain America, Iron Man and Winter Soldier all ending up in Siberia at the same time. Perhaps we should just give him credit for adaptability. His main aim seemed to be to pit Cap and Iron Man against each other. Presumably he worked out that if he framed Winter Soldier for a crime then Captain America would defend him, and if he told Iron Man that Barnes killed his parents then he’d go after him. When a lot of lucky breaks fell into his lap, he improvised beautifully.
I think the authorities lost the moral high ground extremely early on. Not only by employing Thunderbolt Ross, not only by sending a death squad to murder Bucky instead of giving him a fair trial, but by the fact that they immediately place civilian lives in danger. A helicopter opens fire on the roof of a populated area without having much idea who the combatants are (if they’d killed the King of Wakanda, that’s a diplomatic incident right there), then they initiate a running fight on a freeway full of vehicles. If the argument is that following the registration side will prevent collateral damage, then it’s an argument that falls flat. It’s clear that the Avengers working for these people won’t change anything in terms of public safety, it’ll just mean a less trustworthy group in charge.
I’m a bit bothered that they decided to introduce Spider-Man into the MCU by making him one of the villains, or at least one of the ones that is opposed to the protagonist. It doesn’t say much for Iron Man that he forcibly conscripts a minor to fight for him, and it doesn’t say much for Spider-Man that he goes and beats up these guys for the sake of a few fancy toys. We don’t get the moment of realisation he has in the comics where he twigs that he’s on the side that are setting up Guantanamo Bay for superheroes. (Instead, it’s Iron Man that has that moment, and he quickly forgets it once he goes into his “murder Bucky” rampage.) Instead, he just goes back to his flat and his unfeasibly attractive aunt (that line from Stark feels like a wink at the audience but is more likely to annoy them) without any consideration for the moral issues. Where’s that responsibility that came with great power again?
Also, I found the casting of Martin Freeman a bit distracting, and he isn’t on screen long enough for me to stop seeing him as one of the bumbling comedy characters he usually plays. And we seem to lose track of a few of the characters along the way: What happens to Black Widow and Agent Carter after they help Cap? Do they get a ticket to Wakanda as well, or are they in hiding somewhere else?
But I still love that cool moment where we realise Ant-Man is also Giant-Man, and the film does a good job of presenting the argument.
@52/Colin R: “but the MCU has made multiple efforts to try to detach the HYDRA organization from Nazi ideology.”
And Agents of SHIELD used that in a very cool way, when their Hydra-agent character (it’s not really an acronym) tried to defend Hydra as not having any connection to Nazis and Skye/Daisy countered that, yeah, he totally was a Nazi.
@53/mschiffe: “A world in which institutions are effective is a world in which superheroes don’t exist. (Superpowered cops or government agents might, but not the freelance vigilantes who are the central examples of the concept.)”
If you think of superheroes as law enforcement or warriors, maybe. I prefer to think of them as rescue workers. There’s a long history of superhero comics establishing partnerships between heroes and law enforcement/government, so that they’re more like outside contractors than vigilantes. Batman and Robin were in an official partnership with the Gotham City PD by 1942 or so — ironically at a time when Superman was still an outlaw vigilante. The Avengers in the comics had a government liaison as a regular character for years, and even the X-Men did intelligence work for the government in the ’60s comics. The idea that superheroes have to be extralegal is more of a modern conceit. The old idea was more that they were specialists who tackled the problems too big or difficult for regular law enforcement or rescue workers to solve, so that they got called in when regular methods failed.
Although, yeah, you need them to get called in regularly, so that does tend to require having the standard institutions be ineffectual regularly. In the first couple of Batman ’66 storylines, you see Commissioner Gordon conferring with the senior police staff, arriving at the conclusion that the newest supervillain crime spree is too extraordinary for them to handle on their own, and reluctantly conceding that it’s time to resort to the Batphone. By season 2, though, Gordon and Chief O’Hara are portrayed as so ineffectual that they can’t imagine solving even the simplest crime without calling in the Caped Crusaders.
And arguably the trope goes back to Sherlock Holmes and the ineffectuality of Inspector Lestrade, as I think you were implying with your “amateur consulting detective” reference. Although it was more plausible back then, because real-life police back then hadn’t yet adopted the forensic techniques that Holmes employed, and tended to rely more on anecdotal accounts and forcibly coerced confessions to “solve” crimes. So the idea that a scientific detective could solve cases that contemporary police methods couldn’t was actually true at the time, and the Holmes stories helped bring about reforms and improvements in police procedures.
Admittedly I’ve used the trope myself, in my Troubleshooter prose series, where the superhero-like Troubleshooter Corps is needed to keep the peace because the Asteroid Belt has no systemwide government or law enforcement, so they’re sort of like frontier rangers. But they’re not vigilantes, they’re an organized NGO working in partnership with various Belt governments. And I’ve also established that some heroes in the Belt operate locally in concert with the authorities of individual space habitats.
@54/cap-mjb: “I’m a bit bothered that they decided to introduce Spider-Man into the MCU by making him one of the villains, or at least one of the ones that is opposed to the protagonist.”
They didn’t. The whole point of the story is that both sides are still good guys, that both sides of the argument have merit and all the heroes are doing what they think is right. The antagonist is Zemo, who divides the heroes and pits them against each other.
@55/CLB: “They didn’t. The whole point of the story is that both sides are still good guys, that both sides of the argument have merit and all the heroes are doing what they think is right. The antagonist is Zemo, who divides the heroes and pits them against each other.”
Zemo is the main antagonist, in the sense that he’s the biggest catalyst for the crisis (although the Accords is nothing to do with him and that’s a contributing factor) and actively working against the heroes. That said, he’s also doing what he thinks is right: The Avengers destroyed his country and killed his family. Yes, that was mostly Ultron, but the Avengers (specifically Stark and Banner) created Ultron, and recruited his two lieutenants straight after. He’s got every reason to see them as a dangerous element that the world is better off without. It’s only once he starts blowing up buildings that he becomes a villain.
But if we take “antagonist” to mean the person opposed to and obstructing the protagonist rather than necessarily someone evil (eg Lieutenant Gerard is an antagonist in The Fugitive), then Iron Man’s an antagonist here as well. Captain America’s positioned as the protagonist: It’s not marketed as an ensemble Avengers film but as a Captain America film. It’s his viewpoint that we follow and which ultimately triumphs, as he comes out on top with regards stopping Iron Man’s quest for vengeance and the authorities’ attempts to detain his friends without trial. He’s not wholly right either: If he hadn’t intervened, Bucky would be dead, but those guards Winter Soldier killed at the UN would still be alive. It’s a thorny issue. But by the end, Stark has gone right off the deep end, moving beyond following orders and trying to stop things escalating, to heading down the same path as Zemo, ending with trying to flat-out murder Bucky through shooting Falcon after he stood down.
Which leads us back to Spider-Man. The sudden swelling of ranks for the big slapdown is rather awkward. Falcon (like Carter) has been on Cap’s side (and by extension Bucky’s) throughout, War Machine and Vision have been on Iron Man’s side, Black Widow’s doing what she thinks is best at the time, Black Panther joins the side that’s against the person he thinks killed his father. But Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Ant-Man and Spider-Man mostly just join the person that asked them for help first. The first three have the advantage of past heroics and being on the side that’s trying to stop Zemo, rather than blindly following Thaddeus Ross who’s more interested in the PR spin than the truth. The only other one on the Pro-Registration side that we don’t know already is Black Panther, and he has the arc of self-realisation that Spider-Man doesn’t get. Spider-Man is there because of a combination of threats, bribery and one-sided arguments: His parroted assessment of Captain America – “You think you’re right but you’re wrong and that makes you dangerous” – could equally apply to him (and maybe everyone on that concourse). It’s an unfavourable first impression of this iteration of the character to have him charge in without really understanding the issues involved and arguably make things worse. I haven’t seen his two solo movies but they may have a hard time getting me on his side after this, especially if he’s still making questionable choices with regards role models.
@56/cap-mjb: Yeah, it’s nominally a Captain America film, but it’s an Avengers film in practice. As I said in my review, I think Tony actually has more of a growth arc in the movie than Cap does. It definitely was not the intention of the filmmakers to present Team Iron Man and its members as villains. If that’s your takeaway, it’s your own personal assessment. The filmmakers’ goal was to create a story where both sides could be sympathized with, where it was up to individual filmgoers to decide where they stood.
@57/CLB: Again, antagonist and villain are not the same thing. No-one on Team Iron Man is evil, but they’re the ones fighting against the main character.
@55: “And Agents of SHIELD used that in a very cool way, when their Hydra-agent character (it’s not really an acronym) tried to defend Hydra as not having any connection to Nazis and Skye/Daisy countered that, yeah, he totally was a Nazi.”
Also Jemma answering the question of “are Hydra all Nazis?” with “Every last one of them.”
Quoth cap-mjb: “Also, I found the casting of Martin Freeman a bit distracting, and he isn’t on screen long enough for me to stop seeing him as one of the bumbling comedy characters he usually plays.”
You need to seriously expand your Martin Freeman playlist if you think that’s actually true, because it really isn’t.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I am enjoying all the conversation but have nothing to contribute.
However, a brief anecdote: my son loves superheroes, but is too young to enjoy the MCU. But I let him watch the airport battle because it was a great way for him to watch some of his favorites get their super on without a lot of violence. For the most part, the Avengers aren’t hurting each other. And I could tell him that War Machine was gonna be okay, Iron Man could fix him.
So if nothing else, I love this movie for that. But I do also love the complexity and the idea that both sides are not wrong. And Peggy Carter’s eulogy is the best!
@58/cap-mjb: And I stand by my position that just because Captain America happens to be the title character in the film, that doesn’t automatically make him the main character or the one we’re obligated to side with. It’s more a question of where in the production schedule they decided this story needed to be told, and of the marketing reasons for promoting it as a Cap movie rather than an Avengers movie. (Probably in part because you don’t want to oversaturate the toy/merchandise market with Avengers items or go too long without new Captain America-branded items.) As far as the story itself goes, it’s essentially an Avengers movie, and Tony is every bit as much a lead character in it as Steve is.
I read the entire civil war comic event, and all it left me with was a growing hatred for Tony Stark and then in the end Spiderman undoes everything because he can’t stand the thought of his already 90+ year old aunt dying. Just. So. Stupid.
The movie did a much better job selling the idea of a super hero civil war.
I really enjoyed this movie, but I was kinda squicked out by the very brief hook-up between Agent 13 and Cap, in view of the reason why they are in proximity to each other (Peggy’s funeral), and also how we know that Peggy and Steve’s relationship resolves in Infinity War. It was kind of an unnecessary little plot sidenote, and was more distressing than anything it added to the overall story.
@18 / @andrewrm
I see that you argued that there isn’t registration in the MCU, but this is false. The simple fact is, that the Sokovia Accords are the registration act and a simple Google search will show that the cover of the Accords specifically says “Framework and Registration for the Deployment of Enhanced Individuals”. This is the MCU’s version of the Super Hero Registration Act. Further more, here are the specific terms.
The currently known regulations established by the Sokovia Accords include:
Any enhanced individuals who agree to sign must register with the United Nations and provide biometric data such as fingerprints and DNA samples.
Those with secret identities must reveal their legal names and true identities to the United Nations.
Those with innate powers must submit to a power analysis, which will categorize their threat level and determine potential health risks.
Those with innate powers must also wear tracking bracelets at all times.
Any enhanced individuals who sign are prohibited from taking action in any country other than their own unless they are first given clearance by either that country’s government or by a United Nations subcommittee.
Governments are forbidden from deploying enhanced individuals outside of their own national borders unless those individuals are given clearance as described above. The same rule also applies to non-government organizations that operate on a global scale (including S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers).
Any enhanced individuals who do not sign will not be allowed to take part in any police, military, or espionage activities, or to otherwise participate in any national or international conflict, even in their own country.
As a corollary, they will not be allowed to participate in any active missions undertaken by private or governmental law enforcement/military/intelligence organizations (such as S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers).
Any enhanced individuals who use their powers to break the law (including those who take part in extralegal vigilante activities), or are otherwise deemed to be a threat to the safety of the general public, may be detained indefinitely without trial.
If an enhanced individual violates the Accords, or obstructs the actions of those enforcing the Accords, they may likewise be arrested and detained indefinitely without trial.
The use of technology to bestow individuals with innate superhuman capabilities is strictly regulated, as is the use and distribution of highly advanced technology (such as Asgardian and Chitauri weaponry).
The creation of self-aware artificial intelligence is completely prohibited.
The Avengers will no longer be a private organization and will operate under the supervision of the United Nations.
@62 It’s definitely a Captain America movie. First Avenger, Winter Soldier, and Civil War provide a perfectly coherent story for Steve Rogers–his ascent to the mantle of Captain America, his disillusionment with modern America, and his final break with the identity of Captain America.
I don’t think that they intended to make Tony Stark a villain, but given that the movie climaxes with him trying to do a murder that’s what they did.
Also I just can’t really take AoS’s statement equating HYDRA to Nazis very seriously. It’s buried four seasons deep in a show that the movies don’t reference at all, and also Agents of SHIELD doesn’t take the moral problems of SHIELD and HYDRA very seriously like, ever. The show basically turned Coulson from a lovable minor character into a villain without realizing that’s what it did.
@66/Colin R: Yes, it’s definitely a Captain America movie. It’s also definitely an Iron Man movie, in equal measure. It’s not a zero-sum choice; the movie is designed to be about both men in equal and opposite roles.
“I don’t think that they intended to make Tony Stark a villain, but given that the movie climaxes with him trying to do a murder that’s what they did.”
There are countless movies in which the heroes we’re supposed to root for are on missions to kill someone out of revenge. Sometimes they get talked out of it or decide not to go through with it, which makes it a personal challenge to overcome and a lesson to be learned rather than villainy. Often, the movie sides with their vengefulness and celebrates it when they kill their targets. I don’t care for that latter type of movie, but it proves that if a feature film shows a character pursuing revenge, that does not automatically mean that character is meant to be the villain. There’s a long, unfortunate history in Hollywood of blood vengeance being treated as a heroic motivation.
“Also I just can’t really take AoS’s statement equating HYDRA to Nazis very seriously. It’s buried four seasons deep in a show that the movies don’t reference at all”
So what if the movies don’t reference it? It’s elitist crap to talk about movies as if they’re a superior medium to television. Badly outdated too, since these days the writing in television is consistently far better and richer than in feature films, and the acting and production values are often just as good.
A story is a story. It’s self-defeating to judge the worth of a story by what medium it’s presented in. The medium is completely irrelevant to the worth of a story and its ideas.
@@@@@#64
I’m wondering if the plot with Peggy was originally intended as Steve’s ‘endgame’ given , originally, they were going to show that Steve and Sharon had continued their relationship in Infinity War while he was on the run. They said they’d cut it because they wanted to focus more on the climactic battles and the characters coming together.
Knowing tidbits like that really makes one go
@60/krad: You’ve probably got a point actually. My involvement in modern media is so limited that I’m not sure I’ve seen Martin Freeman in much other than adverts and that execrable Blake’s 7 spoof. Still, a look at his Wikipedia page convinces me that about 80% of the characters he’s “well known for” at least broadly fit the description “bumbling and comedic” and make his cameo as a hard-nosed bureaucrat seem like a wildly against type case of stunt casting.
@62/CLB: Marketing is all part of it. If someone’s promoted as the main character, by the title or the billing order or indeed the storytelling where he’s the one fighting to save lives and protect freedom throughout, then he’s the main character I find it very hard to believe that anyone made a film named Captain America:Civil War expecting some of the audience to walk away from it going “Oh no, Captain America won/escaped!”
@cap-mjb, krad: Given that Everett Ross (the character Freeman is playing) is *very much* a bumbling, comedy character in his original appearances in Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run, I found it appropriate.
I was particularly impressed by Freeman’s American accent, given that most Brits play American by mumbling or growling (see: Christian Bale, Hugh Laurie), and Freeman definitely doesn’t. Tom Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch also do good American accents, but Freeman gets the edge for MCU American accents, in my opinion.
Does anyone walk out of that film thinking Captain America won? I don’t think he would see it that way. If it is a victory, it surely must be one that tastes of ashes.
@71: I think he’s ahead on points. And he’s still smiling. He saved Bucky, he got his friends to safety, he exposed Zemo and he refused to be compromised. It’s not a resounding victory but it’s definitely a moral one.
@69/cap-mjb: ” find it very hard to believe that anyone made a film named Captain America:Civil War expecting some of the audience to walk away from it going “Oh no, Captain America won/escaped!””
One more time: It is not a zero-sum choice. You aren’t required to pick a winner. It is both Cap’s and Tony’s movie, and we’re not supposed to celebrate either “side” winning — we’re supposed to regret that they ended up at odds in the first place and hope that they make amends later, as setup for the upcoming Avengers duology. Both characters will continue to be portrayed in a heroic capacity in subsequent films, so naturally this film was not meant to turn us against either one.
And you’re way wrong about Martin Freeman. He’s a brilliant character actor with a lot of depth and range. He’s one of the most impressive reactors I’ve ever seen — he can elevate a scene without a word, just by how he listens to another character’s speech.
One of the characters Freeman is best known for, of course, is John Watson in Sherlock, and if you’re assuming that Watson is “bumbling and comedic,” then you’re trapped in a long-discredited myth arising from the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s. Ever since the Granada TV series in the ’80s, it’s been standard to portray Watson the way he was originally written in prose, as a stalwart, intelligent, highly capable man of action whom Holmes trusts more than anyone else on Earth. And Sherlock in particular leans into Watson’s darker side, painting him as a danger junkie who enables Holmes’s worst excesses, and putting him through some very tragic stuff.
@72: At the cost of having to walk away from pretty much everything he has built his post-thaw life around, including the very friend(s) he just risked everything to save. Both Steve and Tony each end the film still very much convinced they are right and the other is wrong. I don’t think either of them is actually happy with the outcome, but neither sees any room for compromise, so they each just try to find the best way forward according to their own convictions. To me, this is a tragic and bleak ending, not softened much by the olive branch of Steve’s letter and the cell phone.
@67 It’s not a question of whether Television is better or worse than a movie; it’s a question of whether AoS makes moral sense on its own terms. AoS is impossible to take seriously in that respect–not because it is badly made or anything like that, but because the story it is telling is so wrongheaded.
Winter Soldier taught us very firmly that SHIELD has been compromised from its inception. There is no separating HYDRA from SHIELD; even ‘good’ SHIELD agents were actually doing HYDRA’s bidding without realizing it. That’s like, the point of the movie–it’s why Captain America overrides Nick Fury and insists that SHIELD has to end. You can’t use the methods of HYDRA and turn them to good. Fury was creating Project Insight of his own accord, without ever realizing that his methods were unsound. AoS tries to counter the WS argument and insist that the HYDRA infiltration was just a case of bad apples; Cap remembered that the point of the adage was that a few bad apples spoil the barrel.
Perhaps the show could have made an argument for why SHIELD was necessary. But it fails. Skye is introduced as a SHIELD skeptic (rightfully, by the way!) with a desperate need for belonging that Coulson exploits to make her into a true believer–in parallel to Ward’s story where his own vulnerabilities were exploited to make him a HYDRA agent. I know that the show THINK that it is showing the difference between a ‘good’ SHIELD agent and a ‘bad’ SHIELD agent, but instead it highlights how much they are one in the same. Coulson uses the same methods that HYDRA does to recruit and manipulate young agents.
And boy it gets unseemly. SHIELD goes on to use Skye/Daisy’s personal connections to a small nation to destabilize and overthrow it’s government, turning its people into refugees who are later vulnerable to genocide and exploitation; this is all stuff that secretive government agencies like SHIELD would naturally do, and the point of TWS is that it’s bad! The only way the show can make this seem like anything other than the kind of thing a corrupt intelligence agency does to small nations is to make Daisy’s mom go ‘crazy’ (because she was tortured by SHIELD/HYDRA, natch.)
I know that the show is trying to provide a ‘different view’ from Cap’s on SHIELD, but it’s a really bad one. The MCU avoids these kind of messes by just forgetting that TWS happened mostly. The MCU is good at that –no one ever really mentions that Iron Man attempted murder again, either.
@74: That seems to be focusing on the bitter in bittersweet a bit much. Maybe you’re being influenced by the later movies I haven’t seen, but the way it’s presented at the end of this movie, Steve and his friends are all in Wakanda together. (Unless you’re counting Stark in that group: That friendship’s broken but not without hope.) Barnes is in suspended animation but there’s hope of a cure, which there wouldn’t be if Steve hadn’t got him out. It’s not just about material gains, it’s about staying true to yourself and what you believe in: He throws down the shield not because he has to, but as a rejection of the people that gave it to him. As for Stark, he’s chosen to stay inside the system Steve rejected and try and do good there, but he’s still willing to compromise and be compromised: He goes to Siberia to help Steve on his own terms (although Zemo’s trump card derails that) and he chooses to ignore Ross’ call and let Steve and the others escape.
Let’s face it, what Captain America movie hasn’t ended with him losing everything he’s come to rely on and standing tall ready to rebuild?
Fantastic review. You do a great job breaking down what works so well about this movie, and the biggest issue with the Sokovia Accords (it’s administrated by people who have no regard for civil liberties).
Describing most movies where Stark appears as having “Tony Stark vs. his own ego” as a major conflict really gets at the essence of the character.
@75/Colin Ryan: “Winter Soldier taught us very firmly that SHIELD has been compromised from its inception. There is no separating HYDRA from SHIELD; even ‘good’ SHIELD agents were actually doing HYDRA’s bidding without realizing it.”
I still say that’s overstating it. After all, the only way a conspiracy can thrive for decades is by doing as little as possible. The fictional trope of the huge, overarching conspiracy that controls everything but is completely unknown for generations on end is utterly idiotic and self-contradictory. The first rule of not being seen is not to stand up. So logically, the Hydra presence inside SHIELD wouldn’t have been micromanaging every single mission — it would’ve let SHIELD mostly operate as it was meant to and only subtly intervene as much as needed to advance its ends. Otherwise it would’ve been discovered and rooted out before it could infiltrate the highest echelons. So the rot took 70 years to spread to the top, and large parts of the organization were barely touched.
So I can’t object to the idea of Coulson and his team creating a new SHIELD that was true to Howard Stark and Peggy Carter’s original goals for the agency. Sure, maybe it would’ve been better to create a new organization under a different name, but hey, it’s the title of the show. And they still had all that leftover SHIELD gear and buildings and stationery and stuff.
@76: You are right: it has been a while and I may well be mixing in information that doesn’t actually come from this film, including the Prelude to Infinity War comics mini-series.
@78
You’re making my (and TWS’s) point. The reason that HYDRA doesn’t have to do much overtly, and that it was never discovered… is that SHIELD and HYDRA actually shared many of the same values and goals. There was no pre-HYDRA version of SHIELD to ever go back to; guys like Coulson and Fury were brought up in and inculcated with the values and tools of HYDRA, even though they didn’t realize it. Nick Fury built a panopticon designed to allow instant remote assassination of any ‘threat’ without realizing he was a HYDRA asset (even though that is an obvious supervillain plan) because the line between Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce was paper-thin. AoS ultimately makes the mistake that Steve Rogers prevented Fury from making.
The thing that makes The Winter Soldier a good movie, and the thing that distinguishes Captain America as not just a roided up soldier but a hero, is that Steve Rogers has the moral clarity to recognize that. Nick Fury would have killed Pierce and purged SHIELD of its HYDRA ranks… and then gone right back to doing stuff that HYDRA would have done anyway, because that’s what he had trained all his life to do.
That moral clarity is Steve Rogers’ real superpower, and even though I don’t really care for the way that they take the Avengers from this point onward, they are at least pretty consistent on that trait. Tony Stark has no moral compass at all; he wants to do the right thing but he doesn’t know how to tell what that is. Iron Man flies around half-cocked causing problems and desperately trying to clean them up. Rogers always knows the moral costs of what he is doing, and when he crosses lines to save his friend he knows that he is crossing them. When he tosses away his shield at the end it’s because he made a conscious choice to be Steve Rogers instead of Captain America.
@80/Colin R: But Fury isn’t the star of Agents of SHIELD. Coulson is. If you’re going to talk about AoS’s morality, it’s a non sequitur to make your argument about Fury. The morality of AoS’s team is guided by Coulson, who’s always been more pure of heart than the morally gray Fury.
And it’s the same problem with your argument throughout, this insistence on treating the entirety of SHIELD as a monolith with no variation within its ranks. That’s very much not how it’s been depicted in the show. And it’s a misrepresentation of the new SHIELD that Coulson builds after the fall of Hydra, which is not a direct continuation of the old agency but a fresh beginning (and which has spent most of its existence cutting off the various “heads” of Hydra that Cap and the Avengers missed, so it’s absurd to claim it’s the same as Hydra).
As good as everything else was, this movie had me at Giant-Man.
Keith, I find it a bit funny that in the introduction of your review, you use rather “so-so” descriptions for how you felt about the original Marvel comic book “Civil War” storyline (“I could never get my arms around it”, and “… I couldn’t bring myself to entirely buy it.”) So, after I read that part, I thought to myself, “Keith only kinda liked it” or was ambivalent to it.
However, further down, after your in depth review, you say, “I despised the comic book “Civil War” storyline for reasons I outlined in the intro above…” Well, okay then… :-)
@83. David: Keith is right that the original storyline is a mess. It turned many beloved characters into villain-adjacent, who supported not only taking away liberties guaranteed for American citizens (don’t think the registration act was international in the comics), but shunting the offenders to the Negative Dimension. It nearly ruined Iron Man for awhile. Think Stark became a Republican Secretary of Defense and Head of Shield afterwards. (Civil War II did an even worse character assassination on Captain Marvel/Danvers.)
Part of the confusion was that the argument was debated and fought entirely in right-wing terms. Steve’s position was essentially libertarian and Tony’s was pro-establishment. As I’ve said elsewhere, this isn’t nearly as atrocious a misapprehension of the American political system as other Brits’ portrayal of American absurdity and supposed stupidity. The nadir of that for me is still Russell Davies’ last Torchwood series set in the US. Davies hit it from the left, Millar hit from the right. In neither case was it a sophisticated understanding of America’s politics. Pretty sophomoric, actually.
The movie version is a quantum leap better in contextualizing the conflict.
I found it rather weird that the video Tony showed to supposedly demonstrate why the Accords were needed showed incidents that are all cases of the Avengers responding to emergency situations (Sokovia: Avengers stop Ultron from threatening the world. Could be a case for increased oversight of Stark technology. NYC: Avengers counter an alien invasion. DC: Several members of the Avengers stop an attempted Nazi takeover. Nigeria: Avengers counter a raid by aforementioned Nazis to obtain dangerous biological weaponry) and DIDN’T show the one case of an actual rampage by one (albeit currently absent) Avenger that was caused by the psychic influence of another Avenger. Specifically Hulk’s rampage in South Africa.
@84. Sunspear, I wasn’t meaning to comment one way or the other regarding the actual quality of the comics version. I was just saying that Keith’s “I despise it” was a lot stronger a statement than how he has expressed his feelings up at the start of the review. As I said, his first two remarks that I copied could be read as his “kinda liking it but not quite”. It’s not until we get to “despised” that it becomes clear (to me, at least) that he didn’t like it at all.
I watched a video on YouTube, Stuntmen react to Marvel stunts, by Corridor Crew. One reason the action in this movie looks so good is that so much of it is practical. Almost all of the Black Panther/Bucky chase scene was practical, with just a few subtle effects. For example, the fast run was a ‘magic carpet’ and the tow carpet was removed. Definitely check it out for some awesome insights into the action.
I had an interesting conversation about this movie with a friend of mine when it came out that stuck with me. He pointed out that a lot of the conflict in the movie was that they were conflating two functions that the Avengers perform. In his metaphor, the Avengers are sometimes firemen, and sometimes police officers. So when considering how emergencies should be dealt with, i.e. an alien invasion or an unexpected natural disaster, their response should be like firefighters, allowed to simply go in and help during a disaster. In other cases, when they get intel and can plan a raid or investigate something that is happening, then they have to work like police officers, and should have some amount of communication/oversight with existing governments to make sure that they are not trampling on other people’s rights because they think they are right. I mean this beyond weather or not Captain America is good and trustworthy; anyone can make a mistake, and if they have no oversight and can simply go wherever they want, a mistake can cause innocent people to get hurt where communication could have prevented it. So, I’m basically being unfair and not picking either side, because I think a compromise in the middle where Tony is right where it comes to ‘police’-like functions and Cap is right with respect to ‘firemen’-like functions would have made more sense.
@88/hixe: Really interesting analogy there. Your friend made an excellent point that it should depend on the kind of situation. I tend to prefer superhero stories that focus on the “firefighter” side, the rescue work and protecting the public.
I’m not at all surprised that (in the comics) long term friends can be torn apart due to political pressures. I’m seeing just that happening today, in the time of Trump. Long term friends are now calling each other nasty names and “unfriending” each other right and left.
So the back and forth here recapitulates arguments throughout, which regardless of where you end up on the Team Cap/Team Iron Man divide highlights how much BETTER the movie was about setting up the conflict in a way that is believable. BOTH sides have valid points. It’s not just, or even primarily (sorry Keith) that the conflict between Rogers and Stark is more believable from a character standpoint. It’s that the conflict is PHILOSOPHICALLY valid.
Cap is right insofar as systems are corruptible and as @8 pointed out, Ross as the face of the Accords was kind of a tell that the directors fall on the libertarian side of the argument…reinforced by his reaction in Infinity War. And Rogers’ system works…as long as Rogers is the one operating within it.
As my wife says, when I have to rely on a magic hammer to make my argument for me…
Stark’s side of the argument is the more liberal…systems, as imperfectible as they are, are preferable to people acting with no outside, democratically arrived at oversight whatsoever. Because Cap’s argument is “When I see something wrong I have to act.”
Another way to say what Rogers says is, “The only way to stop a bad guy with superpowers is a good guy with superpowers.” Where have I heard something like THAT before??
That’s why, Ross as the face of the Accords and the fact that all mention of the Accords is dropped when Tony outfits a high school student with powers who has NOT signed the Accords with a suit with “Instant Kill Mode”, still doesn’t obviate the fact that Stark’s position, in the real world, is the more viable, philosophically coherent course. Certainly, no one in favor of gun control could actually arrive at Cap’s position without an impressive amount of either conscious or unconscious cognitive dissonance.
@91 Trusting people over systems is inherent in the superhero genre.
@81
I think you had it right in @51 when you were arguing that institutions shouldn’t have to rely on personal virtues–they have to be robust enough to function and survive without that. Even if Coulson had the personal virtue to run effectively run SHIELD (and this is called into question repeatedly in the show), it wouldn’t matter because SHIELD is institutionally unsound. It’s not an accident that pretty much every problem the Agents of SHIELD encounter was also caused by SHIELD, and they can’t blame it all on HYDRA.
TWS made that argument very forcefully, and while it’s possible to imagine an Agents of SHIELD that at least partly counters it, AoS isn’t it.
@93/Colin R: You’re still profoundly missing my point. Coulson’s SHIELD is not the same institution as the old SHIELD. It’s a newly created institution that just happens to have the same name and use some of the same equipment and facilities. What I’m saying is that Coulson presumably set it up in a way that makes it more trustworthy as an institution than its defunct predecessor, because it was created with the goal of avoiding those past mistakes and getting it right this time — and because it wasn’t compromised by Hydra the way the old one was.
@@@@@ 94/ChristopherLBennett – Isn’t that precisely why Tony’s position is inherently more viable than Steve’s? Lets leave alone that Steve is equally, if not more, corrupt than the institutions he fights. He has on his “team” two open and unpunished criminals. Scarlet Witch didn’t even have the excuse of mind control, and Bucky… well, it’s clear he’s done some things since getting out which aren’t exactly virtuous or law abiding. Neither of them face any justice, whatsoever, and Cap goes to great lengths to prevent them from doing so. All because he likes them individually and is personally convinced they can be redeemed. That isn’t justice, it’s cronyism, pure and simple. HYDRA agents can be killed or jailed at will, regardless of their motivations, but Cap’s friends get second, third, or fourth chances because three quarters of a century ago they were nice to him.
Anyway, if your point is that Coulson has created a new SHIELD, without the original sin of the old one, then doesn’t that immediately undermine Cap’s position? Yes, some institutions are corrupt – but if you can have one that isn’t, then Cap should be fighting to reform the system and make it better, not declaring it illegitimate and disregarding it’s authority. Even in Winter Soldier, we see vast numbers of SHIELD employees, presumably the large majority, take up arms to clean their own act up and purge the HYDRA elements. Cap doesn’t even bother to acknowledge that, really. Governments may be corrupt, but at the end of the day they’re still the best expression of the collective will of citizens (obvious cases being exceptions). It’s incredibly paternalistic of Steve to deny that. And lets make it clear, his moral compass of when and how to intervene is extremely flawed. He seems far more interested in fighting supervillains/HYDRA than in actually helping people.
@95/andrewrm: As I said in comment #33, I do tend to agree more with Tony’s position in the movie than Steve’s, though it was the reverse in the comic. So I don’t know why you’re trying to convince me of the position I’ve already said I favor.
@@@@@64 Lady Belaine,
My impression of the Steve/Sharon kiss was always that someone in charge of the MCU (and I wouldn’t want to begin to guess who) got weirded out by the fan support of Steve/Bucky and wanted to make it absolutely totally clear that that wasn’t going to happen. And I say this as someone who wouldn’t have minded Steve/Sharon if they’d made it organic (and hadn’t, you know, put him back with Peggy at the end of Endgame). I understand Sharon is supposed to be coming back in Falcon & Winter Soldier, which I look forward to – but I would not be surprised if everyone just pretends the kiss never happened.
As far as Team Cap/Team Iron Man goes, I’ve watched the movie multiple times and every single time I find myself changing my mind on who has the best argument, so if that’s what the directors intended, then they succeeded as far as I’m concerned.
@97/hummingrose: Wouldn’t it simply have been because Sharon was Cap’s traditional love interest in the comics? No reason to read anything further into it than that.
This is one of the superheroes movies I watch to the end when I catch it up while channel surfing. This, The Dark Knight, Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War and probably Endgame when it gets to TV. A very good movie, and one that made me have faith in team-ups in the MCU again after the disaster of Age of Ultron.
@95
I mean I just want to point out that basically all of those ‘good’ SHIELD agents were about to help set up a weapon of mass murder, and then do a mass murder. They might have been shocked at first, but most probably would have been mollified as Alexander Pierce explained that it was all OK and SHIELD was just doing its duty and those people were bad. Because that’s the kind of thing SHIELD does; they almost nuked Manhattan a few years prior. Everyone in SHIELD had been trained to accept war crimes and extrajudicial killings and stuff. The point isn’t that individual SHIELD agents were all bad. The point is that the system is designed to make them accept things that should be unacceptable. Fish, as they say, don’t know they’re in water.
This observation is what ultimately makes TWS the best MCU movie–and yes, I think the later MCU movies fail to live up to its high mark. AoU shows the Avengers at a critical point where they have also made some really heinous mistakes. Civil War should be about bringing the Avengers to task for their crimes–but it blinks, because the MCU isn’t ready to let any of its superheroes really look like villains. So Civil War devolves into a personal dispute instead of a political dispute; Tony and Steve aren’t fighting about registration at the end, but about their personal feelings about Bucky.
The only saving grace of this film is that Steve Rogers recognizes this, and knows that he can’t be Captain America anymore. Stark doesn’t have that kind of self-knowledge of course.
@70: To be fair, Ross is responsible for much of the comedy relief in the Black Panther movie as well. I wouldn’t describe him as bumbling or incompetent, but he’s certainly in over his head and somewhat clueless at the beginning of the movie.
Also, two of Freeman’s *other* most famous roles are Bilbo Baggins and Arthur Dent, both of whom are also comedic and occasionally bumbling characters, although neither of them is *just* that. OTOH, he’s *also* famous for The Office, which I haven’t watched, but based on the ads I’ve seen I was of the impression that he’s probably the *least* bumbling character in that series — very much an Only Sane Man sort of role.
I think your characterization of British actors is entirely unfair. I’ve only seen one or two episodes of House, but I certainly wouldn’t describe his performance as mumbling or growling. He’s also put out a blues album proving that he can not only act but also *sing* with an American accent. Christian Bale growls a lot as Batman, but not as Bruce Wayne; nor does he do much mumbling or growling in Newsies or The Machinist. And then there’s Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Gary Oldman in Léon, David Oyelowo in Selma, Rufus Sewell in The Man in the High Castle, Damian Lewis in Homeland, Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things, Jamie Bamber in Battlestar Galactica, Lennie James in Jericho and The Walking Dead, David Harewood in Supergirl, and Tom Wilkinson and Catherine Zeta-Jones in nearly all their roles. I think I’ve seen far more British (and Australian) actors doing convincing American accents than I have the reverse. So much so that you may not even have realized that all of the above actors are British.
@100/Colin R: I’m done arguing this with you. You’re hell-bent on twisting everything to fit your “SHIELD is pure evil” agenda, which is an obviously invalid standard to use when assessing the television series Agents of SHIELD, whose core premise requires that SHIELD is not pure evil. Basically you’re just saying that you refuse to buy into the show’s defining premise, which makes it impossible to have a conversation with you about the show on its own terms.
I mean, you could make a case that Clark Kent is deeply corrupt because of his constant use of deception in building his career on stories about Superman, and his enormous conflict of interest in so doing. You could say that this makes Clark Kent a pure, unadulterated villain and it invalidates any attempt at heroism he undertakes. And sure, in the abstract, you could argue that. But that’s just not the mindset that the writers of Superman stories are ever going to take, so it’s basically an exercise in sophistry that has little relevance to any actual Superman series and the stories it tells.
I’m not really that familiar with Superman–does Clark Kent really write a lot of stories about Superman? The thing is, my impression of Superman is that he really IS an ethical guy, and probably would not do that–that he would spend his time trying to do real muckraking on like businessmen violating labor laws or political corruption or whatever. You could totally do a Superman story about journalism, or journalistic ethics. Given how long Superman has been around I suspect it has been done. And the thing is, if Superman was not adhering to journalistic ethics while telling that kind of story, it would totally be fair game to ding him (or rather the storytellers) about that.
It might make more sense to accuse Peter Parker of a bit of deception, since taking pictures of himself IS his deal. But Peter Parker’s deal usually isn’t that he’s a devoted photojournalist–it’s that he’s trying to scrape up a living. And of course, Peter Parker is exactly the kind of guy who might cut some corners, and find it rebounding unexpectedly and disproportionately on him.
I am judging AoS on its own terms, and on its place in the MCU. I sympathize with the people making it, because from the start they were shackled to the concept that SHIELD was going to be destroyed–not even just destroyed, but revealed as having been started by crypto-Nazis. But they failed on their own terms to adjust for that huge curveball and make the case for why SHIELD should exist, compared to the extremely forceful argument for why it shouldn’t.
@103/Colin R: In most versions of the story, Clark Kent gets hired at the Daily Planet by reporting on Superman’s debut or getting the first big scoop about him, and he routinely submits articles based on his adventures as Superman. This was a standard dynamic in the early years of the comics and the theatrical cartoon shorts — Lois fuming at the end because Clark somehow scooped her on the story about Superman’s latest exploits. These days, he generally treats Lois better, but he still routinely reports on Superman-related stories. Sure, in real life it would be unethical, but it’s kind of unavoidable if you want to tell stories about Clark being both a reporter and a superhero, since dramatic efficiency requires the stories he reports on to be the same incidents Superman is involved in.
And you’re still grossly misrepresenting the origins of SHIELD. It was not “started by crypto-Nazis.” That is a complete falsehood. It was started by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. They recruited Arnim Zola to work for SHIELD under Operation Paperclip, the real-life program by which German scientists like Wernher von Braun were recruited to work for the US government — although I get the impression that Zola was under much stricter confinement than von Braun and his ilk. Over the course of several decades, Zola very gradually worked to manipulate SHIELD toward Hydra’s agenda and slowly infiltrate it with Hydra members, because it had to be very slow and subtle to avoid notice. It took 70 years to become as compromised as it was in The Winter Soldier, which is why they waited until then to launch their takeover.
@103: One of the Heroes in Crisis storylines had some themes on journalistic ethics.
@98: The issue wasn’t the canonical relationship, which would make sense if built organically, but the sudden kiss out of nowhere.
@106/hummingrose: I’m not saying it wasn’t tacked on in the movie. I’m saying it was far more likely that it was tacked on because it was their pre-existing comics relationship and was thus somewhat “expected” than that it was tacked on as some sort of reaction to Cap/Bucky shippers. There was an actual Cap/Sharon relationship for decades before Cap/Bucky shipping was a thing, so it makes no sense to postulate that the former was somehow a reaction to the latter.
The comics Civil War series was a bit uneven, but it had two standout moments. The first was, after building things up to make us think that Cap would (of course) support the nation whose flag he wore, he instead chose to support the ideals he thought the nation should aspire to. The scene where he makes his choice, and leaps out of the helicarrier, was both shocking and exciting, in a way that, in retrospect, fit the story and character perfectly. The second was a speech he gave to Spider-Man, which in the movie became the basis for the eulogy Sharon Carter gave at her aunt’s funeral–an inspiring moment that fit the character to a T.
I would have liked the movie better if it had been done as an Avengers movie, and if Steve had gotten true Captain America movie to round out the trilogy. It came just a whisker away from being too overstuffed, with the Cap storylines competing with the Avenger storylines, and the introduction of both Black Panther and Spider-Man. It ended up working, but not as well as it could have if we got two movies (a final Cap trilogy movie and an Avengers movie) instead of one that felt a bit contrived and clunky at times.
Lord Acton once wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men . , . .” Superheroes are great men with great physical and mental powers. Therefore, they are far more susceptible to corruption than average great men with average physical and mental capabilities.
@109/Paladin Burke: People tend to take Lord Acton’s opinion as axiomatic, but when scientists actually put it to the test, they found otherwise. Power didn’t make people less moral; rather, how they used the power they were given reflected their pre-existing morality. As Abraham Lincoln said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Or as David Brin wrote in The Postman, “It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.”
This is basically the fundamental premise of the superhero genre. IIRC, Siegel & Shuster decided to make their Superman character heroic (after a false start with a conqueror figure by that name) as a refutation of Nietzsche’s idea that a superman would be “beyond good and evil” and unconcerned with morality. They wanted to show that great power could be used for good — for service — rather than for self-serving ends.
Also, a lot of superheroes are great women.
@110 CLB/: You make some good points. However, my understanding of Nietzsche’s concept of the “overperson” was that the overperson transcends the morality of the common person and creates his/her own morality to live by. IIRC, Nietzsche found most commonly held moralities revolting, especially Christianity, which he felt was an inversion of the classical Master/Slave relationship. My point: the overperson doesn’t just throw morality out the window and become an amoral being. He chooses to become a being with a new morality. Granted that new morality might not be to everyone’s liking.
@107 I think you’re misinterpreting my comment, though I suppose I should have made it clearer that I do not actually think someone in charge demanded a “no homo!” moment and and that I was instead indulging in some grim humor.
That said, the moment still very much comes across as tacked on at the last minute, for whatever reason. I’m not saying there wasn’t a basis for it in comic history, I’m saying there wasn’t a basis for it given what we’d seen in the MCU. I would have vastly preferred if the movie had been written in a way where Steve and Sharon did in fact have some sort of ongoing relationship leading up to that moment, which really wouldn’t have been all that difficult to do. Instead, what we get is a kiss that comes out of nowhere and has so little relevance to the rest of the plot (or the ongoing MCU) that not only does she never appear on screen again, but Steve never even shows any sign of thinking about her in that movie or any of the ones that come after it.
@112: I wouldn’t say their kiss is entirely out of nowhere. They did share some chemistry back in The Winter Soldier, when Sharon was under cover as his next-door neighbor, and at the end of that movie Natasha suggested he ask “that nurse” out, to which he replied to the extent of “She’s not a nurse, and her name is Sharon” which was not the name she was going by when she was under cover, indicating that there was enough interest on Steve’s part to at least learn her name (though presumably not enough to find/figure out that she was Peggy’s grand-niece).
112, 113, & 97 –
I have no great problem with Steve Rogers getting flirty with sexy neighbor-“Action-Girl” Shield Agent in disguise, and yes true to the comics source material, Agent 13 is in fact Sharon Carter, niece, later grandniece of the estimable Peggy Carter, but that linkage was due to the extreme time dilation of the Marvel Comics history; Captain America is an ageless super-soldier. Peggy Carter, badass as she is, was no longer the ass-kicking iconoclast that she was in the WWII era. She’s an elderly doyenne of the intelligence community. So, in the comic books, the role that Peggy Carter would be playing in the latter day adventures of Captain America (and we’re talking about the 60’s and 70’s here) and his love life was shunted on the new-ish character of Sharon. This is a thing that played out over decades of comics continuity. Pre-internet, unless you were a super huge Captain America continuity nerd, you probably didn’t really pay attention to this shift.
BUT!
None of that was actually necessary in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its somewhat compressed and accelerated continuity. Yes, the in-story timeline of Steve and Peggy’s Grand Romance was 80 years in the making, but the movie-going audience just watched their sadly abortive romance like five years ago.
There literally is no narrative purpose served by making Agent 13 related to the great love of Steve Rogers’ life and then to have them cross paths at Peggy’s funeral. It’s really odd.
@114/LadyBelaine: “So, in the comic books, the role that Peggy Carter would be playing in the latter day adventures of Captain America (and we’re talking about the 60’s and 70’s here) and his love life was shunted on the new-ish character of Sharon.”
No, that’s not how it happened. Sharon/Agent 13 and Peggy were introduced more or less simultaneously in Tales of Supsense #75 in 1966, with Steve meeting 13 and being struck by her resemblance to the nameless resistance fighter he’d fallen for during the war (though we didn’t get more than a glimpse of her in flashback until two issues later) and who turned out to be 13’s older sister. The unnamed sister didn’t appear again for years, while Sharon became Steve’s regular love interest. Steve Englehart (who had a knack for reviving obscure one-shot characters from the past, e.g. Deadshot) eventually brought back Peggy in 1973, and she was a fairly steady supporting character for a while but not a love interest for Steve (she dated Gabe Jones instead), and then she only appeared intermittently in the later ’70s and barely at all in the ’80s, had a comeback in the early ’90s, then disappeared for about a decade between ’95 and ’05 before Ed Brubaker brought her back and redefined her as Sharon’s aunt (or maybe great-aunt) to account for the much greater age difference. This article covers it: https://www.cbr.com/the-abandoned-an-forsaked-so-how-old-is-captain-americas-girlfriend/2/
So you pretty much have it backward — the movies put Peggy Carter into the love interest/leading lady role that was Sharon‘s in the comics.
It is weird having your main character kiss his former lovers niece. There’s no changing how gross those optics are. It wouldn’t matter if it were coming from him or Stark. It’s a sleazy move.
@100 Regarding the nuke, that wasn’t SHIELD. That was the “World Security Council” that SHIELD answered to. So basically, the group that the Sokovia Accords would probably have forced the Avengers to answer to as well. Having oversight from a group that would do that is likely part of Cap’s problem in Civil War.
Also, the main person ordering that nuclear launch, Gideon Malick, was later revealed on Agents of SHIELD to be a/the (?) leader of HYDRA. So that calls into question whether he wanted to nuke Manhattan to be rid of the Chitauri…or to be rid of the Avengers.
How does one define “Superhero”? I was taught that a hero is a person who helps others in need without any expectation of reward, whether that reward is material, spiritual or emotional. Put simply, a hero acts altruistically and has no duty to act to help someone in need. The hero acts because she believes it is the right thing to do.
Example: A woman is walking home from work and sees that her neighbor’s house is in flames. The woman runs into the house and pulls out her neighbor, saving the neighbor’s life. The woman is a hero—but only if she acted with no expectation of reward.
Contrast the above example with an on-duty firefighter who has a paid duty to save peoples lives.*
With the above definition of hero in mind, I argue that a superhero is a person who is far more physically and/or intellectually powered than the average hero. Therefore, a superhero can do more good for more people at one time than an ordinary hero. Alternatively, a superhero can help one person in an extraordinary way.
Example 1: A cruise ship has a boiler explosion at sea and starts to sink. Superman flies in and saves everyone that is still alive. Contrast this to an ordinary hero who might only be able to save a few people at one time.
Example 2: The Flash can sprint a dying child to any hospital on the planet in the wink of an eye.
*However, a firefighter can be hero by acting “beyond the call of duty.”
I don’t think that anyone in this thread has mentioned the second part of Tony’s speech at MIT – the announcement that he was fully funding every student project with no oversight mentioned, and no questions asked.
That makes it almost impossible for me to be on his side.
Coulson was as morally gray as Fury. That’s why he was a successful intelligence agent for many years and why he became a successful director for SHIELD. Being “pure of heart” is not a good requisite for being director of SHIELD or any other spy agency. And by the way, not even Steve was always morally correct. Ironically, the one time I had a low opinion of Steve was in “The Winter Soldier”, when he tried to scapegoat Fury for HYDRA’s infiltration and what had happened to Bucky. That made me angry, because he damn well knew who was truly responsible for HYDRA’s infiltration.
Coulson is not as morally gray as Fury, not at all.
I honestly can’t stand arguments that say Tony has point here.
The value of a mechanism for holding the Avengers accountable is undeniable. But that’s not what Tony is doing, so I get aggravated when people give him this benefit of the doubt.
His very first act after signing the accords, is to recruit a teenager, who is legally ineligible to consent to the Accords, deceiving the teenager’s guardian, and smuggling him out of the country(even if May agreed to let him go to Germany, as we see in FFH, Peter doesn’t have a passport, and still has to be smuggled). That invalidates any point Tony thinks he’s making. Tony has no intention of abiding by the Accords, so any argument he makes in favor of them is null and void.
@@@@@ 121 – but the purpose of the Accords in-universe isn’t to protect underage superheroes from participating in some high-powered hijinks, it’s to protect the world, in large part from high powered underage superheroes! You know, for example, like when teenage Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver participate in numerous crimes and attempted genocides (with no repercussions, of course, because anyone on Team Cap gets an automatic pass for any and all crimes).
As long as Tony is recruiting Peter with the consent of the UN, he’s very much acting within the spirit of the Accords. Moreover, if the position is that Peter is unable to “consent” to being a hero, then he is obligated to be a criminal, because we know he won’t stop helping people. If you think that Peter cannot consent to being part of Team Iron Man, then you aren’t arguing against Tony, you’re arguing against super heroics in general. Because Cap is equally willing to employ underage heroes; either your issue is with consent or you don’t have an argument at all.
And for what it’s worth, Tony is quite clear that he isn’t a giant fan of the Accords. He just is realistic, that he and Cap don’t have the right to violate the sovereignty of national borders and murder citizens without repercussion. If the Avengers want to continue to act, they need permission from the governments of the world, and in this instance that requires oversight. It’s literally the only rational response to a superhero team.
@122 As long as Tony is recruiting Peter with the consent of the UN
He isn’t. If he were, the UN would absolutely demand he or his legal guardian sign the Accords before going to Berlin. They don’t, ergo… I mean, Tony is afraid to tell his teammates Peter’s age, probably because he knows they’d come down on him like a ton of bricks for getting a freaking kid involved in this shit.
Moreover, if the position is that Peter is unable to “consent” to being a hero, then he is obligated to be a criminal, because we know he won’t stop helping people.
Yes, he’s obligated to be a criminal. That’s what happens when you criminalize stuff, Tony. I, as an audience member, can accept that a teenager is going to do what they want, regardless of it’s legality, and can even still cheer them on for engaging in that criminality. I, as Tony Stark, can not argue for following the law, when I have no intention of following said law. That’s just hypocrisy, which is my whole point here.
I don’t have an actual problem with the fact that Tony views the Accords as worth less than the paper their printed on, or that he intends to bend them when they are getting in his way.
My problem is when the audience attributes good faith intentions to Tony, when he doesn’t have them. He doesn’t have a point when he’s arguing with Cap, because you can’t “have a point” you don’t believe in. There isn’t a true ideological separation between Steve and Tony, because Tony doesn’t have an ideology beyond “publicly say what everyone wants to hear” and Steve is arguing from actual principals
He isn’t. If he were, the UN would absolutely demand he or his legal guardian sign the Accords before going to Berlin. They don’t, ergo… I mean, Tony is afraid to tell his teammates Peter’s age, probably because he knows they’d come down on him like a ton of bricks for getting a freaking kid involved in this shit.
You can’t have this both ways. Either the UN/international security community (however you’d like to define it) is a body thoroughly corrupted by self-interest, HYDRA, etc, and therefore ethically or practically incapable of acting in the self-interest of it’s nation states, or it’s so morally grounded that it takes the time to get permission slips from close family members in times of emergency. Those are not the same institutions, at all. If the UN (or whoever is giving the sanctioned-Avengers the all clear to intervene) is willing to ask permission for minors to participate in adventuring, then Cap’s assessment of their values is way out of line with the reality anyway!
Yes, he’s obligated to be a criminal. That’s what happens when you criminalize stuff, Tony.
Except Tony isn’t criminalizing anything, a point he makes explicitly clear in the movie. This is coming for the Avengers whether they like it or not, because the idea that a super-powered paramilitary force has the right to use lethal force in any intervention they choose, without any oversight or repercussion or choice, is anathema to every government in the world, as well it should be. Tony (or maybe Natasha as his proxy, can’t quite remember) makes the excellent (and never refuted) point that the Sokovia Accords are coming, one way or another. The Avengers can either acquiesce willingly, and maintain the ability to do some good in the world as a legally recognized force, or fight it, lose, and become criminals who can’t do their jobs as effectively because they have to fight both actual bad guys, and governments who are genuinely concerned with protecting their citizens and their sovereignty from a bunch of lunatics who show up, blow shit up in the name of protecting “the world” and fly away, leaving said government to clean up the mess.
I don’t have an actual problem with the fact that Tony views the Accords as worth less than the paper their printed on, or that he intends to bend them when they are getting in his way.
We have no evidence this is the case. What Tony says, and what his actions back up, are that he believes the Accords are viewed as a necessity by world leaders, and that it’s better to give in to the inevitable (that the Avengers will need oversight) and work from within to change the Accords so they can retain more autonomy. Cap doesn’t believe in working from the inside, because he saw the corruption within SHIELD and how he helped advance their agenda. He’s an outsider who believes in standing forth for what he believes in. Good for him. That isn’t always the best answer. In his case, it’s also incredibly paternalistic.
My problem is when the audience attributes good faith intentions to Tony, when he doesn’t have them. He doesn’t have a point when he’s arguing with Cap, because you can’t “have a point” you don’t believe in. There isn’t a true ideological separation between Steve and Tony, because Tony doesn’t have an ideology beyond “publicly say what everyone wants to hear” and Steve is arguing from actual principals
Because Tony is shown time and again that his intentions are good, it’s his execution that is bad. We’re right to attribute good faith intentions to Tony. If he were acting in bad faith we wouldn’t have seen the character growth that we do over the course of the MCU.
Tony has a very well constructed position here. He’s seen his desire to protect people backfire time and again. His obsession with building suits in Iron Man 3. Notably Ultron. He’s acted in good faith and seen those actions turn on him, so he no longer trusts his own judgement, and wants someone else to take responsibility for when and how he acts. Perhaps that isn’t as heroic as Cap’s moral compass, but it’s a good deal more ethical when you consider that Cap’s baseline position is “I decide who I rescue and who I don’t, and I decide what level of collateral damage is acceptable.” Why even bother having world governments, or armed forces, or anything? Cap knows what is best, and knows who deserves protection or mercy and who doesn’t, let him decide! Oh, and don’t bother worrying about what happens to that global peacekeeping force if Cap is incapacitated or mind controlled or any other very real possibility – I’m sure every single one of his teammates have the same moral compass – oh wait, that’s right, the Avengers are a bunch of murderers and war criminals who have escaped justice for no apparent reason.
You can’t have this both ways. Either the UN/international security community (however you’d like to define it) is a body thoroughly corrupted by self-interest, HYDRA, etc, and therefore ethically or practically incapable of acting in the self-interest of it’s nation states, or it’s so morally grounded that it takes the time to get permission slips from close family members in times of emergency.
Dude, ideologies come and go, but bureaucracies are eternal. But my point isn’t really about how enforceable the statutes are, granting Tony the certainty that he can flout them without repercussions. It’s about how he isn’t fighting for a principal, where Steve is. Once the Accords are signed, the very first thing they are used to do is sanction the extrajudicial assassination of a man based on flimsy circumstantial evidence. That’s what Tony has set in motion, and he doesn’t even have the decency to believe enough in what he’s fighting for to keep a freaking minor out of the line of fire, and then the audience and the writers are going to stand there and say “Tony has a point”. No, he doesn’t. Tony’s absolutely wrong. And that extrajudicial assassination is in itself reason enough for Steve to be valid in refusing to sign on to that. So he’s not really responsible for the break up of the Avengers, if he’s not wrong to not to want to be a part of that. He captured Strucker alive, for goodness sake, there is no reason they had to go in prepared to kill.
Now, Steve is kinda wrong. He’s proven correct about how flagrantly bad the Accords were going to be, but he had no way of being certain of that. He could have always signed, and then renounced his alliance with Accords. And he’s most definitely wrong in never telling Tony “Oh yeah Tony, by the way, in my discovery of HYDRA buried within SHIELD, I learned that HYDRA was responsible for your father’s death, and I think they had my brain washed childhood friend do it”.
Like that’s TOTALLY OUT OF CHARACTER for Steve, but since the story insists that’s what he did, I have to decree it’s wrong.
But the writers and audience see it that way, and instead somehow grant Tony, some sort of moral authority in this story.
This is coming for the Avengers whether they like it or not
Bull. Just like when they were going to come and get Tony’s suits? They could have held it off, if they’d been united. And making Nat Tony’s proxy is so nonsensical. Like on what planet?(This is why her movie works better post WS, pre CW, because it could have been what she went through could have informed why she acts so differently here)
Cap doesn’t believe in working from the inside,
In no way does this movie indicate that. He states pretty clearly that they aren’t taking responsibility, if they aren’t the ones making the decisions. He recognizes that what Tony is trying to do is abdicate responsibility by letting someone else make the decisions. Cap in no way says they shouldn’t be held accountable, he says they can’t let other people’s agendas decide when they act. They can be held accountable for making bad decisions, without abdicating autonomy, but that’s not what Tony offered, because that’s not what Tony thinks he wants.
He wants to not feel guilty(and then completely blows it by putting an innocent kid in danger), and he’s looking for a way to say to Pepper, “I’m putting this down”. But this movie is really about Tony learning that you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen, even when you try to do good. And the thing that finally does this, is what happens to Rhodey. He can blame Sam, like he does at first. Sam dodged the blast that hid Rhodey. But who ordered the blast fired? Tony. And Rhodey wasn’t harmed in an act of good. Tony was trying to stop Steve out of vanity. Because he couldn’t admit he was wrong about Bucky. Because he couldn’t see the larger threat posed by the hibernating Winter Soldier Squad. And he fired that blast at Sam, because his vanity wouldn’t allow to Sam to escape.
He’s acted in good faith and seen those actions turn on him, so he no longer trusts his own judgement, and wants someone else to take responsibility for when and how he acts.
Then he needs to change, not surrender his agency. He needs to calibrate a moral compass(and he could do a lot worse than, oh I don’t know, LISTEN TO STEVE about that). That’s why Tony is not on an equal footing with Cap. He already knows the difference between right and wrong(he constantly needs to consult his moral compass, as he gets stuck in all these grey situations, but that’s how you make tension with a guy who always does the right thing), and he’s not afraid to face any consequences that he may be called upon to face. If a court tried to charge Steve Rogers with a crime in the commission of his activities as Captain America, he would face those charges. He pretty much dared Congress to do it, and they didn’t force the matter when Nat showed up to testify.
You see growth in Tony’s in this movie, because he starts and stays for most the movie, in the wrong position. He’s begun accepting that he’s not going to get to walk away from his decisions, and it’s not until Homecoming that you finally see him grow into his responsibility as a leader by mentoring Peter.
And the mirror to Tony in this movie isn’t Steve, but Bucky. Bucky is someone who had the ability to make his own decisions taken away from him. Did it bring him peace? No. He still feels responsible for things he did at the command of others. Did it alleviate his guilt? No. This is pointing to the folly in Tony’s choice here.
This movie is legit THE BEST Marvel movie. The truths it reveals about these characters, right as we head into Infinity War, is amazing. The themes are incredible, how it integrates Black Panther is phenomenal.
Yet, it’s this flipping good, while completely defying the creators intentions(Russos moreso than M&M) on what sort of story they are telling. It’s boggling, truly.
A few on this thread make the same mistake that those SA supporters do in the movie. That is, they blame the Avengers for the destruction around them that are all caused by “bad guys.” The Battle of New York, Sekovia, etc., were incidents where the Avengers were trying to save people and prevent further destruction. In Lagos, in particular, it was Rumlo who caused the explosion. Why did Wanda get blamed for it? Why did nobody protest when Secretary Ross blamed them for any of it? Ross had already been shown as a villain in the MCU, his presence and advocacy of the Accords should make anyone in the audience suspicious of their merit.
And the argument that Wanda was a war criminal in AoU is a bit flimsy. Tony’s idea for a “shield around the earth” predates her involvement (he assisted with Project Insight), and some of her bestowed visions are prophetic, Tony’s and Thor’s in particular. I don’t think she was mind-whammying anyone with ideas that weren’t already there.
I have this debate with my “Team Tony” daughter on a regular basis. I agree that the Avengers and other super teams do need oversight, but this ain’t it. Assuming that the MCU is our world—but with Superheroes!—the specifics of the Accords as laid out in Syan’s comment @65 are in direct violation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the official constitutions of most modern governments (whether adhered to or not). That, in and of itself, is reason enough for Cap and friends not to sign. The Accords go far beyond “respect sovereign territories” into constant monitoring and extra judicial detention, at a minimum. The Accords don’t just rein in rogue actors, they curtail the basic freedoms of a group of people without due process.
@126/rowanblaze: “In Lagos, in particular, it was Rumlo who caused the explosion. Why did Wanda get blamed for it?”
I think the issue is that Wanda didn’t give enough thought to her surroundings and the risk to civilians, so that when she flung Rumlow into the air, she flung him too close to a populated building so that a lot of people were killed in the explosion. If she’d had more control or taken more care to aim away from the building, those people would’ve been safe.
Also, if the Avengers hadn’t engaged Rumlow, he wouldn’t have set off the suicide bomb at all, so the thinking was that they provoked the explosion through their reckless actions.
Dude, ideologies come and go, but bureaucracies are eternal. But my point isn’t really about how enforceable the statutes are, granting Tony the certainty that he can flout them without repercussions. It’s about how he isn’t fighting for a principal, where Steve is. Once the Accords are signed, the very first thing they are used to do is sanction the extrajudicial assassination of a man based on flimsy circumstantial evidence.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I assume the fact that they send men for Bucky? Better known as noted assassin and serial murderer the Winter Soldier? That guy? And it isn’t an assassination, it’s an arrest where they have a green light to use lethal force if necessary. Against the super-powered murderer who they have very good reason to believe just blew up a major peace conference. You know, because he’s arguably the world’s best known, most ruthless assassin.
Bull. Just like when they were going to come and get Tony’s suits? They could have held it off, if they’d been united. And making Nat Tony’s proxy is so nonsensical. Like on what planet?(This is why her movie works better post WS, pre CW, because it could have been what she went through could have informed why she acts so differently here)
Tony’s suits are his property. Literally. They could have forced Tony to stop acting as Iron Man any time, is what you mean to say. It was only Tony’s success and the limited scale of his operations which stopped them. Given that the Avengers (through Tony, admittedly) came about 30 seconds away from being responsible for the extinction of the human race… well, it’s a different ballgame.
In no way does this movie indicate that. He states pretty clearly that they aren’t taking responsibility, if they aren’t the ones making the decisions. He recognizes that what Tony is trying to do is abdicate responsibility by letting someone else make the decisions. Cap in no way says they shouldn’t be held accountable, he says they can’t let other people’s agendas decide when they act. They can be held accountable for making bad decisions, without abdicating autonomy, but that’s not what Tony offered, because that’s not what Tony thinks he wants.
Right, and this is why Cap’s heroism doesn’t work in the context of having a superhero team which intervenes at will. When we’re discussing individuals, Cap is 100% correct, that abdicating decision making means abdicating responsibility. When we’re discussing nations, and their sovereignty, and their right to maintain a monopoly on force within their borders… at that point, what Cap is actually advocating is that we redefine what nation states are, and in this case, that definition becomes Captain America as world dictator. A fundamental characteristic of a nation is the ability to maintain a monopoly on armed force within it’s borders, and if Cap is explicitly calling for an end to that (a.k.a. saying he decides when force is called for, and what level of it) he’s asking to take that sovereignty away.
Tony was trying to stop Steve out of vanity. Because he couldn’t admit he was wrong about Bucky. Because he couldn’t see the larger threat posed by the hibernating Winter Soldier Squad. And he fired that blast at Sam, because his vanity wouldn’t allow to Sam to escape.
This is obscene. Tony isn’t wrong about Bucky – Bucky is a war criminal and a murderer. That Bucky manages to escape justice for his crimes is a travesty, only rivaled by the fact that Wanda Maximoff is not behind bars. It’s actually an interesting case comparison. You can make the case (and I’d buy it) that Bucky isn’t fully responsible for his crimes, as he was brainwashed. Like any other mentally ill person, this is a mitigating factor, but not entirely, and one which the world at large may not even know. But if you want to ascribe his crimes to his handlers, which is reasonable, then the giant rampage that the Hulk goes on in Age of Ultron is Wanda’s fault. So again, Cap’s “morality” seems to be dictated entirely by who he considers friends.
And Tony is right to consider Team Cap responsible for Rhodey’s injury. The same as the family of an injured cop is right to consider the robber who shot him responsible. Whatever you believe about the morality or ethics of the Sokovia Accords, they are a multinational agreement with the force of law! Whether you agree with their position or not, Team Cap are criminals and nothing more at this point, and Team Iron Man are the empowered representatives of the law. If you insist on blaming Rumlow for the damage in Lagos, on the good logic that it’s his criminal acts which cause the damage, and the Avengers are just trying to mitigate it or accept it as part of a more important goal, the same logic must apply here. Cap’s heart may be in the right place but he’s still telling the German government that he is above their laws. How the guy with that attitude can be considered the hero is beyond me. He’s not fighting fascism or unethical Deep State type groups like in Winter Soldier. Here, the government is only asking that the Avengers not intervene with violence within their borders without asking first. That’s reasonable and right.
If a court tried to charge Steve Rogers with a crime in the commission of his activities as Captain America, he would face those charges. He pretty much dared Congress to do it, and they didn’t force the matter when Nat showed up to testify.
Seriously? Cap goes on the run for years specifically to avoid this. He has himself, and his gang (and I mean that in all it’s negative connotations) broken out of a prison which they richly deserved to be in. Again, to my earlier point, the reason he doesn’t sign the Accords is his desire to free Wanda, who of any character in these films most deserves to be in jail. The difference between CA:WS and CA:CW is that in the former, Cap is refusing to allow a shadow group in the US/world government to carry out a coup while murdering millions of people. Even if he is acting in contradiction to the “government,” he is abiding by the spirit of the law. In other words, what superheros are all about – acting outside existing structures to do good in the world. In Civil War, that is NOT THE CASE. What the world wants is very reasonable – stop blowing up our cities and citizens without our permission. After all there isn’t any evidence to suggest the Avengers told the Nigerian government Rumlow was coming – they just showed up. They weren’t acting to supplement or rescue domestic security forces, they were usurping their place. And Rumlow isn’t a Norse god or a sentient indestructible super-robot or genocidal conqueror from space. He’s a man. This is exactly who the authorities can deal with.
I’ll stop now because the word count is getting ridiculous
@@@@@ 126 – how can you possibly claim that Wanda isn’t responsible for war crimes. Even IF you assume that Ultron is going to exist without her help (which is not a given), she is using mind control on the Avengers, which leads to some absolutely massive destruction and possibly death.
Look, one has to come down on one of these propositions. Bucky is a serial murderer and assassin, and Wanda is innocent of anything except being duped by Ultron, or Bucky shouldn’t be held fully responsible for his actions while being brain-washed, tortured, etc but Wanda bears full responsibility for the actions of the Hulk, and arguably all of the Avengers once she’s brainwashed them and set them loose.
There isn’t a gray area. It HAS to be one or the other, because these cases are perfect parallels. What is the true measure of the crime – the act or the intent behind it?
it’s an arrest where they have a green light to use lethal force if necessary.
No it’s not, rewatch the movie Ross states they are going in TO KILL not to capture. That’s an extrajudicial assassination.
they have very good reason to believe
They have flimsy circumstantial visual evidence in a world where Tony can make holograms for shits and giggles. That is not a “very good reason to believe” anything.
because he’s arguably the world’s best known
Just a year ago, nobody believed he existed, and now he’s the world’s “best known”. You are flailing.
Tony’s suits are his property.
Google “Civil Asset Forfeiture”.
And to address another point from your original comment, because I didn’t in the first post, there is also no indication whatsoever that the global bureaucracies behind the Sokovia Accords were in the middle of creating them. The way the movie portrays it, this is ALL on Tony. Nobody was thinking the Avengers could be constrained, until Mariah Dillard tweaked Tony’s guilty conscience, and Tony offered the Avengers up on a platter. So to argue that it was “inevitable” and Tony only tried to get in front of it, is nowhere in evidence. Instead, we are clearly shown Tony created this so he’d no longer be responsible for making decisions, because he’d been made to feel bad for his decisions.
he’s asking to take that sovereignty away.
I don’t disagree. My only rebuttal is that, in most circumstances, Cap is again totally willing to face the consequences for his actions. If he violated a nation’s sovereignty to save the world and that nation has a problem with that, they know where to find him. Because he’s not wrong. Sometimes things happen, and you can’t wait for the red tape. You can’t allow nationalistic ego to stop you from doing the right thing. OK, the start of Ultron has them violating Sokovian sovereignty to attack the remnants of HYDRA. Now, suppose instead they had gone to the Sokovian ministry, and given them the intelligence, and said hey the last remaining HYDRA faction is right here, and Sokovia had said “You must respect our borders, we will mobilize our military and root them out!” And then doesn’t actually do that because HYDRA has bribed them. How do you propose HYDRA gets dealt with? That’s the thing about the MCU, is from the start, rejection of national sovereignty has been baked in since the beginning. What do you think SHIELDs been doing all these years? It’s in the 3rd episode of AoS, that the team goes into Peru and steals alien technology and the Peruvian government was not very happy about it.
Bucky is a war criminal and a murderer
No, the Winter Soldier is a war criminal and a murderer. If Wanda is responsible for making Banner rampage in Johannesburg, but not Banner, in what logical way could Bucky be held responsible for his actions when he had no agency over his decision. And Wanda has been held responsible for her actions. That’s WHY she’s an Avenger, to right the wrongs she committed. Do you think becoming an Avenger was a reward? And not a way to keep an eye on her, and ensure she used her powers ethically.
Cap goes on the run for years specifically to avoid this.
Because Tony created a situation where the Avengers can’t act when they need to, so Steve feels he has to be free to fight the fights Tony can’t fight, because Tony allowed his hands to be tied. Without the Accords, Steve would likely feel confident facing whatever consequences, because the team still had the freedom to act.
the reason he doesn’t sign the Accords is his desire to free Wanda
This is never once said in the narrative, where are you getting this. He doesn’t feel she’s ultimately responsible for the lives lost because of the bomb Rumlow detonated, Rumlow is(he’s right). But he states his reasons for not signing the Accords, and while he’s not happy that Wanda is kept under house arrest, that is not the reason for not signing them. He is more judging Tony for acceding to outside pressure in keeping Wanda under house arrest, than he is objecting to her being detained. And Steve is a soldier, he knows the reality of friendly fire, of unintended consequences. Again, you keep saying that Wanda should be held responsible for her actions with Ultron, and she has been, and continues to be. Why this desire to see her in prison? What good does it accomplish? Do you think she becomes a better person in prison? Because if so, you’ve been watching too much Orange is the New Black. Putting her in a constructive environment where she can use her powers to help other people, is rehabilitation and holding her responsible, while reducing recidivism. We should do it more often! Putting her in prison just turns her into the next Big Bad.
After all there isn’t any evidence to suggest the Avengers told the Nigerian government Rumlow was coming
I don’t disagree, Rumlow was not an Avengers level threat. That was Cap’s ego that felt the need to capture him personally. But this is also a training mission, as evidenced by how Wanda is being instructed in espionage.
Again, I don’t deny that Steve is wrong about somethings. My entire objection is the attempts, outside the narrative we’re shown(by the directors AND the audience), that claim Tony is acting on some sort of principal or moral righteousness. Because he’s not, he acting out of fear and guilt. There has been a constant drumbeat to draw a moral equivalence between Steve and Tony here, and I won’t have it, because they aren’t. Steve is sorta wrong. Tony is WHOLLY wrong, and is responsible for the destruction of the Avengers.
@129, The true measure is, as with anything, the impact, the harm caused. Intent is beside the point.
@128 – andrewrm: No, Bucky is not responsible for his crimes, this is not a criminally insane person. This is someone whose actions were literally controlled by other people. And Tony is not right to consider Team Cap for Rhodey’s injury, since it was friendly fire from his own team.
@130 – Aeryl: Wanda should be in jail, not “paying for her crimes by being an Avenger”.
@@@@@ 130 & 132 – I agree that Bucky is not responsible for his crimes pre-CA;CW. But that means that Wanda is! Wanda is a war criminal. Plain and simple. That she has repented does not absolve her of responsibility, and Cap is unwilling to let his friend and comrade face justice. Which is the problem when a vigilante asserts that his judgement is above that of the entirety of normal human justice systems
I don’t have time in the moment to continue litigating whether or not the Sokovia Accords are Tony’s brainchild or not. I think it’s obvious that they aren’t, since those kinds of agreements don’t get thrown together in a few days – it’s clear that Tony agrees with the governments of the worlds and takes the opportunity to hop on that train, not that he’s the locomotive force behind the Sokovia Accords.
And I don’t see how you can defend Cap being on the run so he has freedom to act in the same breath as saying that he’d be willing to stand up and face responsibility. He didn’t and doesn’t. His point of view is utilitarian in the extreme (“you do the right thing, sometimes people get hurt”), which isn’t wrong but also is a little too pat for my taste, coming from a guy using it as a justification for utilizing potentially lethal force at will and without jurisdiction.
So again, until someone addresses the fact that Steve refuses to sign the Accords specifically because he hears Wanda is under lockdown, there can be no further argument about motives. Ethically, Steve can be on the side of protecting Wanda or Bucky, not both. To claim that both are innocent (at least in terms of motivation) is rank hypocrisy, far worse than what Tony demonstrates.
@132, And when she becomes the next Big Bad, do you look back at your choice, and think you should have made a different one?
What is she going to learn in jail? What do you think prison does to people? I can promise you, the vast majority don’t come out it “better” people. They come out traumatized, unable to live normal lives, find jobs and love their families. How does this help Wanda walk back from her path of harm and destruction.
@133,
That she has repented does not absolve her of responsibility
She’s not absolved. She is engaged in restorative justice, but you wouldn’t get that with your obsession with punitive justice. Which is funny, considering Wanda is a woman who was traumatized as a child, and was manipulated into harming people in a quest for justice, because she was taught that justice was punitive. It’s something a lot of people believe, it’s why the American prison system does so much damage.
since those kinds of agreements don’t get thrown together in a few days
I don’t think it was thrown together “in a few days”. We’re never shown a specific timeline from MIT to Lagos, but if Tony doesn’t precipitate the Accords, what’s the point of the scene with Mariah? It’s unnecessary if it is not the impetus behind the Accords. And also, it’s just bad story telling to remove the protagonists of your story from plot developments.
And I don’t see how you can defend Cap being on the run so he has freedom to act in the same breath as saying that he’d be willing to stand up and face responsibility.
I didn’t say it in the same breath, I said it in two different breaths. I said under typical circumstances, Steve is willing to face accountability for his actions, because even if he were jailed, the autonomous Avengers continue without him. These circumstances aren’t typical now, because in Steve’s view, Tony has placed people in danger by removing the Avengers autonomy. So he must remain free to act autonomously, because Tony can’t be relied upon. Hence, the phone.
So again, until someone addresses the fact that Steve refuses to sign the Accords specifically because he hears Wanda is under lockdown
Except he didn’t specifically refuse to sign them because of Wanda. He’s disgusted by Tony’s actions in re Wanda, but he was already opposed to the Accords and refusing to sign them. The scene you are referring to, is the one where Tony tries to emotionally manipulate Steve with one of FDR’s Lend Lease pens. And Steve has already refused to sign on 3 times at this point. The question about Wanda was to prove Steve’s point about Tony relinquishing control, not to make it a factor into Steve’s decision.
@134 Aeryl
The idea that the Avengers should be “autonomous” is in itself awful; why should a small group of private citizens have that kind of power, especially when they don’t have any real oversight from anyone?
This is a fundamental issue with superheroes. I’m willing to suspend disbelief most of the time, but Civil War comes right out and acknowledges the problem of public power in private hands. A very, very small group has the strength to do what they like, and the citizenry doesn’t have any real means of restricting what they are allowed to do.
I entirely agree that restorative justice is generally better than punitive justice. I just think that decision should be made by the legitimately elected representatives of the people, rather than one man with superpowers. There shouldn’t be one law for people Cap knows personally, and another law for everyone else.
All of Cap’s arguments about “freedom” are ultimately about the freedom of the powerful. Ordinary people cannot go to foreign countries and fight crime. What he is essentially saying is that the Avengers should do as they like, with no real outside oversight, because they’re the good guys.
Unsurprisingly, the people who do have a democratic mandate think that the people with superpowers shouldn’t just do anything they want and act as a private jury for each other.
@135. dptullos: ” I just think that decision should be made by the legitimately elected representatives of the people,”
That is no longer as pure a sentiment as it sounds. Maybe it was in Rogers’ time before the war, but I tend to doubt it even then. There have always been politicians with their own agendas, not always scrupulous. What would Steve have made of Joe McCarthy if he hadn’t been under the ice?
These days, democracy is even more subject to skepticism. Look at the behavior of certain Senators of a particular party. They don’t care about justice at all. It’s just a political game. So to say we should trust their judgement in moral debates is highly dubious. For me, it’s part of Cap’s ethical calculus, especially if you throw in the involvement of politicians with the Hydra infiltration. Did he actually meet Garry Shandling’s smarmy senator (I forget)?
@136 Sunspear
Politicians have always had their own agendas, and plenty of them are unscrupulous, dishonest, or outright criminal.
They are also the properly elected representatives of the American people. Be as skeptical as you like, and you’ll be right a lot of the time. But at the end of the day, living in a democracy means that the American people and their representatives are the ones who make the rules, not Steve Rogers and a handful of his friends.
“Hydra” is not a magic word that negates the right of Americans to self-government. If elected representatives don’t have the right to pass and enforce laws, who does?
@137. dptullos: ““Hydra” is not a magic word that negates the right of Americans to self-government.”
We’re talking about Steve’s actions and thinking. In his context, Hydra looms large, as it should for those politicians who aren’t blind. It’s an alternate fictional universe here, if it needs to be said.
Ultimately, Steve’s position is a libertarian one, while Tony’s is a conservative “trust the government” one. There are no liberal or progressive views represented here. That’s what made the original Civil War storyline so frustrating in the comics. It’s a story told by an outsider to American politics, with the arguments happening completely to the right of center.
@135
especially when they don’t have any real oversight from anyone?
Again, there is never an argument from Steve that they shouldn’t be overseen, or shouldn’t be held accountable. He explicitly says, the Avengers should not be stopped from acting just because of political agendas.
Case in point, the Chitauri invasion. Should the Avengers have pulled out of Manhattan when the World Security Council decided to nuke it? No, the absolutely right call was to avert that, and continue to repel the invasion. This is where Steve is coming from, that the Avengers will be forced to step aside in a situation where they are needed. And he’s not wrong.
There is a middle ground between surrendering all ability to decide when they should intervene, and allowing them to rampage willy nilly, and the person to negotiate that middle ground is most certainly not that sleazebag Ross(because we’re supposed to believe the guy who created Abomination in a fit of pique is ABSOLUTELY the guy who should be responsible for the Avengers restrained use of power).
I think a review board after the fact, would be a better proposal here. A set of guidelines of when it is appropriate for the Avengers to intervene, perhaps. But I keep going back to that opening scene in HBOs The Watchmen, where the officer is pleading with some officious rules lawyer who had never walked the beat to release his gun to defend himself.
As I’ve previously stated, I’m not arguing that Steve is wholly correct here. I admit that Lagos was a clusterfuck, there was no need for Avenger involvement(and hey maybe if Tony had been less selfish, he’d still be the co-leader of the Avengers and could have counseled Steve to let his ego go on this one!)
But I despise the argument that “both Steve and Tony have a point”. Steve has a point. There are points to be made in opposition to Steve’s points, but they aren’t Tony’s points. Because Tony’s only motivation here is to surrender responsibility, not take it, and he’s appropriating other people’s valid arguments to bolster that, as evidenced by his complete and total flouting of the Accords at the first opportunity.
They are also the properly elected representatives of the American people.
But the argument here isn’t about the Avengers operating within America, its about operating throughout the world, often in nations without democratic representation, so I think this is kinda extraneous to the argument at hand here.
Let’s look at Sokovia again. Based on Zemo’s knowledge of HYDRA, it seems implied that Sokovia’s military had been co-opted by HYDRA when it operated within their borders. So any attempts to gain permission to infiltrate Sokovia to get the last remnant of HYDRA(ignoring further events in AOS) would have been absolutely rebuffed. What is the solution to that?
@135 – dptullos: Everything you just said.
@139 Aeryl
In this context, “taking responsibility” means “I and my friends with superpowers use our superpowers to do whatever we want, and no non-superpowered people get a voice in what happens.”
The Avengers have more raw power than any police force. But that power is unconstrained by any legal rules of engagement, review boards, or democratic control. They are a small group with the strength of an army, and they don’t answer to anyone.
“That sleazebag Ross”, on the other hand, works for people who are democratically elected. Whether we like him or not, he is part of a legitimate system of government, and he is accountable to that system. Captain America, on the other hand, does whatever he wants. We’re very lucky that Captain America generally wants to do good things, but it’s not safe or wise to allow private individuals to wield unchecked power.
People with “political agendas” will sometimes want to stop the Avengers from acting. Sometimes they’ll be wrong, and sometimes they’ll be right. Surrendering responsibility isn’t always a bad thing, especially when you’re establishing the precedent that superheroes will operate under some kind of law, rather than simply working within a “might makes right” system.
@140 Aeryl
I think the idea is that the Avengers don’t simply get to make the call about whether they invade a foreign country. I agree that it won’t always be possible to ask a country for permission, especially when the local government is infiltrated by the people you’re investigating.
But if the Avengers don’t have to ask someone for permission, then they’re essentially a private police force going anywhere and doing anything they want, and no one has any way of keeping them in check.
If I got a bunch of my friends together to invade a foreign country as part of a personal counter-terrorist operation, you can be sure that the government would have problems with that. But Steve Rogers isn’t an active member of the military, and he doesn’t work for the FBI. He’s a private citizen, just like me, except that he has superpowers.
In a democracy, all forms of lawful authority come from the people. The military is obedient to elected leaders, police chiefs are directly elected or appointed by elected leaders, judges are appointed by elected leaders…all legitimate power ultimately comes from the consent of the governed.
Except for the Avengers, who aren’t elected leaders and don’t answer to elected leaders. They’re a private organization with more power than an army division, and they don’t have to care what the people think.
The Avengers have more raw power than any police force. But that power is unconstrained by any legal rules of engagement, review boards, or democratic control. They are a small group with the strength of an army, and they don’t answer to anyone.
And that needs to change, I don’t deny that. I deny the Accords specifically, are the answer. Especially when the Accords enable extrajudicial assassination, the illicit recruitment of minors without their guardian’s permission and human trafficking(Peter did not have a passport at that time, since we see him get it in FFH, so he had to smuggled into Germany), and suffer from an institutional inability to reassess their misconceptions based on new evidence.
And that’s not even considering the fact that the OTHER Ross(Martin Freeman’s character) lets T’Challa go, in defiance of the Accords, which demand his imprisonment and the confiscation of his suit. In Homecoming, Tony is about to make Spiderman an “official Avenger” which would mean signing onto the Accords, which in most sensible places he would be unable to do so as a minor. NOBODY gives a flying fig about the Accords after this movie, which is a clear indication that they are garbage, which is exactly Steve’s point. They aren’t going to prevent the next catastrophe(Hello Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian), and they will enable bad actors to escape accountability in non democratic nations under the guide of “national sovereignty”.
Surrendering responsibility isn’t always a bad thing
No, it is always a bad thing. Surrendering responsibility is the OPPOSITE of accountability, not it’s counterpart. Even soldiers are responsible for defying unlawful orders, despite the fact that they swear to uphold the chain of command and follow orders, and they are held accountable for failing to do that.
But if the Avengers don’t have to ask someone for permission,
But neither did SHIELD. And sure, SHIELD was HYDRA in disguise, but the idea that SHIELD had the right to insert itself where it liked was baked into the MCU from the beginning. Ross was one of the most ardent defenders of that mindset(sorry Harlem), and we’ve been shown nothing within the MCU to believe he has repented, which means he’s not to be engaged with in good faith. The fact that Ross is even involved is supposed to be a HUGE indicator to the audience that there is something smelly about the Accords.
They should absolutely have to ask permission, but then you have to build into that what happens when that permission is denied, and action is still required. The Accords don’t do that.
In a democracy, all forms of lawful authority come from the people.
The Accords aren’t just about America, nor are most of the countries signing onto it democracies, I don’t know why you keep bringing this up like it’s relevant to the topic at hand.
And again, let me state I don’t understand why people keep wanting to get into the weeds with me over whether the Avengers should be overseen, and sometimes punished for their actions, when I have stated that yes they should, multiple times. My problems are specifically about what we see the Accords do, and the moral equivalence people draw between Tony and Steve, when Tony’s nothing but a selfish coward in this movie, and he singlehandedly destroyed the Avengers.
I’d also like to point out, there was still plenty of time in Ross’ window to capture Steve and his crew, when Tony forced the confrontation at the airport. There was no reason whatsoever he couldn’t have tracked them to Siberia and found out what they were up to. He knew Steve, and he knew that Steve wouldn’t be doing all this if there wasn’t something to be investigated, but at this point it’s HIS ego that won’t let him back down.
@@@@@ Aeryl
NOBODY gives a flying fig about the Accords after this movie, which is a clear indication that they are garbage,
Or just bad worldbuilding from the MCU’s part. The accords are mentioned sometimes (Ant-Eye and Hawkeye making deals, hologram Ross telling War Machine to arrest Steve and the others), but pretty much forgotten in many other parts. After the Snap it makes sense for they to be forgotten (it’s the greatest calamity ever to happen in the Universe, so the Avengers operating openly makes sense), but before it they appear only when it’s plot relevant (or funny, as in the Captain America video in Spider Man: Homecoming). It won’t be the first or the last time something is forgotten in a comic book or comic book movie because other things take precedence, like showing some kind of reward for Spiderman in his movie.
@143 – Aeryl: “nor are most of the countries signing onto it democracies”
Source?
@145
@Aeryl: interesting that the US is considered a flawed democracy. It would be hard to dispute. I agree that stressing the US government as a de facto “good guy” is a questionable position. It may have been more tenable in the movie if we were told it was sponsored by Canada/Australia/Scandinavia.
@147/Sunspear: We were a flawed democracy as of 2019. At this point, I’d say we’re rapidly shifting more toward the orange.
@137: Canadians.
@CLB: “rapidly shifting more toward the orange.”
Was that a pun?
I used to be a news junkie, but I don’t even follow the daily discussions anymore. It’s just too disheartening.
@Aeryl 143
NOBODY gives a flying fig about the Accords after this movie, which is a clear indication that they are garbage, which is exactly Steve’s point.
This is extremely inaccurate. Steve & Co are fugitives! Tony has clearly more or less given up on being a superhero.
The Accords worked exactly as they were supposed to. In other words, in the absence of any world-ending threat, the governments of the world policed themselves, the same as they had since governments existed. Captain America is making things worse when he decides to violently confront some terrorists in a random market in Nigeria, instead of, you know… alerting the Nigerian authorities.
You make all these random assumptions about where the Accords come from (no indication whatsoever Tony is responsible), what they’re meant to do, or how impactful they are. You keep bringing up the fact that Tony brings Peter to Germany in order to apprehend a known criminal as if that is a trump card and not an irrelevant argument. Should Tony include Peter in fighting Thanos? Peter is clearly mature enough to make these decisions on his own, and in fact already is… what is wrong with respecting that? Moreover, making a morally questionable choice in the pursuit of an ethical goal doesn’t invalidate that goal. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus as part of the American Civil War – does that mean that extirpating slavery was somehow wrong, and that the North cedes the moral high ground to the Confederacy as a result?That’s the argument your making.
No, it is always a bad thing. Surrendering responsibility is the OPPOSITE of accountability, not it’s counterpart. Even soldiers are responsible for defying unlawful orders, despite the fact that they swear to uphold the chain of command and follow orders, and they are held accountable for failing to do that.
No, it isn’t. Your soldier example is a good one, because there is a ton of gray area. Yes, if your superior officer orders you to massacre a bunch of children, you get held accountable too. If your superior officer tells you to attack an armed enemy, you don’t get to say no.
You know what the difference is? A soldier volunteers to put himself/herself into that command structure, and understands that there may come a day when they need to refuse an unlawful order. Steve & Co are arguing that not only should they not have to obey unlawful orders, but lawful ones they don’t like!
There is nothing morally questionable about the Mexican government saying to the US “we don’t want your help cleaning up the cartels, we’ll do it ourselves.” Even if they don’t do it well, that’s their prerogative. The Avengers don’t want to be in the chain of command, they want to be at the top of it! The Avengers are explicitly asking for the right to kill whoever they want without ramification or oversight. This is not disputable. They go to Nigeria on their own accord. Innocents die. And they face no consequence. And Steve Rogers says, explicitly, that this is the “deal” they make. As if he and Wanda are the ones paying the price here! If you accept Steve’s position, then you accept that he can walk into your home and murder you tomorrow and claim it’s for the greater good. Because he sure as shit wasn’t explaining his motives to the other dozens of people who died.
But neither did SHIELD. And sure, SHIELD was HYDRA in disguise, but the idea that SHIELD had the right to insert itself where it liked was baked into the MCU from the beginning. Ross was one of the most ardent defenders of that mindset(sorry Harlem), and we’ve been shown nothing within the MCU to believe he has repented, which means he’s not to be engaged with in good faith. The fact that Ross is even involved is supposed to be a HUGE indicator to the audience that there is something smelly about the Accords.
SHIELD is explicitly shown as a multinational force. We don’t know anything further about how it operates, but it already has more legitimacy than what amounts to a bunch of Americans running around intervening in (mostly) poor areas of the world.
And Ross being involved is an obvious hail mary by the production team to somehow discredit a deal which represents the interests of something like 99% of the people on Earth. The Sokovia Accords are obviously the ethical choice here, and this was realized in some dim way by Marvel, so they had to figure out a way to discredit this and give Our Heroes legitimate grounds for taking the position that they and they alone get to decide who is worth killing and who is worth saving in pursuit of whatever goal they want. By his logic, nothing that stops Captain America from casually killing half a dozen Jamaicans the next time he decides he wants jerk chicken for dinner. After all, if he’s hungry, he won’t be able to stop threats to the planet. When you give one man the power to decide life and death (explicitly what the Avengers want), you have to understand that even the most ethically responsible person on the plant (Cap) may one day be supplanted by a person who is willing to casually murder hundreds if not thousands of people because of a childhood grudge (Wanda).
She’s not absolved. She is engaged in restorative justice, but you wouldn’t get that with your obsession with punitive justice. Which is funny, considering Wanda is a woman who was traumatized as a child, and was manipulated into harming people in a quest for justice, because she was taught that justice was punitive. It’s something a lot of people believe, it’s why the American prison system does so much damage.
SPeaking of Wanda. Where are you coming up with this? You claim Wanda is engaged in “restorative justive.” Where do we ever hear that? When do we ever see one person in the entire franchise say “everyone agreed Wanda wasn’t fully responsible, she is/should atone for her role in knowingly and directly aiding Ultron”?
I am not obsessed with punitive justice. The idea that Wanda should aid others as her own form of penance for what she did is attractive. But for someone as obsessed with responsibility as you are, we NEVER see Wanda take one ounce of responsibility for what she did. Even leaving out the assisting-in-genocide bit, which she may have some excuse for, she was more than willing to kill and cause destruction to help get a very personal form of revenge on one person who she nebulously and erroneously thinks harmed her (Tony Stark). Name the one time the MCU addresses this fact? She’s sorry she accidentally killed a bunch of Wakandans while trying to save lives in Nigeria, sure… but the fact that many of the issues the Avengers have can be directly traced to her knowingly messing with her mind? The fact that she’s willing to kill an uncounted number of people in the name of personal revenge…. where is that ever atoned for, ever acknowledged?
You assume all of this crap happens offscreen because it’s the only way to make Captain America even slightly sympathic. Tony is the mastermind of the Sokovia Accords. Wanda is atoning for past misdeeds. On and on and on, when we have evidence for none of it.
Here’s what we know. The entire world, effectively, has asked that the Avengers stop violating their sovereignty and intervening in their borders at will and without permission. Right? That’s all they say, that some sort of international commission/board, or SOME outside authority, have some control over when the Avengers are allowed to use lethal force. Steve objects to this because his moral code will require him to act, possibly in cases where the government in question would prefer he didn’t.
Stopping right there, we have a million and one problems. What happens if Steve is mind controlled? What happens if someone impersonates Steve? What if Steve is constipated when the call comes in and someone with a lesser moral compass makes the decision? What if Steve is permanently gone, and someone with a lesser moral compass is making these decisions? For that matter, why should Steve get to judge the value of one human life over another? He’s a privileged white dude from Brooklyn, why should his morals and his ethics be considered superior to that of a person from another culture? The obvious subtext of the Lagos fiasco is that Steve doesn’t trust the authorities to deal with terrorists. Why not? He seems absolutely certain that the German police are capable of killing/stopping the Winter Soldier, but the Nigerians can’t, with foreknowledge, stop Crossbones? Hmm, a more PC commentator might point out the racist implication in that. Beyond that example, different cultures have different values. Steve is asking for the right to assert the supremacy of a very specific value set, rooted in white Depression-era Brooklyn.
You’ve never addressed ANY of these points. You keep saying the Sokovia Accords aren’t worth the paper they’re written on because of Tony’s involvement, but if Tony weren’t around those points would be equally valid. And on the other side, if Captain America isn’t around calling the shots, all of a sudden you’re on far shakier moral footing.
And for what it’s worth, that was me stopping after the first couple of problematic points.
@146 – Aeryl: You don’t know exactly what countries signed the Accords, nor what the democracy index looks like in the MCU.
I loathe “Captain America: Civil War” with every fiber of my being. One, it’s more of an Avengers film, instead of a Captain America movie. And it allowed for Chris Evans to be robbed of his third solo movie, thanks to Robert “Fucking” Downey Jr’s insistence on being the film’s co-lead, instead of a mere supporting character.
Two, the plot is a convoluted mess. What exactly broke up the Avengers? The Sokovia Accords or the personal conflict between Steve and Tony over Bucky Barnes. The screenplay couldn’t make up its mind.
And three, there is NO conflict over the Sokovia Accords. AN ACCORD IS AN AGREEMENT, NOT A LAW. Anyone who did not sign the Accords should have never been held accountable for using their abilities, unless it was used to break those laws already on the books. Apparently, Kevin Feige and the film’s screenwriters lacked the brains to realize this. And the Sokovia Accords is A VIOLATION OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION. This was never pointed out in this film, or in any of the MCU productions that followed. Why Feige had failed to have this pointed this out in the movies that followed. I don’t know. Perhaps he’s into fascism.
Tony was the main creator of Ultron. The suit that gave him enhanced abilities wasn’t the culprit. Tony’s brains, lack of emotions and his goddamn ego were responsible. He never had the balls to openly admitted that he had done wrong, unlike Wanda. Even as late as “ENDGAME”, he refused to accept that his creation of Ultron was wrong. He tried to blame Steve Rogers for Thanos’ victory. And worse, he allowed his fellow Avengers to pay the price for his own mistake. Perhaps his ass should have been the only one monitored, instead of the entire team. And it was a combination of his
@153/Lee Jones: ” And it allowed for Chris Evans to be robbed of his third solo movie, thanks to Robert “Fucking” Downey Jr’s insistence on being the film’s co-lead, instead of a mere supporting character.”
No, because the film was based on a comics storyline in which Iron Man and Captain America were featured equally as the leaders of the opposing factions. That was built into the concept.
“Why Feige had failed to have this pointed this out in the movies that followed. I don’t know. Perhaps he’s into fascism.”
It is ridiculous and grossly unfair to mistake a storyteller’s choice in a work of fiction for their opinions about the real world. I mean, come on, we’re talking about a franchise where there are superpowers and aliens and magic and time travel. Nobody expects it to be a realistic depiction of how the world works. The Accords worked that way because it served the story, nothing more.
First off, a flaw of the movie was not posting ALL the regulations of the Accords as they were shown in Agents of SHIELD which has been confirmed over & over to be Canon.
* Registering your Identities This wasn’t just the Avengers, this was ANYONE w/Abilities. Which is why the inhumans were being bullied into it in AoS. (Which later was proven a crap decision, as a group started assassinating people on the list)
* F*cking TRACKING DEVICES people! Even if it was a docile power that just kept the person alive.
* DNA testing and ID cards categorizing their powers
* They would have to go on the missions assigned to them by the UN whether they agreed with them or not. They would be the UN’s personal kill squad.
* Could be held INDEFINITELY W/OUT TRIAL Which is illegal by the way
* No technology that can help said superheroes w/out the UN’s permission (Tony helping out Peter in Homecoming anyone?)
………
Tony Stark worked w/Ross & the UN for MONTHS on the accords, but he only brought it to the team to discuss when it was 3 DAYS from being put into affect. He didn’t want to discuss them, he wanted to push them into agreeing with him.
Some people on this thread keep repeating that Bucky DESERVED to be locked up in a hole or killed. Hell with you. This was a decorated soldier that was Tortured and Brainwashed for 70 years. He was turned into a weapon. You don’t blame the gun, you blame the person pulling the trigger…..HYDRA. He did need to be brought in, proven to be a victim, having the REAL wrongdoers brought out, and he needed help. Which thankfully he got in Wakanda. If it was up to Everett Ross, he would have been locked away & forgotten. (Him laughing at Cap when Cap asked about his trial). And this is the people that want control over what the Avengers do.
Yes, Steve was stupid for not telling Tony about his parents after he found out in Winter Soldier. That’s on him. But there is NO FUCKING WAY that I would stand by and let him try to kill my friend. And Tony was trying to kill him. Chased him down as he was trying to escape. that’s not just wanting to punch the guy, that’s wanting to kill him. And Steve ENDED the fight by deactivating the reactor. If he was trying to kill Tony, he would have slammed that Shield down on his neck. Was it a realistic reaction on Tony’s part? Yes. Was it forgivable? yes. Was it RIGHT? HELL NO.
T’Challa & Tony broke the freakin’ accords MULTIPLE times w/in a few days of signing it. But hey, they BELIEVE in it & anyone that doesn’t needs to be arrested. Except for them apparently. Not to mention, Tony continues to break them by helping Peter in Homecoming who NEVER signed the accords but keeps superheroing.
So many times I hear of how horrible Steve was and how Tony was such a victim of everything, and how rainbows come out of his ass. When the reality is that they BOTH fucked up. They BOTH made mistakes that broke the Avengers up. Steve legit believed that 5 psycho super soldiers were fixing to be loosed upon the world. And what would the Accords have had them doing? Waiting for weeks while they decided if it was worthwhile, while people died. Look at what Ross and the other paper pushers were doing when Infinity War happened? When Cap walked in on Rhodey talking to Ross, all Ross wanted was to have Cap arrested. No mention of the fact of what they were going to do against a Titan alien trying to destroy everything. The accords in the comics were more about controlling superheroes and keeping them under thumb than actual accountability. Trying to bring a comic story into the real world doesn’t work. That’s the point of superheroes, they do what normal people can’t. And yes, it’s just them deciding what’s right and wrong, but THAT’S what makes them superheroes or villians, how they handle having that power.
Well, no one can say this movie didn’t give people something to think about. The comments here are flying.
To step away from the “who’s right/who’s wrong” debate, I agree with Keith that the ending winds up turning this into T’Challa’s story. It works incredibly well too. The scene with him and Zemo on the mountaintop is, for my money, the best scene in the MCU. Two magnificent actors giving rich and poignant performances. The world truly lost something special when Chadwick Boseman died.
@@@@@ 156 – Trying to bring a comic story into the real world doesn’t work. That’s the point of superheroes, they do what normal people can’t. And yes, it’s just them deciding what’s right and wrong, but THAT’S what makes them superheroes or villians, how they handle having that power.
Except we see multiple instances of characters who handle the power differently at different times.
No one thinks Tony Stark is a victim, by the way – the objection is that his motivations are heroic, even if he’s allowed to make mistakes. He’s right that the Earth needs protection, even if his creation of Ultron goes badly wrong. Frankly, he’s right that the Avengers are a dangerous extra-governmental outfit. You can complain about how comic book storylines don’t belong in the real world, but that’s what makes the movie compelling, and beyond that, these arguments play out every day! There are many organizations, government-backed and not, that make choices to use violence for what they perceive to be the greater good, on a daily basis. The only difference between the Avengers and the US Government is the the US government was elected. The only differences between the Avengers and Hamas is that Hamas is fighting for Palestinians (and can make a reasonable argument to represent them) and the Avengers are fighting for Americans (and, of course, don’t represent anyone except themselves).
In that context, how heroes use their powers is exceptionally important. No one has addressed the fact that Tony creates Ultron because of Wanda’s influence. No one seems to be bothered by the fact that unrepentant war criminals are members of the Avengers. No one seems to care that when the governments of the world came to the Avengers and said “we’re not comfortable with you employing lethal force in our borders,” they said “eff you!”. The Avengers are terrorists, at that point, and should be accurately termed so. The fact that we’re meant to align with their morals and actions doesn’t take away from that, any more than the fact that many Nigerians probably support Boko Haram makes their goals or actions justifiable. Fine, Ultron may be a failure, but Tony’s intentions are in the right place (and again, there is a direct link to Wanda’s manipulation and Tony’s desire to create Ultron)… but I’d rather that than make the implicit argument that Steve Rogers’ opinion is worth more consideration than the united desires of the overwhelming majority of humanity. Why even bother with the fiction that Captain America is a hero anymore? Give him life and death dictatorial power over the globe, because that’s effectively what you assert when you say that his moral compass is pure enough to overrule humanity as a united whole.
@156/Jennifer S: “Trying to bring a comic story into the real world doesn’t work. That’s the point of superheroes, they do what normal people can’t.”
On the contrary, commenting on the real world has always been part of the point of superheroes. Superman started out as a crusader against real-world issues like government corruption, the mistreatment of the poor by the powerful, even the negligence of auto manufacturers churning out badly made deathtrap cars to save money. Captain America punched Hitler before it was cool. Wonder Woman was a crusader for women’s rights. The wish-fulfillment fantasy element is not that superheroes are unconnected to the real world’s problems, but that they can address or solve those problems in ways we don’t have access to in real life.
Exactly