Captain America: Civil War (2016)

In the wake of The Avengers (2012), a gleeful if deliberately lightweight work that served as climax to all the good and not so good work Marvel had managed in building their cinematic universe, I started to feel that the Marvel franchise began to run on creative fumes and general good will. The gaudy, exhausting follow-up Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) capped a run of momentarily enjoyable but scattershot, superfluous individual hero movies (Iron Man Three; Thor: The Dark World, both 2013) and a pleasantly empty expansion into space opera (Guardians of the Galaxy, 2014). 2015’s Ant-Man felt minor but also refreshing in large part because it was a patent retreat from the excessively busy and self-involved tone of the evolving series. Age of Ultron was a fascinating failure of a film, working as a breathless act of one-upmanship over its predecessor but also revealing Joss Whedon’s lacks as a filmmaker in some rather painful ways and suggesting Marvel could broaden but not deepen their palette. Captain America: Civil War therefore comes loaded with a heightened level of expectation, as it raises the question as to whether the Marvel brand can really find a way to organise a large and complex field of heroes with dramatic effect, and contemplate darker motifs without losing grip on the fun that’s supposed to be inherent in superhero movies. In this regard Civil War follows the naggingly interesting if undoubtedly failed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a film which tackled many of the same ideas. The helmsmen here are Anthony and Joe Russo, who previously made Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) after years plugging away in indie film and TV. The Winter Soldier was the best post-The Avengers Marvel film, if not entirely successful as an attempt to add the paranoid, down-to-earth aesthetics of ‘70s-style cop films and conspiracy dramas to the Marvel imprimatur. 

Although officially another character entry for Steve ‘Captain America’ Rogers (Chris Evans), Civil War is really a de facto Avengers film, offering almost the full roster off Marvel’s increasingly deep bench of characters. The basic motive of Civil War’s plotline nonetheless takes up where The Winter Soldier left off, as Cap’s pal, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who had been captured by the villainous organisation HYDRA, brainwashed, and augmented into a super-warrior but then dubiously restored by Cap, resurfaces. The film opens with an initially enigmatic glimpse of what seems to have been one of Bucky’s less spectacular if still nefarious deeds for HYDRA, as he causes a car accident on a lonely road late at night in 1991, and retrieves a load of obscure serum from the boot. A quarter-century later, Bucky becomes the object of an international manhunt after it seems he stages a terrorist attack on a UN meeting in Vienna. This attack exacerbates a watershed sweeping down on the Avengers, after their attempts to take out former HYDRA agent Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo), who’s reinvented himself as terrorist-supervillain Crossbones, in Kenya results in Wanda ‘Scarlet Witch’ Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) accidentally blowing up an office building where several envoys from the small African nation of Wakanda are meeting. Wakanda’s king T’Chaka (John Kani) and his son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) join an international coalition demanding controls be placed on the growing number of “enhanced” people at large in the world, and an international treaty, called the Sokovia Accord after the city trashed in Age of Ultron, is written, proposing that a UN panel be set up and superheroes registered and supervised by bureaucratic taskmasters. 

Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jnr), shamed by the mother (Alfre Woodard) of a young aid worker who died in Sokovia and continuing his recent drift towards a conscientious desire to hand over responsibility for the world peace he once claimed to have privatised, becomes the main proponent of accepting the Accord, but Cap dissents, insisting they can’t give up their right to autonomy in case they’re compelled to take part in acts they don’t approve of, or worse, compelled to sit on their hands when they're really needed. The moment Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), former General and perpetual foe of the Hulk, takes up the task of enforcing the accord, the strong whiff of fascism hits the nostrils, but Cap’s objections take on an unavoidably personal colour whenever his old pal, his last living link to his past after Sharon Carter dies, is concerned. The schism properly manifests after the Vienna bombing, which kills T’Chaka. With evidence pointing to Bucky as the culprit, Cap is moved to chase down his friend and protect him from the wrath of security services and of T’Challa, who vows vengeance and soon hits the warpath in the guise of his national mythical defender, the Black Panther, swathed in a suitable suit made of vibranium. Meanwhile, a former Sokovian intelligence agent named Zemo (Daniel Brühl) interrogates ex-members of HYDRA and moves around the world with insidious designs, seeking both the keywords that allow Bucky’s internal programming to be reset, with particular interest in the car crash glimpsed at the outset. Just exactly what this part of the story involves is carefully meted out as the film unspools, and provides much too interesting a twist to spoil here. Suffice to say that as Cap realises Zemo is behind several of the engineered acts propelling the schism, but to investigate it and keep Bucky safe realises he’ll have to punch his way through Tony and the other members of the Avenger team who are determined to enforce the Accord.

Civil War might just be a bit too measured and knit-browed for the Marvel series’ younger fans. A great deal of the first half of the film is devoted to character interaction and argument over the rights and wrongs of violent action, and I’m sure some will feel it offers too much talk. But this is what made the film feel special and substantial for me, and Civil War proves the movie Age of Ultron should have been: the fitting culminating point of several contending storylines and a clearing ground for the next phase, and a film dedicated as much to exploring the way a set of people we know well and care about trying to maintain their connections in the face of great tests as it is to providing thrills and spills, remembering all the while that thrills and spills come most enjoyably when they’re motivated clearly by those characters. The Russos don’t have Whedon’s loquacious moxie or Zach Snyder’s visual bravura, but prove far superior as organisers of screen narrative outlay, able to handle a complicated narrative landscape with many moving parts and still give every character a chance to register however brief their appearance. The filmmakers find as much fun in depicting casual and human-level elements, like Vision’s fussy efforts to humanise himself and the early glimmerings of his canonical romance with Wanda, as they do with chase and fight scenes. The screenplay, by regular series dramaturges Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, is adroit and confident in sketching them all, whilst the actors playing them are in consistently good form, except perhaps for Cheadle, who seems well aware he might as well not be here.

Particularly cool is the glib, funny way the film allows Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man (Tom Holland), to enter this realm. Tony, alerted by YouTube videos of Queens’ greatest swinger, tracks him down to augment his team, contending with Marisa Tomei’s perturbingly hot take on Aunt May and negotiating with his much younger counterpart in wiseacre genius, thus rendering all the efforts of the lumbering Amazing Spider-Man diptych even more pointless. Holland and Boseman, the new blood here, are both excellent in roles that could easily have seemed clumsily shoehorned in. I'd even go so far as to say the only films Marvel should be making now should have more than two or more their core characters, as they come to life best when glancing off others who count as their equals. But the fact that this narrative was tackled under the Captain America banner is probably, ironically, what allowed the Russos a freer hand in this regard, as there’s no expectation the finale has to squeeze in every character, but can use them and change focus according to the needs of the moment. If the first half of Civil War is tense and concerted, the second half cuts loose with exactly what we all came to see, with the two different camps of superheroes contending in an airport – Tony leading Spidey, Natasha ‘Black Widow’ Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), cyborg Vision (Paul Bettany), James ‘War Machine’ Rhodes (Don Cheadle), Cap backed up by Bucky, Wanda, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Sam ‘Falcon’ Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and late ring-in Scott ‘Ant-Man’ Lang (Paul Rudd) for a glorious free-for-all bash-up as Cap and Bucky try to give chase to Zemo, and T’Challa trying simply to bring down his quarry all the while. 

The Russos, who revealed surprising gifts for staging large-scale action with The Winter Soldier, here utilise the conflicting, more cinematically dynamic talents of Spidey and Ant-Man to bring what is essentially large-scale slapstick humour to the fight, where most of the combatants can’t quite keep the grins off their faces as they bash and beat and zap their pals. If the first few action scenes in the film suffer from an excessive amount of shaking camera syndrome, presumably to lend immediacy to the enterprise, the Russos settle down for the big bout. Smartly, though, Civil War actually saves its punchiest – in both senses of the word – scenes for the finale, staged on a much smaller scale and invoking the fervent emotional quandaries of two hitherto stalwart heroes, both of whom are pushed towards acts that cut against the grain of the most cherished ideals. Interestingly, one aspect that helps make Civil War superior to Dawn of Justice is the way it uses continual pivots from humour to solemnity to leverage its concerns, as opposed to the cumulatively oppressive gravitas of Snyder’s film, because in this way our affection for the characters can be raised and then used against us. We’re left to contemplate just how much we actually like, say, Tony, whose sense of humour has long covered the fact his real motives when studied tend to be confused and alarming, whilst Cap, whose status as national representative gives way increasingly to disdain for power structures and becomes more a matter of personal allegiance, to the point where he starts to seem more like Captain Libertarian. 

If Civil War starts as a metaphor for the increasingly fraught idea of interventionist power in the post-9/11 age, a note that’s already bubbled to the surface in several other recent superhero films, by its end it seems more an inward-turning study, contemplating diverging ideas of liberty constantly at loggerheads in modern political discourse as exemplified by our heroes and their outlooks. I particularly liked one off-hand moment when Lang, told siding with Cap and his cadre will make him a criminal, shrugs and confirms that’s hardly new to him: here the film seems to catch the essence of something it tries to articulate throughout, the schism between those who feel the touch of social authority as an embrace, like son-of-a-cold-warrior Tony, or as an icy burn, and which way you’ll break depends on how that authority has treated you. One more aspect of Civil War which I expect will attract some criticism and yet one I instead feel makes it stand out is the subplot of Zemo’s agenda, as he manipulates events to set the Avengers at loggerheads and to gain access to Bucky. At first it seems the filmmakers are setting up the seemingly inevitable common enemy to fight a la Luthor and Doomsday in Dawn of Justice, but actually proves to be something much simpler, and yet which serves perfectly to ram home the narrative’s ultimate point: sometimes there are acts that cannot be forgiven and experiences that, no matter how similar to those of others, cannot be reconciled, and the film presents new ground for Marvel basically by ripping its old presumptions apart. The very competence and straightforward integrity of Civil War might be considered a fault, the absence of grinding gears signalled by the efforts of personal vision trying to work with franchise filmmaking telling, and I will admit it does lack any glimpse of the truly fantastic, the sense of Wagnerian grandeur Ken Branagh brought to Thor (2011), or the wittily pictographic, as when Whedon managed to translate the aesthetic of the fold-up spread into filmic terms in the climax of The Avengers. But frankly Civil War kept me entertained, even riveted me from go to woah, and it vaults right to the head of the superhero movie pack.