Captain America: Civil War
Saw the latest Marvel offering last night, and I feel a mighty need to ramble about many things. This is not a review so much as me working out various ideas as I think through them but
Well that was interesting - the Russos are very good at misleading trailers as very little played out as it was implied in the last trailer I saw! And they've done another game changer for the MCU - first they tore down SHIELD and now the Avengers are broken, half of them are fugitives and the Sokovia Accords stand, which was something I wasn't expecting to be left still unresolved at the end (though I maybe should have).
I saw an interesting interview with the Russos where they talked about being able to give Steve this big arc where he's gone from patriot in TFA to rebelling against command in TWS and now to being an outright insurgent operating outside the law, and how because of TWS and AoU both Steve and Tony end up on sides of the Accord question that they probably wouldn't have before those events. Tony wouldn't have wanted to give up any control to others without the guilt from creating Ultron (flagged up very nicely by the encounter at the start of CW with a grieving mother which is effectively low key) and Steve would probably have agreed with oversight if he hadn't just had demonstrated how corruptible the existing power structures are by the fact that Hydra was able to work within them all without even being noticed because their actions and objectives were indistinguishable from those with supposedly better intentions.
Interestingly, if I think about the Accords issue in any kind of real world context, it leaves me feeling that despite my total partisanship for Steve Rogers, while they showed he had good (and in-character) reasons for all the actions he took in the film, in the bigger picture it was actually Team Tony that were right, though Tony at least wasn't necessarily making the decision for the right reason. Because though Steve had a point that them being ordered or prevented from acting may not ultimately be a good thing (and there are other implications I get into below), the Avengers really shouldn't be able to ride roughshod over the world with no accountability. It's the competition between "with great power comes great responsiblity" versus "power corrupts" - I think Steve sees their responsibility to do what they can where necessary to save people as the most important factor while I think the proponents of the Accords outside the team quite rightly feel that there should be more checks in place on that than the Avenger's own consciences, and in real life I would agree.
Going back to the MCU context, inside the Avengers I think the reasons are slightly more complicated - Rhodey is the most used to working in that kind of accountable structure from the military and is probably the one I think is most genuinely in agreement with the need to comply with the Accords. Natasha I think sees which way the wind is blowing politically as much as anything else and is trying to avoid further sanctions, Vision is trying to calculate the logic of which is safest for others, Wanda is reacting against the idea of being a prisoner and a tool again. Sam I'm not quite sure of, but there was something about his exchange with Rhodey (which I unfortunately can't remember the words) that made me think he sees the Accords as a slippery slope to them giving up too many rights and becoming just weapons in someone else's control and that he also doesn't have the trust in the system that Rhodey does. I think Clint sees the same thing as Natasha, but as he only comes in to help Steve and Bucky get to Siberia and stop a major disaster after the team has split I’m still speculating whether he would have taken her path if he’d been there for the meeting with Ross and that the context of needing to stop something else is specifically why he is on Steve’s side, or if he would have been Team Cap from the start.
But I think Tony has got all tangled up in the guilt and learned a wrong lesson from Ultron, and I think his decision is probably a mix of wanting to give responsibility to someone else so that he can't make such a huge error again and him believing that without signing they are all in real danger from the government. Where I think there is a wrong lesson is that I don't see how having UN oversight previously would have stopped him creating Ultron, unless he is planning to give oversight of all his inventions to outsiders which I really, really doubt he is capable of or intends to do. I think the mistake he made with Ultron was going off half-cocked into a grand scheme without telling or discussing with the rest of the team to get their perspectives on whether it was a good idea or not - which he immediately did again in creating Vision - and since what he seems to have learned is not to trust the team around him more but only to trust himself less, I don't see him ending up anywhere particularly good on this path (I’m wondering particularly how long it will be before he’s being pushed to give weapons to other people again). The danger side is more interesting as I think he genuinely believes this is the best way to protect the Avengers from eventually being hunted down and locked up as too dangerous by the rest of the world (which is where I think Natasha is coming from as well).
I think Steve on the other hand is reacting in the opposite way to that threat - and I think he does realise it is there from the way Ross is clearly classifying both Bruce and Thor as weapons to be tracked and watched, not people - by pushing back rather than complying. Which is maybe not particularly politically smart, but is in character for him reacting extremely badly to any type of bullying. And Ross gets his back up straight away, not just with the comments about Thor and Bruce, but I think by presenting such a biased view of the Avengers in the clips he shows to try and browbeat them into being guilty and ashamed. In neither the fight against the Chitauri or bringing down the Helicarriers did they have a choice of ground to keep it away from civilians, and his presentation also ignores completely that without the Avengers in New York the city would first have been mostly defenceless and then nuked and without Steve and the others the Helicarriers would have murdered however many million people it was as soon as they launched, so blaming them for the villains actions and not being omnipotent enough to stop any loss of life is a false argument. Lagos is the same on a slightly smaller scale as if Wanda hadn't tried to lift the explosion it would have killed the people in the market instead, so she is damned either way and taking the blame for a situation Crossbones created, not the Avengers. If Ross had gone with Hulk losing it in Johannesburg, Ultron and Sokovia as his examples, I think Steve may not have reacted quite so negatively to the idea of the Avengers needing at least to be accountable to some other organisation. Though I think he would still also have been concerned about being used as tools for agendas aside from saving people, corruption in the system if they give up control and possibly also what it means to "retire" when the powerful are classing them as a dangerous weapon whose location needs to be known at all times... Either that means literal loss of freedom because they are going to be locked up, or being constantly monitored and under threat of being locked up for stepping out of line or yanked back into service as needed. And it may start with the "out of control" ones (by whose judgement?) but that may not be where it ends.
Which is a very long winded way of saying that I think on that question Tony is running with "if we agree now it will stop it getting worse later, we shouldn't act yet" and Steve is running with "if we agree now, it will ensure it gets worse later because we've already surrendered, we have to stand against it now". I think on the whole Natasha actually agrees more with Steve on the direction things may go but thinks it is more expedient to comply for a while and see. Interestingly, both Natasha and Clint warn Tony to watch his back, Clint I think fairly explicitly against Ross and with Natasha it was implied that it was against Ross or someone else “coming for” him, which is why I think they see the situation fairly similarly and with their experiences of shady spy work and working the black ops side of things they are maybe more alert to the possibilities of betrayal down the line than some of the other team members.
The Bucky plotlines really didn’t go where I was expecting them to, which was kind of cool. About the only thing I did manage to predict right was that at some point he would get triggered back into the Winter Soldier, and the book of code words made that a certainty right at the start. But I wasn’t expecting it to be after he had been captured, I had assumed (like most people) that someone would use his conditioning to commit the outrage that would get him hunted in the first place. He was also very together - fine interacting with people, living in a flat not on the streets, which was a little unexpected and I would have liked it if they had made it a bit clearer how much he remembered when as it seemed on the first interaction with Steve he was going off second-hand information but after being triggered and half-drowned he seemed to have more back. I would also have liked if there had been a bit more emotion in the reunion, but they were never exactly huggy in the previous ones so I can live with it. I’m not sure how I feel about Bucky going back into cryo at the end, though it was a nice tie up to the T’Challa plotline that he ends up helping Bucky and friends with Steve. I did like a lot too that rather than Steve going against the Accords to run with Bucky, he initially went against them to bring Bucky in and avoid other people dying trying to apprehend Bucky as much as to stop Bucky being killed. Which makes me wonder what Steve would have done once Bucky was caught if it hadn’t been for Zemo stirring the pot. He still wouldn’t have signed the Accords but I think he might actually have tried to defend and protect Bucky within whatever legal process they would have used unless/until Bucky was made a scapegoat or otherwise treated unjustly. The super kill squad story being used as a set up for Zemo to get Tony and Steve to really fight was also a neat twist - by the time they all got to Siberia I’d completely forgotten the speculation about Bucky having killed the Starks being a major cause of the rift so that came back in from left-field with a big “oh noooo” realisation. The end fight between the three was more brutal than I was expecting even from the trailer, with the extra edge that as well as being horrible because I did see a better relationship between Steve and Tony in this film and I didn’t end up wanting to see them go all out against each other, it is horrible because they are doing exactly what Zemo wants while he swans off.
Which has just occurred to me, this may be the first time the villain pretty much won all they wanted - Zemo’s plan was clever and nasty, nobody saw it coming and he played Tony and Steve beautifully. By the end he’s set them up so well that even though he flat out tells them that his goal is to get them to tear each other down, they still can’t pull back and stop it. The only thing I think was a wild card for Zemo was T’Challa’s involvement which ultimately meant Zemo didn’t get to die himself but he achieved all his other aims.
And it leaves things in an interesting way for the future films. Steve, Sam, Scott, Clint and Wanda are all escaped fugitives and while I can’t recall if it is stated that they will continue to act as superheroes outside they Accords, it is clear that if they do it is going to have be with them working underground. Natasha may also be in trouble for helping them, Steve doesn’t have his shield any more, Rhodey is severely injured, Vision is going to have to deal with making a mistake and causing Rhodey’s injury, Clint and Scott are cut off from their families due to being fugitives, Steve and Tony came within a whisker of killing each other which has to have ramifications even with Steve’s letter as an olive branch, and they’ve all of them lost the Avengers as team and family.
And that may be all I have to say, except for a quick list of things that made me happy:
- Scott Lang fanboying all over Steve
- Steve, Bucky and Sam in a VW Beetle (I now need all fics about their road-trip, with Sam and Bucky alternately bickering and ganging up on Steve and Steve threatening to pull over and make them walk)
- Spider-Man was way, way more fun than I was expecting
- Rhodey saying something like “uh, tiny dude is big now” and Tony asking if anyone on his side has some super awesome secret power left when Scott goes Giant Man
- Bucky and Sam’s almost identical reactions to Steve kissing Sharon (actual kiss I’m less keen on because I do find it a little squicky that she is related to Peggy)
- Bucky and Sam being snarky at each other
- Natasha letting them go to the Quinjet and her friendships with Steve and Clint remaining despite the Accords issue
- T’Challa was awesome and I am looking forward to his film quite a lot
Well that was interesting - the Russos are very good at misleading trailers as very little played out as it was implied in the last trailer I saw! And they've done another game changer for the MCU - first they tore down SHIELD and now the Avengers are broken, half of them are fugitives and the Sokovia Accords stand, which was something I wasn't expecting to be left still unresolved at the end (though I maybe should have).
I saw an interesting interview with the Russos where they talked about being able to give Steve this big arc where he's gone from patriot in TFA to rebelling against command in TWS and now to being an outright insurgent operating outside the law, and how because of TWS and AoU both Steve and Tony end up on sides of the Accord question that they probably wouldn't have before those events. Tony wouldn't have wanted to give up any control to others without the guilt from creating Ultron (flagged up very nicely by the encounter at the start of CW with a grieving mother which is effectively low key) and Steve would probably have agreed with oversight if he hadn't just had demonstrated how corruptible the existing power structures are by the fact that Hydra was able to work within them all without even being noticed because their actions and objectives were indistinguishable from those with supposedly better intentions.
Interestingly, if I think about the Accords issue in any kind of real world context, it leaves me feeling that despite my total partisanship for Steve Rogers, while they showed he had good (and in-character) reasons for all the actions he took in the film, in the bigger picture it was actually Team Tony that were right, though Tony at least wasn't necessarily making the decision for the right reason. Because though Steve had a point that them being ordered or prevented from acting may not ultimately be a good thing (and there are other implications I get into below), the Avengers really shouldn't be able to ride roughshod over the world with no accountability. It's the competition between "with great power comes great responsiblity" versus "power corrupts" - I think Steve sees their responsibility to do what they can where necessary to save people as the most important factor while I think the proponents of the Accords outside the team quite rightly feel that there should be more checks in place on that than the Avenger's own consciences, and in real life I would agree.
Going back to the MCU context, inside the Avengers I think the reasons are slightly more complicated - Rhodey is the most used to working in that kind of accountable structure from the military and is probably the one I think is most genuinely in agreement with the need to comply with the Accords. Natasha I think sees which way the wind is blowing politically as much as anything else and is trying to avoid further sanctions, Vision is trying to calculate the logic of which is safest for others, Wanda is reacting against the idea of being a prisoner and a tool again. Sam I'm not quite sure of, but there was something about his exchange with Rhodey (which I unfortunately can't remember the words) that made me think he sees the Accords as a slippery slope to them giving up too many rights and becoming just weapons in someone else's control and that he also doesn't have the trust in the system that Rhodey does. I think Clint sees the same thing as Natasha, but as he only comes in to help Steve and Bucky get to Siberia and stop a major disaster after the team has split I’m still speculating whether he would have taken her path if he’d been there for the meeting with Ross and that the context of needing to stop something else is specifically why he is on Steve’s side, or if he would have been Team Cap from the start.
But I think Tony has got all tangled up in the guilt and learned a wrong lesson from Ultron, and I think his decision is probably a mix of wanting to give responsibility to someone else so that he can't make such a huge error again and him believing that without signing they are all in real danger from the government. Where I think there is a wrong lesson is that I don't see how having UN oversight previously would have stopped him creating Ultron, unless he is planning to give oversight of all his inventions to outsiders which I really, really doubt he is capable of or intends to do. I think the mistake he made with Ultron was going off half-cocked into a grand scheme without telling or discussing with the rest of the team to get their perspectives on whether it was a good idea or not - which he immediately did again in creating Vision - and since what he seems to have learned is not to trust the team around him more but only to trust himself less, I don't see him ending up anywhere particularly good on this path (I’m wondering particularly how long it will be before he’s being pushed to give weapons to other people again). The danger side is more interesting as I think he genuinely believes this is the best way to protect the Avengers from eventually being hunted down and locked up as too dangerous by the rest of the world (which is where I think Natasha is coming from as well).
I think Steve on the other hand is reacting in the opposite way to that threat - and I think he does realise it is there from the way Ross is clearly classifying both Bruce and Thor as weapons to be tracked and watched, not people - by pushing back rather than complying. Which is maybe not particularly politically smart, but is in character for him reacting extremely badly to any type of bullying. And Ross gets his back up straight away, not just with the comments about Thor and Bruce, but I think by presenting such a biased view of the Avengers in the clips he shows to try and browbeat them into being guilty and ashamed. In neither the fight against the Chitauri or bringing down the Helicarriers did they have a choice of ground to keep it away from civilians, and his presentation also ignores completely that without the Avengers in New York the city would first have been mostly defenceless and then nuked and without Steve and the others the Helicarriers would have murdered however many million people it was as soon as they launched, so blaming them for the villains actions and not being omnipotent enough to stop any loss of life is a false argument. Lagos is the same on a slightly smaller scale as if Wanda hadn't tried to lift the explosion it would have killed the people in the market instead, so she is damned either way and taking the blame for a situation Crossbones created, not the Avengers. If Ross had gone with Hulk losing it in Johannesburg, Ultron and Sokovia as his examples, I think Steve may not have reacted quite so negatively to the idea of the Avengers needing at least to be accountable to some other organisation. Though I think he would still also have been concerned about being used as tools for agendas aside from saving people, corruption in the system if they give up control and possibly also what it means to "retire" when the powerful are classing them as a dangerous weapon whose location needs to be known at all times... Either that means literal loss of freedom because they are going to be locked up, or being constantly monitored and under threat of being locked up for stepping out of line or yanked back into service as needed. And it may start with the "out of control" ones (by whose judgement?) but that may not be where it ends.
Which is a very long winded way of saying that I think on that question Tony is running with "if we agree now it will stop it getting worse later, we shouldn't act yet" and Steve is running with "if we agree now, it will ensure it gets worse later because we've already surrendered, we have to stand against it now". I think on the whole Natasha actually agrees more with Steve on the direction things may go but thinks it is more expedient to comply for a while and see. Interestingly, both Natasha and Clint warn Tony to watch his back, Clint I think fairly explicitly against Ross and with Natasha it was implied that it was against Ross or someone else “coming for” him, which is why I think they see the situation fairly similarly and with their experiences of shady spy work and working the black ops side of things they are maybe more alert to the possibilities of betrayal down the line than some of the other team members.
The Bucky plotlines really didn’t go where I was expecting them to, which was kind of cool. About the only thing I did manage to predict right was that at some point he would get triggered back into the Winter Soldier, and the book of code words made that a certainty right at the start. But I wasn’t expecting it to be after he had been captured, I had assumed (like most people) that someone would use his conditioning to commit the outrage that would get him hunted in the first place. He was also very together - fine interacting with people, living in a flat not on the streets, which was a little unexpected and I would have liked it if they had made it a bit clearer how much he remembered when as it seemed on the first interaction with Steve he was going off second-hand information but after being triggered and half-drowned he seemed to have more back. I would also have liked if there had been a bit more emotion in the reunion, but they were never exactly huggy in the previous ones so I can live with it. I’m not sure how I feel about Bucky going back into cryo at the end, though it was a nice tie up to the T’Challa plotline that he ends up helping Bucky and friends with Steve. I did like a lot too that rather than Steve going against the Accords to run with Bucky, he initially went against them to bring Bucky in and avoid other people dying trying to apprehend Bucky as much as to stop Bucky being killed. Which makes me wonder what Steve would have done once Bucky was caught if it hadn’t been for Zemo stirring the pot. He still wouldn’t have signed the Accords but I think he might actually have tried to defend and protect Bucky within whatever legal process they would have used unless/until Bucky was made a scapegoat or otherwise treated unjustly. The super kill squad story being used as a set up for Zemo to get Tony and Steve to really fight was also a neat twist - by the time they all got to Siberia I’d completely forgotten the speculation about Bucky having killed the Starks being a major cause of the rift so that came back in from left-field with a big “oh noooo” realisation. The end fight between the three was more brutal than I was expecting even from the trailer, with the extra edge that as well as being horrible because I did see a better relationship between Steve and Tony in this film and I didn’t end up wanting to see them go all out against each other, it is horrible because they are doing exactly what Zemo wants while he swans off.
Which has just occurred to me, this may be the first time the villain pretty much won all they wanted - Zemo’s plan was clever and nasty, nobody saw it coming and he played Tony and Steve beautifully. By the end he’s set them up so well that even though he flat out tells them that his goal is to get them to tear each other down, they still can’t pull back and stop it. The only thing I think was a wild card for Zemo was T’Challa’s involvement which ultimately meant Zemo didn’t get to die himself but he achieved all his other aims.
And it leaves things in an interesting way for the future films. Steve, Sam, Scott, Clint and Wanda are all escaped fugitives and while I can’t recall if it is stated that they will continue to act as superheroes outside they Accords, it is clear that if they do it is going to have be with them working underground. Natasha may also be in trouble for helping them, Steve doesn’t have his shield any more, Rhodey is severely injured, Vision is going to have to deal with making a mistake and causing Rhodey’s injury, Clint and Scott are cut off from their families due to being fugitives, Steve and Tony came within a whisker of killing each other which has to have ramifications even with Steve’s letter as an olive branch, and they’ve all of them lost the Avengers as team and family.
And that may be all I have to say, except for a quick list of things that made me happy:
- Scott Lang fanboying all over Steve
- Steve, Bucky and Sam in a VW Beetle (I now need all fics about their road-trip, with Sam and Bucky alternately bickering and ganging up on Steve and Steve threatening to pull over and make them walk)
- Spider-Man was way, way more fun than I was expecting
- Rhodey saying something like “uh, tiny dude is big now” and Tony asking if anyone on his side has some super awesome secret power left when Scott goes Giant Man
- Bucky and Sam’s almost identical reactions to Steve kissing Sharon (actual kiss I’m less keen on because I do find it a little squicky that she is related to Peggy)
- Bucky and Sam being snarky at each other
- Natasha letting them go to the Quinjet and her friendships with Steve and Clint remaining despite the Accords issue
- T’Challa was awesome and I am looking forward to his film quite a lot