Bangs And Flashes: A Review of “Captain America: Civil War”

Bangs And Flashes: A Review of “Captain America: Civil War” May 6, 2016

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Captain America: Civil War is now available in the usual assortment of digital and disc formats.

I was excited about this one. I enjoy Marvel movies; I admire the way the take the rather outlandish and often stylized world of comic books and weave it into the relative realism of live action films. I like how a character who’s played a part in hundreds of complicated comic book plots is presented to the audience so clearly, so quickly that we don’t need to be comic readers to appreciate them. I also like all the little in jokes that please people who have loved Marvel comics for years. Marvel movies have consistently impressed me, and I was prepared to be impressed again. But I’m afraid I wasn’t 100% impressed. It wasn’t a bad movie overall, but there were a couple of flaws that kept me from thoroughly enjoying it.

Captain America: Civil War involves a plot to frame Cap’s old partner Bucky for a terrorists plot. Due to an agreement with the UN that most of the Avengers signed, only a few of the Avengers will believe him or help him save Bucky and get to the bottom of the intrigue before chaos is unleashed on the world. Spider-Man and Ant Man make appearances. There is a funny cameo by the wonderful Stan Lee. There are explosions. There are acrobatics. There are drawn out angsty arguments and guns that go “piu piu piu.”

I’ll cut to the chase (which this film doesn’t) and give you the positives first. Foremost is the character building for Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Junior). They way they are pitted against one another is very well-written and plotted, and their acting is phenomenal. I never completely felt for Steve Rogers in any Marvel movie before, but this film had me genuinely admiring him. I really liked the way the characters deepened throughout the film, and I’m excited to see where they go next.

Another overwhelming positive is that the blockbuster fight scene involving Spider-Man an Ant Man is awesome. It’s one of the best fight scenes I’ve ever watched in a superhero movie. It’s well choreographed, it’s colorful, It’s funny, the stakes are high, we care deeply about all the fighters on each side, there are surprising twists at every moment. Tom Holland is excellent as Spider-Man. I would have loved to see a whole film of just Spider-Man and Iron Man snarking at one another. And after that fight sequence comes a tragic and disturbing climactic ending that could have come out of classical myth; I was on the verge of tears. The last hour of this film is absolutely wonderful. I would gladly buy the DVD so I could watch the last hour again and again. Unfortunately, Captain America: Civil War is two hours and twenty-seven minutes long. And the first hour and a half of the film drags.

The first hour and a half of Captain America: Civil War follows a fairly consistent pattern. First we get an establishing shot of a city landscape, with the name of the city superimposed over it in white. Then, after a brief setup, we either get a grand mal seizure of a fight scene with the camera moving too fast to tell what’s going on, or else we get a massive explosion, or a scene of an assassin doing something truly awful in a cheap motel, or sometimes two or three of these. Then we cut to the Avengers looking angsty and arguing in expensive rooms with large windows. Some of this argument actually builds character, but a lot of it feels like filler. Then there’s another establishing shot and we go on from there. I usually like Marvel’s balance of exposition, character development and over the top fight scenes, but for me, this hour and a half did not properly gel. It was balanced too heavily toward angst. There’s a generous smattering of curse words in these arguments and the fighting is violent, so I want to caution my readers that this movie is not appropriate for small children. There were several Kindergarten-aged children in the theater at my viewing, and they did not seem to enjoy themselves. I wouldn’t bring my daughter, though I do plan to just show her the bits with Spider-Man when it comes out on DVD.

I don’t object to violence in films. I’m a firm believer that everything that exists in human experience needs to exist in art, so a movie is a fine place to portray violence, sex, cursing and anything else. But these elements need to be portrayed very artfully, in a way that tells truths, or else it’s just a kind of porn. In my view, there are two ways in which you can portray violence in a film. You can have flamboyant swashbuckling violence with minimal gore and no real consequences in a lighthearted movie, where we all know it’s just for fun and escapism, and that’s all right if it’s done well. People daydream and fantasize about such things, and films can show us our daydreams. You can also have intense, gory violence in a serious film, violence that makes us face the horror of what war and killing really are. People need to understand the unfortunate truths lurking in their daydreams as well. But I don’t think it works to go half and half, which Captain America: Civil War attempts to do. There are moments of highly choreographed bravado with a ludicrously small amount of actual killing– how many times do you think that a seasoned martial artist like Black Widow could grab an enemy goon by the head or shoulders yet never break anyone’s neck? Yet I counted four or five people she grabbed in just that way and then tossed, still alive, to the floor for the janitor to clean up. Have you ever heard of a bomb that blew off the front of a building, blew out all the windows, filled the room with flame and smoke, yet only killed its intended target and no one else? The prince of Wakanda, who was standing right by the window, is left alive with only a few cute little cuts on his face; furthermore, Black Widow, who was also in the room, didn’t smear her lipstick, muss her hair or get any dust on her perfect black clothes. The king of Wakanda is killed, yet the corpse is completely intact for the prince to mourn over afterwards. At other times, the violence is realistic and disturbing. There’s a broken spine. There’s a drowning as part of a torture interrogation. There are shootings and a screaming man who sets himself on CGI fire. It’s not consistent. It vacillates between rather sexy violence and traumatic attempts at realism. The result is that, while we don’t get to have the lighthearted fun we had watching the Avengers save Manhattan from an alien invasion, we also don’t get to have a real, serious look at violence either. It just feels patchy and a bit manic. I think this could have been fixed if Marvel had just decided to make an r-rated film and show all the violence realistically. I suppose they could have also toned down the violence and made it appropriate for those children in the audience, but then we would have lost the chilling and really worthwhile climax where all the emotional strength of the film is. Much better to just decide that the film was for adults and pull out all the stops.

Captain America: Civil War is not a perfect film and certainly not my favorite Marvel movie. But it does have a lot of very worthwhile moments, particularly in the latter half. Inveterate Marvel comics lovers will probably enjoy seeing the whole thing, and adults who don’t object to the inconsistency of violence will have plenty to enjoy if they can sit all the way through it.

(The image is from the official poster for Captain America: Civil War, and is used in accordance with fair use principles.)


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