After months of hype Captain America: Civil War is finally in theaters, and I don’t know who brought the Russo brothers in to start directing the Captain America movies, but that person was a genius. After a good-but-great Avengers movie Disney needed a big hit to prove that their Marvel mojo was still working, and Captain America: Civil War delivered in a big way.
Civil War takes place not long after Age of Ultron, with Cap and the gang out hunting bad guys as an elite fighting force. When things go a little sideways on a mission people start calling for the Avengers to be reined in. Surprisingly Tony Stark is one of those people. As you can guess from all the artwork and advertising Steve Rodgers disagrees. Neither of those gentlemen are very good at articulating their viewpoints so they decide to fight it out.
Honestly not to get too spoilery, but Civil War is probably an overstatement of what happens in this movie. In the end it focuses more on Cap’s buddy Bucky than whether or not superheroes need a UN leash or not. Which isn’t a bad thing, and it does make this more of a Captain America movie than an Avengers movie. Just unlike the last Captain America movie it doesn’t have the, “Hey where are the Avengers?” problem. Also since it forces the heroes to face it off it gets around Marvel’s growing lack of interesting villains problem.
It was also nice that while it built on previous movies Civil War was its own thing and not a giant advertisement for movies coming down the pike. Sure it did get the ball rolling for the Black Panther and Spider-Man movies, but not in an over the top way. More in a, “Hey aren’t these guys cool, and don’t you want to see more of them?!” kind of way. Yes they are, and yes we do. My wife loved Spider-Man.
Judging by the box-office results you are all going to see Captain America: Civil War without my approval, but that is fine. It is a good movie, and it is worth seeing. I hope they can find a way to inject this much life in to the rest of their franchise movies because I don’t know if I can sit through another Avengers: Age of Ultron after Civil War has shown me how good the Marvel movies can be.