Saw the film yesterday, and I liked it. Thought it was well executed, with the story flowing nicely, some fine character portrayal, and plenty of fun action. As for the philosophical/political aspects, the disagreement over signing the accords felt right to me. There’s no perfect solution to the tension between beneficial use of power and oversight to prevent abuse, and I think this movie did a fine job making points on all sides. I particularly like that the tension isn’t ever really resolved, what with Team Cap never signing and basically going underground…you don’t ever really resolve this issue in the real world, either.
Yeah, I suspect more (albeit incomplete) resolution will come in future movies, likely in Spider Man, Black Panther and then Infinity War. I doubt we’ll see anything more than a reference or two (if that) in Doctor Strange and Ragnarok.
Yep, absolutely. One of Ultron’s missteps was having the villain skip very rapidly from “I am a messed up child of my overprotective father” to “I will exterminate most of the human race to make them advance.” That doesn’t follow either logically or thematically, but it clearly happened because someone thought it was necessary to Raise The Stakes. Keeping the stakes personal made things much more immediately relatable in Civil War.
(Because Civil War is so densely packed, though, the personal stakes aren’t always as apparent as they could be. It wasn’t until a few hours after seeing the movie that it really hit me why Cap was so concerned with saving Bucky. It wasn’t just because they were buddies in Brooklyn, but also because they were soldiers together - no one left behind - and more importantly that Bucky is literally the only link to the world Steve grew up in and is now lost. I mean, the information is certainly there, but the movie doesn’t have time to linger on it and let you process it emotionally.)
Yeah it would have been nice to draw out the “what do you remember?” scene a bit more. I think they were trying for that angle there, but it was over so quickly.
They summed up someone who was broken, both physically and emotionally, but desperately trying to keep together the only family he really has left. And they summed it up with an in-character quip. I’d say that’s pretty elegant writing.
In The Avengers and Winter Soldier, Captain America is essentially regulated by SHIELD, a government entity. He goes where they say, fights who they say to fight, and doesn’t freelance. In The Avengers, it turns out Fury has built an arsenal of secret weapons powered by a device that Captain America perceives as being invented/used by the Nazis in WWII. In Winter Soldier, it turns out that half of SHIELD is actually Hydra and has been using not just him, but have been secretly using his best friend as a mindless assassin-bot for the last 70 years. And you think it’s weird that he doesn’t trust putting The Avengers in the hands of “the government”?
For Wanda being in interment, she wasn’t. Tony asked Vision to keep her on the compound until the accords are signed. His reason was “so nothing else goes wrong”. She had just killed 13 foreign nationals and was on multiple people’s shit lists. If she was out on the street and someone assaulted her, and she did the smallest amount of fighting back (even just to restrain them), the press would have been all over that. What if they attempted to arrest her (which would be in their rights, being as she had just committed 13 counts of involuntary manslaughter)? If she crushed a police car and fled, or Vision showed up and carried her to safety, it would essentially force the world governments to go completely draconian and do something like declaring all superheroes as criminals. By keeping her in “house arrest”, Tony is trying to get the currently proposed Sokovia Accords in to place before anything else has a chance to happen. Wanda wasn’t locked up in The Raft until the airport incident, which again, was clearly something worth locking someone up for.
Isn’t that the exact same reason the Japanese were put into internment camps during World War II? For their own protection (among other reasons)?
One of the problems with the Sokovia Accords is where they routinely view the superheroes as “assets” instead of people. Tony says, “They don’t offer visas to weapons of mass destruction.” General Ross says, “Do you know the current whereabouts of Thor or Dr. Banner? If I misplaced a couple of 30-megaton bombs, you can be sure there would be hearings.” That seems like the dangerous part to me: that the governments would view the Avengers as just another weapon that they could point in whatever direction was bothering them.
It’s a little weird to talk about answering to the government, laws and then finish with someone being locked up with no trial and no hope of one either. This is where Tony started shifting… because when given the chance what did the government do, lock them up and hide them from the world with no due process.
The argument isn’t meant to be taken seriously. Come on, this isn’t a realistic movie, the accords are just a plausible sounding excuse to have the team choose sides.
Because in the Marvel Universe world, everyone will trust Cpt. America over nameless, most likely corrupt government officials. In the real world, weapons manufacturing billionaires can’t actually walk around with the weapons they build, “My company built it” isn’t going to allow you to drive a tank / fly a fighter jet around NY.
It isn’t a realistic look at the problem, and it isn’t trying to be. That way lies “If that dude enters our airspace, we’ll treat it as if we’re being attacked”…
This is where the film gets muddled. The impression I get from the movie is that teamcap is against government or institutional oversight at all, while the less radical opposition and more reasonable position for teamcap is against Sokovia Accord specifically, againat the inhumane parts (which is an interesting debate to have: should we grant Thor the same human rights as an average human?). Just like those of us who abhor Gitmo aren’t pro-terrorism, no we are against terrorism, we just want due process etc., and generally want people being treated like people, even in Gitmo.
I can be on teamcap, if teamcap is this nuanced approach to superheroes. But from what I can tell in the movie, teamcap isn’t this.
I don’t think you can say, “Millionaires don’t walk around with their weapons in the real world, therefore you can’t take anything in this movie seriously.” A movie doesn’t have to directly reflect reality; it just has to be self-consistent. And in the context of this universe, where millionaires DO have weapons that they carry around with them, and the government (up to this point) hasn’t done anything to regulate that (because of press coverage or public opinion or whatever), then something like the Sokovia Accords seems like a reasonable solution that should be taken seriously.
If people just randomly picked a side, then that would be difficult to believe, but it seems like they gave a pretty good reason why people came down on the side they chose.
Instead of being CA3, this movie should have been IM4, the Fall of Iron Man: the Arrogance of Tony Stark. Stark has two character traits, he thinks he is better than everyone and he is incapable of controlling himself. With the moderating influence of Pepper out of the picture, the government is the only thing that can control him, and since he signed, everyone should. Tony is mad that Cap kept Bucky and his parents a secret, but he negotiated the Accords behind the rest of the Avengers back and expected them to sign up wholeheartedly. The only other members of #TeamIronMan are two images of himself (War Machine and Vision) and a kid who couldn’t catch on that he was a mindless stooge for Stark (Spidey: “Mr. Stark told me to hit you in the legs. Mr. Stark told me you were wrong and he was right.” Cap: “What else did Stark tell you?”). At the end, Stark is alone with himself and his self imposed safety, while Cap is surrounded by his friends.
Things I liked:
A Bucky / Falcon buddy movie would be hilarious.
Young Stark as 80’s Robert Downey Jr.
Things I didn’t like:
Vision in love with Wanda was weird.
The only time Steve Rogers is referred to as “Captain America” is when Ant Man joins the team and gushes over him. Every other time he is Captain Rogers or just Cap.
Thing I’m not sure of:
Will Everett Ross introduce Dr. Strange into the Avengers Initiative to continue the Freeman / Cumberbatch duality?
Holy crap, I just realized where Ultron came from!
"While in high school, a young Tony Stark witnessed his two classmates successfully create an artificial being. Haunted by the scientific prowess of his peers, Stark spends a lifetime trying to recreate their experiment. And now, with the help of a mystical scepter, he is on the verge of creating something…incredible.
Weird Science 2: Age of Ultron"
The impression I get from Captain is he’s not ready to give the decisions over to people who don’t know better and may be slow to act. How much information does a government official need to have on god that falls to earth and just starts killing people? What if a member on the Avengers team, say Thor, knows this guy and says hey we should probably stop him and by the way you’re weapons won’t work. But the governments position is already to distrust this strange blonde god so they’re certainly not going to act on intel he just gave them… this presents the Avengers with a permanent crutch, one their enemies don’t have.
Let’s keep in mind SHIELD was tied as an agency to some oversight… how well did that work out for them? Didn’t Nick Fury just kind of say fk and do his own thing. He’s a superhero, and he knows better than to sit back and watch or destroy the good guys “just in case”.
In your example, I would say a healthy amount of scepticism is necessary towards Thor is the absolutely right approach. This dude who appears out of thin air, claims he is working for the best interest of humanity, and he wants us to do what he says. Oh that’s right, Loki said something like this when he first appeared out of thin air. So Thor, or institution made up of super-beings like Thor, using this exact argument doesn’t work. Trust in Thor, or any similar kind of institution, must be earned, not given, and being bounded by an institution accountable to its constituents is one way to earn that trust. The institution in question here is the Avengers, and it claims to be the protector of earth. Therefore to earn the trust of earth it should respect and be bounded by the wills of the constituents of earth, which is its people, the people it is supposed to be protecting.
Look we are all aware that our institutions are not perfect, and we are constantly trying to make them better. Representative government doesn’t always represent. We get that. But evolution of institution is the most humane way to improvement. Not revolution. (See e.g. communism for “revolutionary” improvement, I put it in quotes because in communist countries the “revolution” becomes an institution in itself very very quickly, the radical rapidly degenerated into the norm. See e.g. Animal Farm.) Not anarchy.
The thing with the Hydra inside SHIELD thing is very contrived IMO because it is just BIZARRE that no one noticed for 50+ years that there is a Hydra cancer inside SHIELD. It can only be a comic book or McCarthy era plot. “You have these people who from all outward appearances are Americans/SHIELD agents but they are really not, they are not Americans/HYDRA agents”.
By that rationale, so is “Why did you say that name?”
-Tom
Well maybe with Thor 1, but by the time the Avengers have worked with these other guys, what do you expect them to do, create business cards and introduce them to every ally, family member or ally. I think you’re approaching it like all the conflicts are on Earth. What happens when they move to space? our government, the one that can kind of sort of get a rocket off the ground most the time, and build spacesports is supposed to make decisions based on the galaxy and world they know… Thor’s a god. I mean how many of the members government would just be pissed off that someone even label themselves that?
The thing with the Hydra inside SHIELD thing is very contrived IMO because it is just BIZARRE that no one noticed for 50+ years that there is a Hydra cancer inside SHIELD. It can only be a comic book or McCarthy era plot. “You have these people who from all outward appearances are Americans/SHIELD agents but they are really not, they are not Americans/HYDRA agents”.
I think this is exactly the thing that happens in the Marvel world, so it’s not contrived. Hydra is exactly what Captain was designed to combat, and he’s good at it. I mean you’re talking about a guy whose worried about hurting police as they try and escape, not avoid killing them but not hurting them at all… yes I’d put my card with that kind of man over the kind of guy I KNOW Ross is going to be.
I don’t see it. “Why did you say that name?” is based on the fact that Bruce’s mom and Clark’s mom have the same name. It’s a coincidence, not a character beat.
Wait, Bruce Wayne deciding not to kill Superman isn’t a character beat? Dude, I know it’s Zack Snyder and all, but SICK BURN.
Look, I’m mostly busting your chops. If it worked for you, it worked for you. One man’s bad writing is another man’s elegance. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was so completely disengaged by that point in the movie that Iron Man could have recited a monologue from Hamlet and I probably would have thought it was bad writing.
But I do wish more people would explain to me how #teamcap is at all a viable political stance. The dude is literally a paramilitary soldier. Without any oversight from the government that made him! However, if you guys don’t read the front page, our podcast co-host Kellywand pretty much closed the book on the matter with these words:
Just to re"cap": you guys are arguing about a piece of legislation that you haven’t and can’t read, concerning a group of fictional characters conceived in the '60s for 10-year-old boys wearing spandex “armor” for which there is no actual real-world analogy. As sifted through the sociopolitical prism of Mark Millar. Haha! #TeamSpiderMan
-Tom
This thread is getting way to serious, and dreary. Lets just go back and talk about how freaking awesome the airport scene is.