Captain America 3 or How Marvel Won the Comic Film World

Yeah because watching your mother gunned down in the street has no gravitas at all. Its not like that event affected Bruce Wayne’s entire life, including his motivation to become Batman. Both situations were based on coincidences, which seems to be the basis of comic book movies. I have to agree with Soma on the whole artificially manufactured thing in Civil War. I just never could buy into the conflict. Im not saying that I felt the Batman V Superman thing was any better but but Civil War wasnt any stronger plot wise. They are pretty darn close, in my opinion, on the “its a comic book movie, just go with it” scale.

I also watched this again on a flight recently. One line that stuck out that I didn’t pay attention to before is when Bucky is fighting Widow in the base, after being reactivated by Zemo, she says, “Do you even remember me?” Is this a callback to the time she got shot by him, as explained in Winter Soldier to Cap, or was she at some point in the past an ally of his? Meaning her story to Cap was bullshit.

I also watched this again on a flight recently!

I agree with the point that the conflict within the Avengers generally feels lacking. I like the “very civil Civil War” description. Black Panther showed potential to be a real adversary early on. It would also have added to his scene with Zemo in the end if he had been more present, but alas: too many characters and not enough screentime. Tony’s reaction towards Bucky in the end felt personal and real enough, but too little, too late.

However, @Scotch_Lufkin, now that I expected the scenes with Spider-Man they didn’t feel like an interruption to the flow as much as I thought when I watched it last. So I’ll revise my previous statement to “Just enough Spider-Man, but not enough Black Panther”. Secretary Ross and the enforcement of the Sokovia Accords is mostly just backdrop but could also have been expanded upon.

They’re both bad, but on different orders of magnitude. Civil War has the problem of not actually dramatizing Tony’s relationship with his mom, so while we can understand why he’d want to kill the guy that murdered her on an intellectual level, we don’t actually feel it.

BvS on the other hand assumes merely hearing your mom’s name would throw you for a loop which is just nonsense.

Beat me to it since I was at work, but I agree completely. Though I will add that I felt it a bit, because it was somewhat foreshadowed earlier in the movie and we already knew Tony had a strained relationship with his father from the IM movies.

Tony and Howard’s relation is very briefly allured to with some of Tony’s throwaway lines while talking to Steve in Berlin (the pen scene). Tony said Howard mentioned Steve “like a billion times”. It showed that Tony kind of resent the fact that Steve knows Howard more than Tony, his own son.

We already know Tony loves his mom (how come we didn’t even get a name without going to wikipedia? It is Maria.) from that VR thing in the beginning. And from that scene in Berlin, we can perhaps infer that Tony regretted not knowing his father better, despite a strained relationship.

And then the video shows Bucky killed them both in cold blood.

While Civil War wasn’t perfect on the parent/child revenge/obligation theme, it’s vastly superior than BvS due to the addition of the Black Panther’s exploration of the same theme from a different angle. Unlike Stark’s troubled and guilt-ridden relationship with his parents, T’Challa had a wonderful relationship with his father. The way Panther went about seeking revenge/justice is an interesting contrast to Stark’s approach. Also, Stark’s relationship with his father was a big part of the first Iron Man, IIRC.

Whether Marvel successfully pulled it off is debatable, but there are certainly more layers there than BvS’s ham-handed approach.

I’m pretty sure if I was thinking of my mom with my last or presumably my last dying breath I wouldn’t actually say her first name or assume the person killing me is so familiar with her that they would know her first name. I am guessing I would plead with them to save my mom…

I found the Tony response a lot more believable than the BvS parent death exchange… shout.

I was pretty disappointed in this movie on the first go around. But I watched it again last night. I have to admit, now that I’ve seen Black Panther, and I knew who that character was, and I knew his father, and I knew Martin Freeman’s character, and I wasn’t coming at it with a sense of Robert Downing Jr overload, I had a really good time.

I was much better appreciate the Russo brothers’ fights and action sequences this time around. Again, it’s not as good as the action in Winter Soldier, but it’s still very good. Plus I actually was able to see Tony Stark’s point of view a little better this time, so it wasn’t completely one-sided this time. There is still the whole specter of knowing, as the audience member, that this Russian guy is setting things up, so you know from the beginning that Tony is wrong and Captain is right on Bucky, but at the same time, I was able to ignore that this time, and just look at it as if I was a neutral observer and didn’t know that as an audience member, and only knew what Tony knew.

Anyway, it worked a lot better for me this time. Not having this weird unknown character called the Black Panther really helped though.

You didn’t know who the Black Panther was?

Not until I saw the Black Panther movie in the theaters recently, no. Are you familiar with him because of the comics or something maybe?

I didn’t really. I’ve always been a DC person.

Correct. I guess to me he was as well known as like Iron Man or Hulk.

@BrianRubin

I also enjoyed DC - when I was a kid I liked any comic, not just from a specific studio. I always thought that was passing odd. “I only read X”?

I have to join the crowd that knew nothing of the Black Panther. I still liked the movie though cause I am a CA fanboy. :)

Yeah, I’m surprised that people didn’t know him, given how old the character is and his lengthy history in Fantastic Four and the Avengers. Not surprised at all that people didn’t know Jessica Jones, for instance, or the version of the Ant-Man that Paul Rudd is playing or even Luke Cage, or Cable and most of the X-men characters, but Black Panther has been a fixture in the Marvel Universe for 50 years

To be fair, I basically knew Black Panther almost exclusively from people doing variations on the very tired old joke of “Someone mentions Black Panther(s)” > “Hurhur which did you mean the Marvel superhero or the activist group?”

Like, I was aware of his existence…but nonetheless knew almost nothing about him.

Then again, up until I saw the old X-Men movies at the turn of the century, that was about as much as I knew about any Marvel character except Hulk (I knew he turned green and tore up his jeans, too) and Spiderman (I saw a couple of episodes of his cartoon show on Fox back in the day and knew he whipped around on spidersilk ropes and took pictures for the paper).

None of you knew him from his relationship to… Storm?

I would argue despite having some solid stories since his Fantastic Four appearance, he didn’t get any real traction until Christopher Priest’s run in 1998. Outside of Don McGregor’s Panther’s Rage in the mid-70s, I think even diehard Marvel aficionados would have a hard time naming a good BP story before Priest’s run.

I literally didn’t know about that until just now. Then again, alarmingly close to 100% of my X-Men lore comes from the ~9 or so films released in that universe in the last 20 years. Pretty much that, the party based ARPGs that hit GameCube in the early 2000s, and like three episodes of the cartoon airing in the mid 90s.

Have I mentioned I’m the lamest sort of comics poseur? :-(

I thought he was in the cartoon for a minute, maybe less than a miniute. I don’t really read comics, and i know about his relationship with her. 90s internet wouldn’t have been that easy for me to find this out… hmmm.

Ooh, maybe it was Marvel RPG… I know i got that info from somewhere and it wasn’t Wiki.