So, in the conflict between Iron Man and Captain America, the movie must insist that Captain America, who wants to keep the Avengers free from oversight, is right. Except he's wrong. When Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, is accused of bombing the United Nations, Cap decides he needs to capture Barnes himself, before the government does, so he can be sure of Barnes's guilt before he is condemned. Why does he think this is necessary? The answer is that he in fact has no reason at all to believe this. 70 years of sci-fi brainwashing stand between Cap and the Bucky he knew, and there's plenty of reason to think Barnes is guilty. A little conspiracy is good for an action thriller, but Cap's sudden leap into conspiratorial thinking is just shoddily justified. Why should I go along with this?
What's more, there's nothing thrilling about this conspiracy. It's only there because Captain America can't be wrong, because he's the one truly representing the interests of the Avengers in this movie. Tony Stark represents the shortsighted interests of people foolish enough to think it would be wise to subject the Avengers to oversight.
That said, in the end, what principles they stand for turns out to be a moot point. This movie presages Black Panther in that the motivation for its overarching conflict flies out the window and is totally replaced at the climax. When
the film finally reaches the confrontation between Tony, Cap, and
Bucky, the ensuing fight isn't driven at all by the differences in
their beliefs or personalities. It's just Tony's revenge, forced by
the villain's sudden, manipulative revelation that Bucky killed Tony's parents. This revelation about Bucky's past has nothing to do with Tony's moral apprehension or Captain America's reasons for refusing oversight. It turns all the hand-wringing in the first act of the film into lip service. The basis for the film's events is abruptly and completely changed.
It might be easier to accept Captain America's actions if his relationship with Bucky was better realized, but neither this film nor the previous ones in which Bucky appeared accomplish that. The films are too distant from him, and Sebastian Stan's performance does little. At the end of the day this movie still only makes out Captain America as reckless at best.
Maybe things could have been different. But it would have to be very different indeed to overcome the premise that the Avengers, for all their imperfections, are ultimately above criticism. While I don't think it's the intention of these films to make such a point, they just end up there. Age of Ultron was the first of the MCU films to make this clear to me. In that film, the Avengers directly create the global threat, and their initial attempts to defeat it only manage to harm civilians. But even then, they're not really responsible for what happened, and the way they overcome their destructive creation is by creating something else, just better this time.
And, you know, whatever. Not every movie has to be Sansho the Bailiff. You don't always need a deep-dive into matters of principle, though it would be nice if they could shut up about it when they can't deliver. This film is part of the larger framework of the whole MCU, fitting together pieces set up in earlier movies. But even then, I don't think this film does it as well as The Avengers or the later Endgame. Captain America's behavior is too arbitrary for that. I sympathize with the sentiment that it's usually not useful or appropriate to describe movies as "smart" or not. But this isn't about the movie's intelligence, it's about being insulting to the audience's intelligence. If we're just here to see Captain America and Iron Man fight, why bother with all this moral legerdemain? The most benign purpose that would explain it is that they want us to like the "heroes," but with the shit they both pull in this movie, they still don't deserve to be liked.
There's something else, too. It's common for people to claim that these films are the modern equivalent of mythology. I'm not saying they can't be, nor that none of them are. But some of these films lean into it—see the marble statues in the credits of Age of Ultron—without delivering, and it just comes across as cloying self-justification. The term "mythology" means something. Socrates wasn't killed for disliking Spider-Man, and people don't go to live in monasteries for their entire lives out of devotion to Batman.
Heyo,
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to let you know that your MCU reviews helped me get a better sense of why I enjoyed the movies that I did, and why Age of Ultron and this one fell so comparatively flat to me. I think another way to put it would be to say [and spoilers for Watchmen incoming, for anyone reading] that the fake alien-threat which Ozymandias used in Watchmen to unite humanity against something bigger than humanity is basically played straight in the MCU as early as the first Avengers movie, and ever since then, the forced serialization/connection between these movies has become a burden. If Civil War world is the same world as Avengers World, then all these discussions of UN oversight seem somewhat trivial, and if we are asked to ignore the story of the first Avengers movie, other incoherences come into the light. Basically, I think, all of the current comic movies haven't really come to terms with the fact that Watchmen has made stories of this kind impossible, all the way back in the eighties (And the fact that Zack Snyder failed to heed the lessons of Watchmen despite trying to make a film out of it seems doubly ironic). I cant help but think, for example, that all of these movies would be more interesting if the superheroes didn't find supervillains (Zemo being a mild example, but still). Spider-man coming to grips with the fact that the best he can do is prevent a bunch of robberies? Superman comin to grips with the fact that he can literally do anything, yet has no fucking idea in what direction he actually ougth to nudge humanity, if at all? As soon as there is a supervillain, no matter how powerful he is, I already know who will win regardless..
(As for the fight choreography - while I think that too much has been made of the golden age of television, it does seem telling that even something as non-artsy as Game of Thrones, in last weeks Battle of the Bastards, manages to choreograph combat both much more exhilaterating and unnvering at the same time compared to the latest outings in any of the comic movie franchies.)
Cheers,
/f
You're right, the end of Watchmen is an apt comparison. I actually have seen people suggest that the MCU is going for something similar, trying to show that the Avengers only have unity against a common enemy, and that this film shows them fragmenting because they don't have any superhumans to fight besides each other. It would be interesting to see if they take that direction, but at the moment I find that argument unpersuasive; I don't think it accounts for a lot of what happens in this film, and unlike Watchmen, the villains in the MCU will probably always be external existential threats. And now that you mention it, it's interesting that one of the Marvel movies I actually like is The Avengers, which seems to me like it doesn't reach for what Watchmen did at all and just plays the genre straight, and does it fairly well. Of course, you're also right that it would be interesting to see more superhero movies that don't really fall into either vein.
DeleteThanks for the comment!