SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN CIVIL WAR YET, AND DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, STOP READING NOW.
***UPDATED- after seeing the movie a second time…several of my complaints turned out to be me just missing things, since the point of these blogs is first and foremost to be entertaining, not to look cool or smart, I have left the blog up but added notes where I was completely wrong…enjoy***
It’s times like this when I feel so very very alone. Everywhere I look people are raving about Captain America 3 “Civil War”.
I thought it was okay. That’s about it. I would say it was a Giant mess, but my inner ten year old won’t allow me to have that opinion. After all I got to see Ant Man, and the Scarlet Witch.
But let’s all be honest here…that…was a mess. There was so much crap going on, we didn’t have time to give a damn about anyone aside from our prior biases. Speaking of that, I can only wonder just what the hell they were going to do if they hadn’t gotten the rights to Spidey back from Sony? Imagine that same movie without Spider-man’s cameo….not good.
I will tip my hat to the director and screen writer, they had to shove tens pounds of stuff into a five pound bag and that ain’t easy to do. A lot of my gripes involve too much left in /too much left out, and they were going to have those complaints no matter what because they just had too damn much to deal with (I’m going to complain anyhow because I’ve been emotionally invested in these characters since I was ten). This would have been better as a Netflix ten episode season, because they had ten episodes worth of crap to try to dish out in just three hours.
or did they?
Did we really need to see the black panther’s dad die? Seeing as how the majority of the heroes and villains are motivated by the violent death of a family member, I think the audience could get their heads around it if it was just mentioned as an anecdote, like Zemo’s telling of his families death. Zemo’s retelling was actually poignant as opposed to the ham handed explosion and silent cut of the panther holding his dad..which seemed callous, lame, and a bit absurd. Or as Arsenic Lullaby Colorist Erika Rolbieki groaned “why not just have him die during the attack on the biological lab?” There was a good 5 minutes of crap there we didn’t need and just came off as forced.
Perhaps it only seemed ham handed because there are only so many times you can see some hero cry over a dead loved one before it loses all meaning. They could have divided up sides between Avengers who lost loved ones to violence and those who hadn’t. No…that would only leave Cap, Ant Man, War machine and the Vision on one side. ( Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Spidey, also lost family members to violence even though the movies have not gone into that…yet…I’m sure there are outtakes of each one of them holding their respective loved ones in their arms while sobbing and looking towards the heavens).
Let me say this about the world of the MCU as a whole, their security is good for sh*t. These people are worse than the most green recruit at the TSA. Let’s look at the security breaches so far.
-Stark breaks into Shield’s computer system
– all of shield infiltrated by Hydra
– Loki’s scepter stolen… twice
– Vibranium, the most precious element on earth, stolen from Wakanda buy some half assed pirate/mercenary on a 1950’s merchant marine boat.
-Ant Man breaks into the Avengers compound.
– Ant Mans Token Latino sidekick is able to pass himself off as security at PYM incorporated.
-Cross bones is able to steal a biological weapon (stored in the middle of a heavily populated city…?!) with three UHauls and a garbage truck.
-Even Hydra is incompetent. Cap and the Widow pretty much just wander into their computer hub.
-Zemo able to breach security and somehow convince everyone he was a famous psychiatrist that he looks nothing like.
-Agent Carter able to steal cap’s shield and the Falcons wings from where ever they hell they were being stored.
-Cap able to break everyone out of the prison in the middle of the ocean, somewhere.
***Forgot to mention that apparently the Quinjet is easier to hotwire than a 1980 chevy***
-They have the big accord signing in a building less secure than the local CVS, in the middle of a heavily populated city. Ain’t part of the reason behind the accord that the Avengers are constantly attracting violence, and semi responsible for the deaths of civilians? WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU SIGN THIS IN A PUBLIC BUILDING?! They are lucky the only thing that happened was ONE explosion, because in the first Avengers movie their headquarters became ground zero for an alien attack. That’s why the Avengers now have a nice compound in the middle of nowhere, how about you use that? Who was the idiot who decided to have several Avengers, who each have dozens of super powered foes, all in the same place, surrounded by civilians?! You know where they signed the peace treaty with Japan at the end of WWII? On a BIG BATTLE SHIP AWAY FROM THE CIVILIAN POPULATION WITH WARPLANES CIRCLING.
Ayways…the list goes on, of lapses in security that would give Edward Snowden a giant boner. I mean this is MF’n ridiculous. Nothing is safe from anyone, anywhere in the MCU. You would be better off having tin cans on fishing line as an alarm than relying on any single security team in the MCU.
So I guess I can’t blame Cap’s asinine plan to have his team meet at an airport…to all go somewhere else. Me , Myself personally, I would have just had everyone meet at the final destination so if a few of us get caught, there’s still a good chance it’ll be more than just Cap and Bucky. Or meet at the second destination on the way to Siberia. There was going to be a second destination right? Because you can’t fly a helicopter from the U.S. to Russia. So, they would have had to be talking the Helicopter to some plane, why not all meet at that plane instead of an INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FILLED WITH SECURITY CAMERAS…that Tony Stark would obviously have a direct feed to. I would just all meet in Russia, but that’s just me.
***The airport was in Germany not the U.S. My point stands , maybe more so…why have Hawkeye and everyone travel across the globe but stop short of Russia, just to meet up at an International airport full of security cameras? The falcon was able to tell Stark where the location was, so it’s not like it was a matter of having to search for the exact spot together. I mean, you know Iron Man is in Germany, you know he knows Cap is in Germany…why meet there instead of Russia…where he has no inkling of you going. whatever.*** Don’t worry…other update coming soon where I look like a dope.
My favorite example of “no one under Ten need watch this movie” was the initial scene where Ross presents the Sokovia accords. A seemingly 900 page document, that he plops A SINGLE COPY of on the table, in front of over half a dozen individuals. And they all start arguing about it…HAVING NOT READ ONE SINGLE PAGE. Now if these were U.S. senators I could believe it. But it seems to me they might want to crack it open and maybe read a line or two before making a personal life altering decision.
In a scene with Cap and Stark, Cap has a lot of questions about the accord…what if this? what if that? I dunno Cap…MAYBE READ THE F*CKING THING! MAYBE IT ANSWERS THOSE QUESTIONS.
***Cap was reading it while asking questions, and It seems like they were going over it while arguing, so…my bad on that. I must have been daydreaming about the Scarlet Witch***
Hey Tony…maybe get your lawyers on it and have them add some amendments to it. You do have lawyers right? I mean…you are a multi millionaire…seems like you might know a lawyer or two…how about you have them at least skim the thing over before you sign your name to it? maybe? hmm? Who are these morons? Would YOU sign a 900 page document after getting a only 30 second briefing on it?
Okay…fine…I suppose a montage of them all reading it isn’t very good use of time in a summer blockbuster, but how about Ross at least had each of them a copy. What F*ck? where they all supposed to share? I could let this go if the document wasn’t the CENTRAL POINT OF THE MOVIE. At least have ONE person read ONE page and then say “Hold up…I don’t like this already”. I guess just the word “accord” was enough to make them all suspicious…?!
***yeah…That whole paragraph is null and void too then.***
Speaking of the accord…Spider-Man is a minor in this movie and cannot legally sign that document, If he signed it at all. So….Stark broke the accord about twenty minutes after Cap did. And did the Black Panther sign the accord? because it sure didn’t seem like he was working in co-operation with anyone. He was just flat hatting it around the globe….but who knows, maybe the accord let’s you do that , or maybe theirs some giant loophole and he’s the only one who read the f*cking thing.
One last question. How did Tony stark get home? His armor was completely dead, and he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. I like to think he had to hitch a ride back with Cap and somewhere on the dvd extras will be a montage of the most awkward international flight ever.
***It wasn’t completely dead…it was glowing a little so maybe he could have gotten off a call, but I still would rather believe he had to ride home with cap.***
On the plus side…Ant Man and the Scarlet Witch. I read here and there the Black Widow might get a movie…why I have no idea. She is dreadful. She’s the least interesting , most acrhitypetual ( is that a word? …it is now), most 2 dimensional, most “we’ve seen this character type a thousand times, in a thousand other movies”, most already played out, character in the whole franchise. I can tell you the whole movie before they’ve even written it. It’s one part “the professional” and two parts ” Le femme nikita” Why…bother? Why bother with that lead balloon when you have The Scarlet Witch?!
A Scarlet Witch movie could go in dozen different directions. To begin with her powers are based in that weird mind over matter- we all kinda believe in it even though no one can prove it- pseudo science that we’re all into now a days. It could be a mystical thriller as in the comic books she began learning actual magic. It could explore her budding romance with the Vision. It could go into her friendship with Hawkeye and his emotional sponsorship in her role as a superhero.
Her character is interesting, and maybe this owes to the skill of the actress. The Scarlet Witch has a unique personality that doesn’t fit into any obvious archetype. She is pragmatic but sensitive. She is brave without being “Rambo Brave”, by that I mean you can tell she is a bit scared and a bit overwhelmed. She goes with her own instincts at times, and at other times takes a que from the people around her…she is 3 dimensional. Unlike the Black Widow who is basically just a typical 198o’s action hero, with an occasional, really out of place attempt at warmth, that we’re all supposed to chalk up to her letting her emotional guard down and not just a really forced scene…and by the way, at the funeral…with Cap…that was the most stiff insincere hug I’ve ever seen outside my own family.
A Scarlet Witch movie could touch on her coming to terms with the lose of her brother and DESTRUCTION OF HER ENTIRE HOME TOWN ( you know…little things that were glossed over, so time could be given to the death of the dad of some character who had, at that point, about as many lines as the dad. What do we give a a f*ck? We just met these two characters. The audience has as much emotional attachment to them as the victims of a car accident, that they saw on the way to work).
A Scarlet Witch movie could go into how she was enhanced and what she went through with Hydra. She could spend time tracking down some hydra scientist that worked on her but escaped, or trying to track down others that where enhanced at that lab and sent out into the world. There’ a ton of possibilities and they’d all be more unique and interesting than some Jason Borne rehash with a broad in black leather.
A Scarlet Witch movie would be something me and my inner ten year old could agree on…well, we’d like it for different reasons. I’ll just let him enjoy her making cars fly around, and try to keep my thoughts out of the gutter.
“but Doug, why would you want them to make a movie out of one of your favorites after you just got done bitching about their most recent movie?”
Because…the movies they do involving just one or two characters have been very good. Civil War was an insurmountable task. They should not do that again, and deep six all their plans for the next Avengers movie, and all the lead up to infinity war and just make more Ant-man and Scarlet Witch Movies. Maybe the Scarlet Witch fights some hydra bad guys in the Bahamas YouknowwhatI’mtalkingabout.
***on a side note, Cap mentions that Bucky was flirting with a red head he called “Dot”. Was that an Easter egg for Arsenic Lullaby?! Dottie from the Dottie and Liquid Sam stories was a red head…let’s just say it was, I’ve had a rough week, I need a win***
I’ll be at MSP comic-con in St.Paul May 14th and 15th.
When Doug isn’t complaining , he and his work can be found here
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