Captain America: Civil War - Review Thread

Superhero fatigue. That's the buzz word these days on most movie blogs and podcasts. Internet reviewers love to use it, and have jumped on the bandwagon of the phrase's overuse. It usually makes me roll my eyes, as it seems like an attempt to sound "above all that". But I have to admit... I may be starting to feel it.

I was quite bored with the first half of Civil War, which surprised me as I was genuinely excited for this movie, and have been more or less on board with the whole Marvel universe experiment. But things were starting to feel very familiar when this movie began. And it didn't help that I found the action scenes to be uninspired and poorly shot. I'm not sure if it was the cheap 3D or not, but the action felt jerky and rough, and not in a good Bourne way. It wasn't shaky cam, it was more... fuzzy? Either way, I didn't like it.

But the movie did start to pick up in the middle. The Civil War storyline was actually more well-conceived than I assumed it was going to be. That said, it did still feel odd that these crime-fighting partners would be at each other's throats so quickly. But they did try to deal with the collateral damage issue and the growing distrust of superheroes, and it mostly worked. They also added a late movie revelation which... well, didn't seem that organic to be honest. It really felt like it was there to get one last big fight out of Captain America and Iron Man, who beat on each other harder than they have ever beaten on the bad guys.

There's a lot of comic book characters in this movie. A LOT. Which admittedly is kind of fun. Age of Ultron had a lot too, but I felt that movie did a better job of balancing them all. Here... okay, it was good too. The only one who felt short changed was Ant-Man, who was awesome whenever he was around It just seemed that for a hero who already had his own movie, being relegated to such a small part, yet big enough not to be considered a cameo, was odd.

We also get introduced to Spider-Man. Again. This time they go all out in making him a 15 year old kid, like he started out. No doubt this will buy a lot of cred among the more particular nerds out there. And its sure to generate a lot of hyperbole about him being the best screen portrayal of Spidey to date. True, he was pretty great and added a fresh dynamic to our cast of well-known movie characters. But this movie still ain't no Spider-man 2.

Black Panther also had a cool intro to the MCU, and is definitely a character who I'd like to see a whole movie with. Vision is still... wow, I'm surprised they introduced Vision. He's really out there, and honestly he's a little too powerful to be entirely interesting. Iron Man is as solid as ever, Black Widow and the other 2nd tier avengers are still great sidekicks, and Bucky, well... he's there too.

There's one really great action scene that takes place on an airport tarmac. The set-up behind it seems pretty telegraphed (there's even a scene where the two teams actually line up on either side of a literal line in the ground). But the superhero action is well realized, giving us cool ideas like Ant-Man going inside Iron Man's suit, or Spidey trying to wrap up Cap in webs. All this kind of stuff is a lot of fun. (The poorly executed action motions seem to have dissipated at this point as well).

Civil War is much of the expected Marvel "stuff", with the twist that now they're fighting each other. And we get a whack load of characters. I can't say its always interesting, but the parts that are are quite entertaining.
7/10