I confess, what mostly worries me about Captain America: Civil War is the fact that Civil War was one of the worst comic books in recent memory. Fortunately, it seems even Marvel has realized Civil War is best left off screens.
Civil War, the comic book, had the rather intelligent idea of asking why thousands of beings with vast power and bleeding-edge technology weren’t, you know, accountable for the inevitable mistakes that will happen when you turn a human being into a walking nuke. Unfortunately, it was so bad that Marvel spent years undoing it, by selling Spider-Man’s marriage to Satan, by revealing pretty much everybody involved was actually a shapeshifting alien spy, and by straight-up just forgetting about it and pretending it never happened, at least until they needed a Secret Wars miniseries.
The movie, according to Birth Movies Death, puts all of that in the dumpster. The issue still revolves around superheroic accountability, but instead about whether or not, say, heroes can cross borders to meddle in a dictator filling a prison full of political dissidents with nerve gas. Tony is on the side of being accountable to the UN, which is still pretty rich considering some of the crap he’s pulled, while Cap, having seen S.H.I.E.L.D. turn out to be a HYDRA front, is worried that governments can be manipulated or use the Avengers to their own ends.
To be honest, I’m still a bit on the fence about this. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a lot of fun, but also incredibly facile about the serious issues of surveillance, data mining, and intelligence community accountability it touched on. But at least this will actually be about something, no matter how hard Marvel tries to make it just a superhero fight, and that’s a step in the right direction.
(via Birth Movies Death)
