Captain America: Civil War

Another Marvel superhero movie I hear you mutter. Yes, another one. While the majority of news surrounding this movie was super positive I remained sceptical. Age of Ultron was good but it wasn’t amazing and kind of put me off the whole marvel universe agenda for the next 20 years. However, I finished watching Captain America: Civil war 50 minutes ago.

I have one negative comment about this movie and it may be considered a spoiler for most readers so skip to the next paragraph if you feel it’s necessary. There is a villain right in the beginning of the movie. That villain was Crossbones. Now this villain was teased for a while during filming and I was looking forward to seeing what his role was in this movie. Instead he had probably a total of 15 minutes of screen time. Yes there was an intense fighting scene between him and Captain America but it ended way too quickly. While his role was extremely important for the movie to get going I just felt extremely disappointed.

It’s very hard not to compare this movie with DC’s latest Batman Vs Superman (I did see it and my review will be out shortly after this). Both movies had similar ideas but were in actual fact very different and in some ways I was surprised. When I think of a Marvel movie I don’t think of dark and gritty themes. I think of a ton of action with a large portion of comedy and a splash of drama. However I feel like the Marvel franchise is doing the same thing the Harry Potter movies are doing. They started off light and family friendly and got darker as the movies were released. This isn’t a bad think and it worked in Harry Potter’s case but this is Marvel which has arguably a much larger and older fan base.

A word of warning. I highly recommend watching the previous Captain America movies, yes both of them, as well as the Avengers movies. In fact watch all the Iron Man movies too. Oh and Ant-man and Thor. See what I did there? Marvel has set up their movies so well that if you do not watch everything you will be confused. If only I got money for every time my mom leaned over and asked “who’s that?” Even I felt like I needed a refresher course in everything Marvel after seeing this movie. I don’t really know if I see this as a negative thing though but it’s definitely not something I’m okay with. I generally don’t watch movies twice but because everything is connected it almost becomes necessary.

It is extremely hard to talk about the story without ruining the movie. What I will say is that I felt like the story was amazing and really well thought through. The plot twists were brilliant and I was literally on the edge of my seat for all of the fight scenes. Even the villain was unexpected. The action in this movie was the best yet. It was fast and very brutal at some points. I really felt that the boundaries were pushed in this one and I’m glad they were. You get to see a darker side of Tony Stark which was great. Even the 3D felt perfectly in place. I am so glad that the gimmick of having things done just so something can fly towards the audience has been removed from the minds of the directors.

There were two new characters that were introduced in this movie. These are not spoilers unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months. First up is Black Panther who is scheduled to get his own movie in 2018. I am extremely excited to see more of this character. His combat skills rivalled some of the greatest Avengers and his acrobatic skills are mind blowing. The actor played the role superbly. While I know very little about this character I can say that the tease we were given was more than enough to get me excited.

The other new character was Spiderman. I specifically avoided any of the new trailers that had him in it so that I could see him for the first time during the movie. I will say that I had mixed feelings about the direction they were going with this character in his solo movie in 2017 but my doubts were erased the more I saw him in action. The actor is perfect. This is a much younger Spiderman than we are all use to but holy crap he is perfect for the role. The new suit looks so much better than any of the other ones and he was swinging and shooting his web like crazy. Many people forget how witty and annoying Spiderman is and that shone through in this movie. I cannot wait to see how his solo movie will turn out.

I do feel the need to mention another super hero who was included in this movie. I am of course talking about Ant-man. While his origins movie had a vast amount of mixed feelings, especially from me, he really showed how awesome he could be in this movie. He was absolutely hilarious.

Overall I feel like my faith in what Marvel is doing has been restored. This movie will hopefully be a pivotal benchmark for all the movies still to come.

// One of the best Marvel movies to date. It had all the drama, comedy and action I needed. My faith in Marvel has been restored. //

8/10