Five things re: Captain America: Civil War

I. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the more I thought about Batman v. Superman, the more I hated it. The conclusion, in the end, was simple: Batman v. Superman is a movie made by people who hate (or fundamentally don’t understand) Batman and Superman, their history, and probably even their fans. It has characters that look like the ones people love, but bear essentially no resemblance to them otherwise. It’s meathead cinema that attempts to pass as a superhero movie.

Captain America: Civil War, in contrast, is a movie that’s dripping with love for the source material. It’s clear that its creators sincerely adore the characters and respect the relationship that fans have with them. It’s a movie that’s hard not to love in return.

II. Batman v. Superman could never have been this movie. Marvel has spent a decade building its characters and this universe, and the existing layers of backstory make every character and relationship feel real and organic. Warner Brothers, rushing to catch up and build its own cinematic universe, filled Batman v. Superman with so much universe building and spent so much time teasing new characters that it never bothered to give anyone reason to care about the existing ones.

III. Captain America: Civil War is a masterclass in efficient screenwriting. Each one of its dozen protagonists — and even its antagonists — gets just enough screen time that you perfectly understand their motivations and their relationships with other characters. The exposition is often transparent, but never forced. Everything is deliberate, economical, but organic. It feels impossible, and yet Marvel somehow managed to pull it off. And in spite of that, it’s still clearly Captain America’s story.

IV. Death still feels like an abstraction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Characters have died in previous films, but having even a slight grasp of the economic reality of movie franchises means that you know that none of the central characters will actually die — even if the movie tries to hoodwink you otherwise. It makes the punching, the bullets, and the explosions feel hollow. There’s almost certainly another, more dark version of this movie deep-sixed by Disney beancounters.

V. It’s notable that both Batman v. Superman and Captain America: Civil War both revolve around the clashing ideologies of their protagonists. The better version of Batman v. Superman would have involved an idealistic rookie Superman clashing with an older, jaded, murderous Batman scarred by personal loss and the inefficacy of letting the bad guys live. Captain America: Civil War revolves around a disagreement over the morality of super hero autonomy, a question that the entire series of film has been building towards.

These ideology dustups don’t quite match the cultural notes of the current Trump clusterfuck, but mainstream movies that revolve around fundamental, seemingly unbridgeable disagreements feel very much at home in 2016: ten years ago superhero movie villains planted bombs in hospitals. Today, the villains are tricking the heroes into planting the bombs themselves.