Warning in advance: Today’s blog post has a large number of spoilers for the new Marvel movie, Captain America: Civil war. While large areas of the plot are not elaborated on, a lot of the plot is referenced in detail with personal reflections upon it. For this reason, I would recommend checking out the movie first and then reading this article personally. However, if you cannot be asked to go see it, feel free to read ahead.





Welcome back to Caorigon, Traveller. A place in the Eververse where I talk about things I find interesting in comics, movies and games, as well as other things I may have not discovered yet. Anything is possible here, just like the universe where when they make a Captain America: Civil Car movie, Captain America dies at the end.

Let me paint you a picture. Usually with these posts I write a bunch of them one after another and queue them up for you guys to read one a day. Except, that this is not the case today. Last night I got in at 11:30pm after watching Civil War, I woke up at half 5, and have been working at this before I head off at 9 to International Tabletop Day 2016. Normally I would be crabby as hell and wanting to put this post off. However this movie was so good, that I am writing now. In fact, I am actually really happy. This movie was so amazing that I just need to talk about it to anyone who will listen. Let me start by saying the following.

Captain America: Civil War is a better Avengers movie than Age of Ultron was. The characters are done better, there are less jokes (but the jokes are better), they introduce Spiderman and Black Panther seamlessly and the story, while not the Civil War comic story, is not bad.

Also: Shout out to my local cinema, Palace cinema Cinderford. Worth a travel if you are in the Gloucestershire region of the UK, as they only charge £2.50 for tickets to weekday shows, and £3.50 for weekend ones.





So, in the above statement there are a few important things to note. What do I mean first of all by Avengers movie? By avengers movie I mean a marvel movie that collaborates multiple franchises and is able to deliver a story that involves a host of characters that would not work if they had not been set up prior to the movie at hand. So for example, you can’t really watch the Avengers movie without knowing what is going on in Thor, captain America and iron man. To understand civil war, you need to understand the events of winter soldier, age of Ultron as well as a few others. Where I felt age of Ultron was weakest, with the character development and introduction, a feeling of rushed plot and cut content, I feel like Civil War excelled.

Let’s talk length. Age of Ultron was a 141 minuet movie and felt like it needed to be a good 20 minutes longer in order to fill in what I felt were gaps in the plot (looking at you Thor. No matter what you say, a magic bath does not fill you with the plot you got from your quick shower). However, civil war was 146 minutes long and yet felt more fully developed than avenger’s age of Ultron ever did. The plot was fully complete and they did not feel like they were missing anything. Highly happy in this regard, as I came out of the film going “oh, it’s been that long? Felt a lot less.” It also felt like nothing was really cut out. All of the characters were fully explained where they were, or they were not included at all (in the case of Thor and Hulk). This really helped as you were never left going “hey, where is X? They haven’t been around for a WHY IS THE HULK RED NOW.”



Now let us move onto the other major concern I had going in: Character introduction and development. In Age of Ultron, we had the characters Ultron, The Vision, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch all introduced. Yes, we had seen Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch prior to this, however they had only been minor teaser appearances. They needed a lot of development and I feel that age of Ultron really only gave them a motivation to be superheroes over villains, and not much of a personality. Fortunately Scarlet Witch really comes into herself as a character; much like black widow did in avengers, in this movie. Both Ultron and The Vision felt very underwhelming in Age of Ultron otherwise.

And this is where Civil war excels. We see in this movie both Black Panther and Spiderman introduced. Both of these characters are on the size scale of characters like iron man and captain America in the marvel universe in terms of popularity. This was going to be a big asks to introduce them both in this movie and I have to say, they did a spectacular job. Both characters have great backstories and have very logical reasons for being in the movie. Without going into all the spoilers, Black Panther is personally invested in the capturing of Bucky, whereas Spiderman is brought in by iron man, and we don’t see uncle ben die for a third time! Both of these characters are ones who I am now highly excited to see more of, and can’t wait for the respective solo movies to come out.



Wow, I want to see a spider man movie. What is this, 2002?

Of course it would not be a movie if there were not at least one or two faults with it. First of all, some of the fight scenes use a shaky cam to follow the fast paced action. Now I can see why they do it, it implies the scene is tense and scrappy, with characters relying on everything they can do in order to get the upper hand. However, I personally always have found it to more look like either a scene is not well choreographed enough to show the level of action via the combatants, or that they are doing stunts and tricks that would be too hard to edit out. Fortunately after the first 30 minutes of the movie this stops happening and the fights in the later part of the movie (mainly the big Team Cap vs. Team Iron) are extremely well set out.

My second large pet peeve of this movie was the villain Crossbones. You know, the character who has pop vinyl figures and is advertised a large amount. The guy most people theorised would kill the Cap? Yeah, he’s dead in the first 15 minutes of the movie. And not in a “DON’T WORRY GUYS HE WILL BE BACK TWIST” kind of way, as in the he was the bomb. Literally. Also metaphorically in some ways, as his actions are the bomb that blew the avengers apart. Civil war may have happened because of Bucky, but Crossbones was the catalyst that caused the public to go “enough is enough.” And this is brilliant. You see, when the Avengers saved the world twice, people can be mad but they can see that they were needed. People can’t be mad at them because they had to do what they did to save the world.

But when you blow up a few people with a bomb you can’t prevent, as opposed to hundreds on the floor? You can blame them for that. It simply boils down to a few people dead is a tragedy that demands actions. A few thousand plus is a statistic. The real villain, without going into details, is one of my favourite villains in the marvel universe in a long time. Not a super, no powers, just a man after vengeance. He has a line along the lines of “I could not kill the avengers. More powerful men have tried and failed. However, if they could destroy themselves.” This was so dam awesome to hear.

In summary, civil war is a brilliant marvel movie. I haven’t even gone into the plot here but it’s fair to say the title should imply what most of the movie is going to be about. Something makes the avengers to have a Civil War, Avengers fight; the world is changed afterwards in the fallout of this event. i don’t like to give number reviews on my movies, but I will defiantly be going back to see this film again while its showing if that is any indication as to how much I liked it. Make up your own minds and leave comments telling me what you thought!

Also, captain America doesn’t die. But if you go into a marvel movie expecting a marvel comic story, you are always going to be disappointed now. And for you community fans, there is a community reference in this movie as well.

Tune in tomorrow where I talk about what board games I played today for far too many hours, and all the stuff I bought.