Home Entertainment Midweek Movie Mouth-Off: Hands up, who DIDN’T like CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR?

Midweek Movie Mouth-Off: Hands up, who DIDN’T like CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR?

3 min read
12

Midweek-Movie-Mouth-Off-750px

Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War has been smashing it at the box office – pushing Marvel one step closer to being the first movie of 2016 to earn over $1 billion. Cumulatively, the MCU has now earned over $10 billion across its 13 movies. That’s pretty impressive, all in all. But, I know some people weren’t too impressed with Civil War, so let’s talk about that.

Seeing as it’s been on South African cinemas for three weeks now, I’m going to assume the majority of you have seen it. For those of you that haven’t yet, please take this as a very obvious spoiler warning for the rest of the article and the comments.

Spoilers ahead! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let me give a quick disclaimer. I am a huge fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Captain America is my favourite character from all the solo movies. I loved The First Avenger and I rank Winter Soldier as one of my favourite movies of all time. That being said, there have been some valid criticisms about Civil War, so I’d like to open up the comments to a discussion about what you didn’t like. And bear in mind, what I’m about to say comes from the bottom of my heart, as a Marvel fan that loves the franchise and did love Civil War, despite its faults.

So, on to what I didn’t like. First off, the usual issue of a hamstrung main villain. Zemo served as little more than a walking plot device, whose sole motivation was to get characters from scene to scene, and honestly this bothered me. Now that I’ve had time to reflect on it, the plot contrivances that Zemo brought start to rankle.

Another issue I had was the fact that the stakes were so low, comparatively. Yes in terms of The Avengers dividing and fighting amongst themselves, the fate of the team we care so much about were high stakes, but in the end nothing really bad happened. Nobody died, even Rhodey’s permanent disability was magically fixed with Stark technology. I’m really not inferring that someone has to die for the sake of drama, but there should be real and visible consequences, and it feels like that’s lacking.

What concerns me about the MCU in general is that Marvel is riding a high. Right now, it seems like they can really do no wrong, and I’m worried that it will lead to complacency. If they decide to just start cashing in on their name and throwing every fan service character they can think of our way, they run the risk of collapsing under their own weight. I hope that it never happens, and I hope they don’t stagnate, but I’m worried that they will. Their current unbroken string of excellent movies almost seems too good to be true.

So, for those of you that really didn’t enjoy Captain America: Civil War, I’d like to hear why. Just please keep it civil (ha!) in the comments.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Critical Hit as an organisation.

Last Updated: May 18, 2016

12 Comments

  1. Mighty Mikey

    May 18, 2016 at 10:48

    The lack of stakes is becoming an annoyance. As you said, people dont have to die to create drama but we as the audience have to know that something tragic can happen.

    Crossbones was thrown in as fan service. Purely so Marvel can say they had crossbones fight Cap.

    I disagree about Zemo. It is very Marvel, especially a Cap America story to have a Intelligent/Ruthless antagonist. It was a little contrived that his plan fell together so perfect. All the pieces fell into place so nicely. It was a little to clean, but his motivation and end result worked. He wanted no more Super Soldiers. He wanted to tear the Avengers apart and he did by opening up the truth and allowing the awful secrets to flood out and cause devastation the way it did for Cap and Stark.
    Look Id probably prefer a villain that can pose and match the physicality of the heroes. But that is where Thanos comes in. Well… Hopefully.

    Lets put it this way. Civil War was fun and had a fantastic balance between drama and action. The introduction of Spiderman and Black Panther is exciting and Im looking forward to the smaller characters time to shine. And yes in my opinion Spiderman is a small character at this stage in the MCU.

    Civil War lies somewhere in my Top 5 MCU

    *sorry for long post

    Reply

  2. Alien Emperor Trevor

    May 18, 2016 at 12:15

    I enjoyed it, it was very cool. But that’s all it was…a collection of cool moments… without much depth to it. Everything wrapped up nice & neatly, no one got hurt in a way they couldn’t recover from quite easily. No one was going to die in that very cool airport fight and we all knew it.

    For all I know the Wakandan trade delegation are still alive because they weren’t in the building that exploded because they were stuck in traffic on the way to the meeting & actually turned up a few hours later.

    It’s why I think BvS was a better movie overall, and despite its many flaws, because when something bad happened you saw it happen on-screen instead of hearing about it happening off-screen.

    Once the cool wears off Marvel movies are basically popcorn munching movies, like Transformers. Biff whack pow pewpewlazorz.

    Reply

    • oVg whippersnapper

      May 18, 2016 at 14:13

      4/10

      Reply

      • Alien Emperor Trevor

        May 18, 2016 at 14:21

        🙁 Thanks a lot. I lost a bonus because my rating fell below 4.1. I’m going to start a petition to have this review removed.

        Reply

        • oVg whippersnapper

          May 18, 2016 at 14:45

          You cant, its my opinion, I mean onion.

          Reply

          • Alien Emperor Trevor

            May 18, 2016 at 14:51

            Your opinions, like onions, make me cry. ;P

          • Mighty Mikey

            May 18, 2016 at 16:32

            Many layers to your onion. Many layers indeed

      • RinceThis

        May 18, 2016 at 18:14

        lol

        Reply

    • RinceThis

      May 18, 2016 at 18:14

      27% bwahahaha. That’s what I think of your opinion too 😛

      Reply

      • Alien Emperor Trevor

        May 18, 2016 at 20:15

        Ant-Man sucked. 😛

        Reply

  3. Kromas untamed

    May 18, 2016 at 17:22

    Is this on of those Jay and Silent Bob strike back moments where you are compiling a list of people to beat up? 😛

    Reply

    • Tracy Benson

      May 19, 2016 at 09:03

      Hahaha! Noooo! Not at all 😛

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Check Also

Action-packed new Shang-Chi trailer shows off the Ten Rings in battle

A brand new trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings shows us the revamped or…