This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It's called "Captain America: Civil War." But everyone from here to Inner Mongolia should be aware by now that this third Captain America movie out Friday and 13th feature film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is both a dysfunctional Avengers reunion and a vehicle for introducing new characters such as Spider-Man and Black Panther to this superhero megafranchise.
So, yep, Steve Rogers' old school Cap (Chris Evans) and snarky Tony Stark's Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) lead different Avengers factions in a philosophical clash over whether their world-saving but often destructive efforts should be regulated by an international governing body.
Previously established members Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Vision (Paul Bettany) choose sides while Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Spidey (Tom Holland) and Panther (Chadwick Boseman) come in and also pick a team.
As is the Marvel hallmark, everyone's personal issues and strained relationships need to be dramatized, too — and lead to mind-blowing battles, one incredibly kinetic, another totally awesome and a climactic one so emotionally/thematically heart-rending it may never be resolved.
Plus, jokes, another staple of the MCU that, while not absent from the previous Cap entries "The First Avenger" and "The Winter Soldier," were downplayed enough to make the films about Marvel's oldest hero seem more sober than the others.
With all of that, "Civil War" is still a Captain America movie, according to its directors.
"The tone is from 'Winter Soldier,' not the tone from the Avengers movies," explains Joe Russo, who with his brother Anthony entered the MCU with the critically acclaimed 2014 Cap sequel. "The score, the editing, the camerawork, the themes throughout 'Civil War' all keep it in Cap's point of view.
"In 'The First Avenger,' Cap was a patriot at a time when there were very clear delineations between right and wrong," Joe says of the World War II-set origin picture, which was directed by Joe Johnston. "In the second film, he has to subvert that and become a character who goes against the system in order to save the system. In this third film, we wanted to send him on a journey from the first film's patriot to insurgent; we thought that would be the most interesting arc you could track with a character like him."
"Winter Soldier," which the Russos directed after distinguished stints on such ensemble sitcoms as "Arrested Development," "Community" and "Happy Endings," saw Cap, who'd recently been revived from the suspended animation he'd entered in the 1940s, adjusting to the modern world and discovering that his childhood friend, Bucky Barnes, had outlived the war years in a similar, though much more alarming, manner.
The Soviets turned Bucky into The Winter Soldier, a brainwashed superassassin with no memory of his previous relationship to Steve.
In "Civil War," Barnes is apparently responsible for bombing a U.N. meeting, called, not so coincidentally, to hammer out the Avengers oversight agreement. Cap, already opposed to outside control of the Avengers, soon goes rogue in an effort to aid his hunted friend. An Avengers faction follows him and Stark organizes a pro-control cadre to go after them. Then things really get complicated, for Cap more than anybody.
"Bucky is certainly the last remaining part of Steve that is his memory of home and who he was before," Evans notes. "That's what motivates Steve to become selfish. You've got the most selfless guy in comic books saying, 'I care a little bit more about my relationship than what it means to you guys.' It's new territory; Steve's a very binary guy, this or that. With Bucky, it becomes gray."
Tony Stark's early years also catch up with him big time in "Civil Wars," resulting in a more emotional Iron Man than we've previously seen.
"As far the emo arc of Tony over these bunch of years, I think anyone who sticks around for more than a minute and joins the party here, that's where I think Marvel has really done its smartest moves," Downey says. "Making sure that there's a real emotional background to what's going on."
Which isn't to say that Stark's lost his sense of humor, as is more than evident when he recruits an overeager Queens teen, Peter Parker, to flesh out the ranks of his Avengers loyalists for the looming big battle.
While Marvel Comics' most popular character has long been controlled on the big screen by Sony Pictures, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige worked out a deal to include the web-slinger in his Disney-owned MCU while Sony retains distribution of the next run of standalone "Spider-Man" movies that will star the young Brit Holland.
He and Rudd's Ant-Man, introduced in his own MCU film last year, provide much of "Civil War's" comedy relief, and that was as crucial as integrating them into the big brand.
"There were very emotional stakes in the film, and we knew that the third act was going to subvert traditional structure and go to a darker place than these movies traditionally tend to go to," Joe Russo points out. "One reason to bring Spider-Man and Ant-Man in was to balance out that tone with characters who didn't have the same investment in the main plot stakes as all of the other characters because it's hard for them to crack jokes; it takes the audience out of the movie."
As for Black Panther (aka T'Challa, King of the African nation Wakanda), he's got his own agenda that is not the least bit funny. Scheduled for his own MCU movie next year, the Boseman character's introduction was crucial to "Civil War's" design, too.
"We thought it would be interesting to have a very random element in the storytelling who had as emotional a motivation as the other characters, but not about the same thing," Joe explains. "He comes into the story as a free radical who can change things or make it complicated or make it surprising, so you just weren't watching a very linear story about two sides that were working toward this conflict."
While fans of the 2006/07 limited comic book series "Civil War" will find broad references to its iconic plot in the movie, the Russos readily admit that, like all MCU films, theirs deviates substantially from the printed canon.
"It's a complete departure," Anthony, a longtime comics collector like his brother, affirms. "Oftentimes, the characters have evolved a lot over many, very specific eras of comic books. I mean, Captain America has been around since 1941; he's had a lot of iterations, some of which are quite different from one another. So it's never been a question of how do you satisfy the fan base, which is a fool's errand. The other thing we like about the movies is that we don't want a straight interpretation of what the books are. We've got the books. As fans, we want to go to the movies and see something we haven't seen before; we want to see a new book, so to speak, a new run.
"While we can borrow on the great work that's been done in the books and we can reference cool ideas and moments and all of that and be really informed and inspired by those things, we want to give a new experience to fans and audiences about where these characters can go and what they can be. We've always looked at that as our job."
That job is going to become, well, infinitely more challenging as the Russos gear up to direct the two-part "Avengers: Infinity War." Those will adapt an even more complex limited comics run to tie up what, by the time Part II comes out in 2019, will be some 20 movies worth of characters' interrelated storylines.
That won't be easy. It should help, though, if the Russos bring the same basic approach to the task that they did to "Civil War."
"The thing that's most valuable to us as storytellers is the human condition," Joe says. "That's what we're most interested in exploring, and that's what these superheroes are a conduit for. It's a modern mythology, and they represent certain iconic elements of humanity and ourselves.
"I think this comes from working with television ensembles for many, many years: We can take them to a place where we could track each character's story and give each of them a human moment in the film to move them forward, so they end the movie in a different place than where they started."
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