The real battle royale this summer isn't between Batman and Superman, or between Captain America and Iron Man, or between the X-Men and the purple guy. It's over the soul of blockbuster cinema. Marvel has clearly staked its claim, and DC announced its own perspective rather loudly a few months ago. The latter made a film which, while admittedly convoluted, was at least a stab at something grandiose and new. It didn't make logical sense, but it felt like it did. There was an emotional truth to every punch. The former studio doesn't make films so much as it engineers them on a factory line. They're designed to be CinemaSins-proof, but they come off more as automatons than anything else.…

No, it ain't the War Between the States, nor Ali vs Frazier. But, it's Team Cap vs Team Iron Man. So, whose side are you on?

I've only seen 2 MCU movies in their entirety. GoTG and Civil War. I've seen 8 minutes of Iron Man, 13 minutes of Captain America, and half of Thor. That's it. Why? I never got around to watching. So, I watched this with fresh, excited, and open minded eyes. Boy, was I pleased.

What did I pickup on? Captain America has a rad shield. The fella from The Hurt Locker is probably my favorite character. I cracked up at his Mark Fuhrman reference. Does he have his own movie? The other fella from The…

87/100

Sweeping through a vast array of comic-book heroes and a particular, timely political environment, Captain America: Civil War subverts the very idea of spectacle. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, this third Captain America installment is a gigantically complex vision of ramifications, taking bits and pieces of the MCU and utilizing each resonant segment for a storied experience of crumbling friendships and episodic catharsis. Through its grand 2 hour 20 minute runtime, Civil War operates like a culmination *and* an antithesis of the Marvel brand, narrowing its focus to showcase conflict among heroes even though the brawls escalate towards geeky, rapturous highs.

It isn't immediately noticeable, however. An opening action sequence is typical Bourne quick-cut rapid intensity, and it's…

"Captain America: Civil War" isn't necessarily the best Marvel movie — directing duo Joe and Anthony Russo fail to deliver even a fraction of the scale, grace, and ineffable sense of joy that Joss Whedon brought to "The Avengers" — but it's nevertheless the Platonic ideal of a Marvel movie.

More so than any of the previous episodes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, "Civil War" is a soap opera in spandex. In part, that's because of the film's refreshing (if not fully realized) emphasis on emotional turmoil rather than global destruction; while plenty of buildings blow up, most of the collateral damage is caused by the good guys as they argue with each other and threaten to go their separate…

"... it always ends in a fight"

i can see why this is going to work for people - the safe, mathematically calculated narrative construction here will be appealing to anyone turned off by the weirdly incoherent BvS - but, as a regular defender that these movies can actually be ~about things~ (the chaos & pain of growth in Age of Ultron, or the war on terror as an american farce in Iron Man 3, or the hokey serial on the neutrality of weapons & maintaining moral values in questionable times in The First Avenger) i found it pretty crushing to watch 2h15m of emotionally & thematically dull, contrived and derivative expository set-up as an excuse for a 15m action setpiece of cool…

Just after the first fifteen minutes of the film I felt as if I couldn't wait until I got to watch what I had seen so far thirty more times. This feeling only intensified the longer I sat in the theater. This movie shouldn't work. You'd have to be a genius to make this movie work. Fortunately, Marvel Studios hired two geniuses.

Everything works. Every single character shines. It's actually incredible that not a single Avenger gets the shaft in terms of development or arc considering we can't say that about either Avengers film, and those had less characters to pay attention to. The writing of these characters are so noticeably different from Age of Ultron but so familiar from…

"You have a metal arm? That is awesome, dude"!

Spider-Man steals the entire movie. He was easily my favorite part of Civil War. Marvel, thank you so much for casting Tom Holland and not Asa Butterfield. If this is any indication of how Homecoming will be, then it'll be really great! It won't be better than Spider-Man 2 though ;). No Spider-Man movie will ever top Sam Raimi's SM2. But damn, if this version of Spider-Man could have been in SM2; best Super Hero movie of all-time confirmed!

Aside from Spider-Man and the airport action-sequence (the airport battle is so awesome) what I liked most about this movie is the fact that everyone had their moment to shine. There are…

Captain America, conceived and drawn by Jack Kirby, was and always will be one of my favorite superheroes. A nearly pure kineticism arrayed against grotesque madness. My favorite Cap/Kirby era was its most unhinged, the post-Nixon Seventies, where whatever moral center there was, it was not aligned with governmental authority, and certainly not with the legacy of the United States. Cap's journey was inward, into an interiority left mostly vacant through constant violence, into the fringes of American Life, conspiracies within conspiracies, where what was known was deposed and revealed as fraudulent. I love those comics with all of my heart.

Captain America: Civil War already seems a product of another era, different from our own, one of routinized self-importance,…

Civil War is actually a pretty good movie when watching it again.

It and Batman v Superman came out within a few weeks of one another and I feel like the Marvel outing really shined at the time. Not an unbelievable task considering most of BvS took place at night and in the rain. Civil war is faster paced, brighter, and is a more upbeat movie despite the very clear Democrats vs Republicans feel of it all. 

The movie itself has a decent premise. I think when the Marvel movies aren’t facing off with a cosmic threat and it’s human related the movies have a different feel. While I do enjoy the big Thanos show downs, the more reality driven…