Stupid super soap opera

There’s really just one thing I can give solid credit to Marvel and DC (along with their movie studio overlords) in regards to their comic book film adaptations: they really know how to suck all of the fun out of cartoons. If you thought that Batman v. Superman was bad enough, here comes Captain America: Civil War to cap it all off with even more plot jumps, even more exposition, and much, much less character development and lightheartedness for any audience member to really enjoy.

In short, this movie is an excellent example of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of big budget tentpole movies being creatively bereft culture killers.

In this new edition to the extended Marvel series, the entire Avengers crew (plus a few others) have found themselves in hot water for the unnatural disasters they participated in causing while saving the world from such foes as Ultron and Thanos. At the beginning of this film, they inflict even more damage unto the world and the world responds by forcing them to disband or sign a document that puts them under the authority of the United Nations.

Some agree but others don’t and a rift of superhero proportions is borne. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and War Machine (Don Cheadle) among those on the pro side while the opposing side has Captain America (Chris Evans), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie).

Since this is one of those movies where every mutant and billionaire industrialist comes out of the woodwork, look for an astounding cast of characters that also includes Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), as well as some of the usual Avengers suspects such as Vision (Paul Bettany) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Hulk and Thor are notably absent. They are not missed, however. This whole spectacle is a glut of filler with nothing satisfying.

The major problem with this movie – as with most of these movies these days – is that they have to constantly find new conflicts to illustrate on screen. You can’t just have the newest alien or sentient robot show up for the Avengers to assemble against. Audiences would presumably get bored for the formula being repeated and repeated ad nauseam. Monsters are monsters, whatever shape they come in. Now, the superheroes have become the monsters and thus they must fight each other.

But superheroes only exist in conflict situations. The only logical solution is for them to start having conflicts with each other. If it wasn’t about agreeing or not agreeing to signing a UN accord then it would be something like Hawkeye barking at Scarlet Witch for not filling the car with gas after she borrowed it or Ant-Man leaving his grape jelly spoon in the peanut butter, exactly what Falcon cannot stand. In this movie, Iron Man even complains about somebody putting coffee grounds down the drain. He complains about a lot of other things too, and my interest in his character has continued to wane ever since he first appeared eight years and five movies ago. He’s a one-trick pony. I’m bored of him.

That’s why there are so many characters. They’re all one-trick ponies, and so a never-ending series of new ponies must enter the scene in order to stave off that stale smell from pervading the cinema. I won’t be surprised if one day the Avengers have to fight the X-Men. That will be right before the Avengers/X-Men have to fight the Justice League. And then an intergalactic network of all superhero villains will team up to fight a consortium of the Avengers/X-Men/Justice League. And then the consortium will start infighting and the process will repeat itself.

Make no mistake: this film is a colossal soap opera and a poorly written one at that. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely should be ashamed of themselves for not having any sense of pacing, not knowing how to flesh out a character through dialogue, and for not doing anything to abate the parade of international locations that change the scenes with each city announced in screen-sized banners.

The only thing that really redeemed itself (and distinguished it from that other Batman v. Superman atrocity of late) was the attempt to enter into an interesting ideological intellectual zone that involved a discussion about the importance of compromise versus standing for what you believe in. It might very well have been simply Markus and McFeely repeating what they found in a fortune cookie but these few instances of thought-provoking dialogue modestly made up for the vast scenes of people standing around and arguing about whether it was better to have pizza for dinner or to try something new. This is what today’s superheroes have been reduced to: nattering, nitpicking nincompoops.