To be honest at a minimum you may want to watch at least Captain America Winter Soldier (which has the side benefit of being a great movie anyway :)). The story really works as a sequel to that story. But the movie alone gives you all the info you need to watch it.
Regarding Wakanda: I kind of feel like I have to mention that even in the real Africa in our world there are plenty of cities that are just as advanced and would be indistinguishable from a city in Europe or North America. Africa isn’t just huts and lions.
No, but if I had access to Tony Stark’s tech, I’d build goggles that dilate/contract in sync with my eye muscles, if that happened to help me in a fight. The fact that they also match my expression is just icing on the cake.
Sure, it’s not a perfect explanation, but for comics, it’s good enough.
They discovered the bomb and he detonated it. He wasn’t depending on killing anyone specific, he was creating an incident. If he got caught, the rest of the movie doesn’t happen. But that goes for any plan.
It seems you’re thinking that he expected everything to happen the way it did, I don’t think so. He wanted to expose Stark to that message at an appropriate time to cause friction.
The sequence of events, as far as I can tell:
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He discovers from the Hydra data leak, that Hydra killed Stark’s parents, and that a tape of the killing exists. And that Bucky, the good friend of Cap America did it.
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He tries to get the tape by interrogating the Hydra agent in charge. When there, he gets the Bucky codebook. The guy doesn’t tell him where the tape is located.
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Realizing that he needs to get the location of the tape from Bucky, he flushes him out with the bomb plot. He makes the Avengers look bad by bombing the accords, and makes Bucky the most wanted person on Earth.
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He kills the UN interrogator and swaps with him, bringing the Bucky codebook, so he can meet Bucky, activate him, and get the location of the hydra base with the tape.
He knows that Cap will try to save Bucky, and cause some friction.
- He gets the tape. Confrontation.
I don’t understand the comments here questioning the existence of high-tech science in Wakanda. It’s been established in the comics since Fantastic Four #52 (nearly 50 years ago) that Wakanda is a hidden country with a highly advanced scientific community, thanks in part to having the only source of the rare vibration-absorbing mineral Vibranium.
I really enjoyed Captain America: Civil War but just have a few quibbles.
• I’m surprised that there was NO mention that Wanda’s brother died in Sokovia. You’d think that when she was forced to watch the film of Sokovia again on TV that she would have expressed some sort of sadness over Pietro’s death.
• Kind of disappointed that they slightly changed the Black Panther’s origin. Having his father killed by Ulysses Klaw in the comics kind of gave T’Challa an arch villain, though I guess going forward that slot can be filled with Zemo.
• Even though I knew what Zemo was looking for when he went to Siberia I was hoping that he could have accidentally uncovered a frozen Red Skull to be a Cap foe in an upcoming film. I miss the fact that we don’t have that great Cap vs Skull set up in the films.
A couple things I really liked in the film:
• LOVED all the dialogue between the characters during their battle and other scenes. I laughed much, much, MUCH MORE during five minutes in this film than I did in the entirety of Deadpool, which bored the hell out of me.
• Surprised, though happily, with the appearance of Giant Man/Goliath and the first signs of a romantic relationship between the Vision & Scarlet Witch (though, have they ever called her that in the films?).
Another winning film by Marvel Studios!!!
Hawkeye did say he owed her a debt.
I’m sure that I could get a chemist to go through the periodic table of elements and explain how each one is amaaaaazing in what it can do. Being able to say that vibranium is really useful (unlike all those other elements) still doesn’t mean that the place where it is mined is making much money nor doing anything useful with that money if they are making it. The people of Dubai, for example, seem to be content with building underwater hotels and racing Ferraris in the desert.
I’m happy that the Wakandans are doing better than the humans in our world. My point was simply that there was no introduction to that fact, so each time the Black Panther got ramped up, it was like :dubious:
And what percentile of watchers of the movie do you think read comics?
Or are sitting next to one? Pretty much all of them. They can easily turn to their neighbor and ask “Is this a comics thing?” Their neighbor will nob and the movie will go on, everyone satisfied.
May I ask who shot the film of Bucky killing Tony Stark’s parents?
(A motor bike rider shoots out the tyres of a car on a deserted road…where was the cameraman?)
Hydra developed GoPro decades ago.
It makes sense, given how they think, that Hydra would send a handler to follow Bucky.
How old is Tony Stark? Cap knew his father as a young, rich, genius playboy inventor in WWII. Later we see Tony as a teenager around the age of 17 or so? His parents get in a car that looks late 60’s, maybe 70ish? Wouldn’t Tony be in his 60s?
SHIELD had oversight, which we clearly saw in the original Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldioer. The World Council gave direct orders to both Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce. (It’s a little unclear what role Pierce plays since Fury is titled the Director of SHIELD; he seems to have some kind of regulatory role coordinating with and answering to the council, but that is never really fully illustrated, only that he is Fury’s direct superior.) Frankly, given the threats that the Avengers have faced, individually and together, it is unclear that any regulatory authority would be able to provide useful oversight. They’re dealing with aliens, magic, and forces beyond the understanding of science and law, as well as a conspiracy so deep it has apparently controlled history from WWII onward with no suspicion by official intelligence and law enforcement agencies whatsoever despite the fact that Hydra likes to put their logo on just about every flat surface they can find. Steve Rogers knows that he and his select team are untouchable as far as Hydra is concerned (with the exception of Barnes, for which Rogers has an avowed weakness); he has no assurance that any other agency would not be infiltrated, and given how much factions of Hydra keep reappearing in the MCU, it would be almost certain that any larger agency almost inevitably would be a target for control by Hydra.
During T’Challa’s speech at the UN, he explains how the use of vibranium in Age of Ultron to build a weapon of mass destruction convinced him that Wakanda needed to abandon their policy of isolation from the rest of the world and take a position of responsibility. Although they don’t go into great detail about how Wakanda uses vibranium, they clearly aren’t selling it as a natural resource in exchange for cash, and aside from the shipload that Klaw had in South Africa, the only known quantity of it outside of Wakanda is Captain America’s shield. And vibranium clearly isn’t a normal chemical element; it has properties that are aphysical compared to normal chemistry, such as its affinity to bond with organic material to make a living matrix. Like Pym particles, it is some kind of material that is beyond normal science. I’m sure they’ll get into more detail in the upcoming Black Panther film, but the reason the technology or even basic geography of Wakanda isn’t known to the world (remember, even Bruce Banner had never heard of it) is because the Wakandans wanted it that way.
As far as the film itself, I thought it was really good. A worthy successor to The Winter Soldier and a vast improvement on the overstuffed and tired Age of Ultron, recapturing the wit and character interaction of the original Avengers. I do have a few minor quibbles with some choices, though. Stark’s reveal of his last memory of his mother and father was there to set the stage for everything else that occurs in the film, but it really didn’t seem like something that Tony Stark would actually do. I know they wanted to include Spider-Man as a lead-in to that stand alone movie, and I don’t have any issue with the acting of Tom Holland and Marisa Tomei as Peter Parker and Aunt May, but the entire inclusion seemed very forced and detracted tonally from the film. It wasn’t as if Parker played the kind of role here that he did in the comics, so the inclusion wasn’t necessary for story reasons, and bringing a child in to fight against soldiers and near-gods seems beyond the even normal recklessness of Stark, who generally likes to do things by himself anyway. Bringing in Ant-Man, on the other hand, seemed kind of organic and Paul Rudd’s enthusiasm about meeting all of the Avengers (at least, the rebellious ones) served to break the tension when the film was on the verge of getting too dark and somber. And as an aside, how does the War Machine suit not have some kind of emergency propulsion or bail-out system? Given everything else Tony builds into the suits how can he not have someething to protect against propulsive failure?
All in all, though, a great film, and it provided a good basis for both the Black Panther storyline, a hook in getting the team back together for the Infinity War storyline, and the forward bookend for the same. If Dr. Strange goes well and Marvel can get the casting and tone right for Captain Marvel, they can pretty much keep printing money off these things for the next four years. And they’ve also demonstrated the ability to maintain a pretty cohesive narrative while allowing each film to have a distinct tone and character, which is pretty impressive. Although the Russo Brothers and Feige are clearly helming the Phase 3 films creatively and narratively from here on, it has the fingerprints of Joss Whedon all over it.
Stranger
It looks like Howard Stark died in '91, when Tony was twenty-one, which means Tony was born in '70, which means he’s now maybe forty-six? Does that work?
Howard Stark is alive as of the events in the cold open of Ant-Man set in 1989. So his death is presumably in the early 'Nineties, probably in part because of the fracturing of the SHIELD leadership (e.g. Hank Pym leaving and refusing to release the ‘secret’ of the Pym particles). Howard Stark clearly married later in life. If they pseudo-flashback scene was set in the early 'Nineties, then Tony Stark would have been born in the early 'Seventies and be in his mid-forties now (which is only a little younger than Robert Downey, Jr.).
Stranger
Since the beginning scene took place in 1991 we can gather that Howard and Maria were killed in '91. My question is how old was Howard when he died. If Steve knew him in '42, '43, when he became Cap, I’m guessing that Howard was in his late 20’s? Maybe 30? So he was in his late 80’s early 90’s when he died? I realize that John Slattery usually plays older men, but he is only 53 years old. He sure as hell didn’t look 90.
If, as you say, he “was in his late 20’s” in '42-'43, then in '91 he’d be in his seventies.
That was part of the point, actually, so he could pass himself off as Bucky.
I really liked Zemo and his motivation. He wasn’t a super villain or an alien, just an ordinary guy bent on revenge for what happened to his family.
I’m totally Team Cap as far as the Accords are concerned. We all know how corrupt the UN is. What are they supposed to do if the UN orders them to put down a democratically elected government (Chile, anybody?)? Or if Iran and the Third World put together orders for them to take out the US government? And what happens if Loki or some other alien attacks, and they have to sit around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for the UN to authorize them to attack? Plus, did any of them bother to read that huge Accords document?
This movie really hyped my interest in the Spider-Man and Black Panther movies. It’s hard to believe that Tom Holland is really 19, btw. And now there’s talk of finally producing a Black Widow movie?
Howard Stark was clearly a young genius (only loosely based oh Howard Hughes). If he were 30 in 1945, he’d have fathered Tony in his mid-fifties and would be 76 in 1991, which is not implausible, especially if he managed to take a little ‘Winter Soldier cocktail’ to stave off aging effects, which wouldn’t be beyond Stark to continue to attract young and attractive women. It’s not nearly as big a question as how a Walkman made circa 1987 is still functioning with the same cassette tape it was playing as of 2014.
Stranger
I was really pleased that Zemo lived at the end. Then again, I was really pleased that Rumlow lived at the end of Winter Soldier, only they killed him in the first fifteen minutes of Civil War. Because as cool as the big set piece fight in the airport was, what I really want to see in an MCU movie is a similar fight where it’s all established superhero characters on one side, and established supervillain characters on the other. Unfortunately, by my count the only two established supervillain characters in the MCU right now are Loki and Zemo. None of the other villains survived their movies.