CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR - Perpetual Motion Machine

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Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Daniel Bruhl, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Renner, Emily VanCamp, William Hurt, Paul Rudd, Tom Holland, Frank Grillo, Martin Freeman, Marisa Tomei, John Kani, John Slattery, Hope Davis
Runtime: 147 mins.
2016

In the month since the release of Captain America: Civil War, I have been trying to parse my feelings about the film. I've always been a sucker for comic book cinema, ever since I was weaned on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies,* but as I've become more discerning and my tastes have shifted, I've grown less and less comfortable with easy bankable formulas. In fact, my adoration of nerd culture in general has soured for reasons I'd prefer not to get into here.

*Spider-Man 1 + 2 still being the best pieces of superhero cinema in existence, with a sideward nod to The Dark Knight.

Over the years I've frequently pushed to redefine the arbitrary boundaries of what is fit to be included in discussions about art and academia to include certain "vulgar genre fiction" properties. I've tried to rally against biases folks have towards superhero fiction, children's movies, animation, speculative fiction, and so on. It's not about the surface level signifiers; it's about being able to meet a story on its own terms.

That being said, I've also had to flip that script on myself and confront my own delusions about properties that I wanted so badly to adore. 2012 was a watershed year for me; I had to face the one-two punch of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, both movies that I wanted to love so badly that I was blinded to their myriad flaws. In both cases, my wake-up call came in the form of my favorite film critic, Film Crit Hulk, who wrote eye-opening screeds against both of these films. Here they are, if you're interested.

Film Crit Hulk Smash: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN HAS 99 PROBLEMS BUT AN UNCLE BEN AIN'T ONE

Film Crit Hulk Smash: HULK VS. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

IRON MAN: Ground Zero Hero

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Jon Favreau
Writers: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Clark Gregg, Paul Bettany, Jon Favreau
Runtime: 126 mins.
2008

Eight years later and the success of Iron Man feels inevitable. This is the movie that spawned a franchise of thirteen films and counting. Returning to the source is a fairly satisfying experience. The zippy pace, tight action, and whirlwind of a lead performance make for both an enjoyable standalone experience and a solid foundation for all the hubbub to come. And yet, nobody saw any of this coming.

Iron Man had been in development hell since 1990, burning through directors, writers, and producers on a regular basis. Everyone from Tom Cruise to Nic Cage to Tarantino had been approached about the project. Eventually 2006 rolled around and Marvel Studios took over the mantle. They essentially started from scratch, ignoring the script treatments that had come before. Iron Man was fast-tracked simply because he was their final major property to have never gotten a big screen treatment before. Iron Man was not at all a hot commodity before this film. He was a B-list hero with so little cultural relevance that Marvel had to actively educate potential audiences that Iron Man was a man in a suit rather than some sort of automaton. It's not surprising that the self-financed and unproven Marvel Studios had to go through 30+ writers in order to put together a team for this movie.

CAPTAIN AMERICA II: DEATH TOO SOON - Camp Cap

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ivan Nagy
Writers: Wilton Schiller, Patricia Payne
Cast: Reb Brown, Connie Sellecca, Len Birman, Christopher Lee
Runtime: 83 mins.
1979

Captain America II: Death Too Soon is the 1979 sequel to the 1979 TV movie Captain America, and it is several orders of magnitude better than its predecessor. If you're in the market to watch one of these movies for camp purposes, it should undoubtedly be this one. It's not like you'll be missing anything important from the original's pointless wheel-spinning narrative.

In fact, the plot is a fair bit clearer and more straightforward. A mysterious terrorist who goes by the name General Miguel (Christopher Lee) plans to hold the entire town of Portland hostage by dropping an aging serum on their heads. Miguel is in hiding, pretending to be a prison warden at a local penitentiary. Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) must investigate a small town where something suspicious is going on, so that he might ultimately discover Miguel's location and let Captain America take care of business. Meanwhile, in an irrelevant B-plot, our favorite scientists Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman) and Dr. Wendy Day (conspicuously replaced by Connie Sellecca--didn't this character used to be blonde??) are working on a cure for the virus. They deliver exposition ably, but fail at everything else.

The film still takes a little too long to reveal what is going on in the town, but the plot is for the most part less obtuse. This is very much to the film's advantage, because the last thing this movie should want is for us to start using our brains to figure out what is happening. Everything about the story is ridiculous, of course, but it's well within the reasonable bounds of schlock sci-fi. Steve Rogers taking time to woo a single mother and hang out at her farm with her kid is a less forgivable narrative misstep.

That being said, you can shrug that stuff off with a laugh because, unlike Captain America, Captain America II doesn't spend an ungodly amount of time on every single sequence. It sets up what it needs to, knocks it down, and awkwardly edits into the next scene. Parts of it still drag, but at least we're not watching a doofus go off motorcycle jumps for five to ten minutes at a time.

ANT-MAN: Smalling with Style

Director: Peyton Reed
Writers: Adam McKay, Paul Rudd, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish
Cast: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, T.I.
Runtime: 117 mins.
2015

[Ant-Man is notorious for its behind the scenes history and drama. I'm not going to tackle any of that right now because it's overdone, and because I want to treat the movie well enough to criticize it based on its own merits and pitfalls--what is on the screen above all else.]

Ant-Man is not an especially well-written movie. I want to set this notion on the table and dine upon it first, because I'll have nicer things to say later on.

The story mostly follows charming everyman Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) who also happens to be a cat burglar and father to a small girl. His daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) is in the custody of Lang's ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her policeman boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott isn't a lost cause; everybody loves him, even the bosses who fire him, but Maggie forbids him from seeing his daughter until he pulls his act together and starts ponying up on child support.

Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is trying really hard to keep the technology he secretly invented many years ago--a suit that allows you to shrink to the size of an ant--out of the wrong hands. Those oh so wrong hands belong to Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who is about to have his own breakthrough with a weaponized shrinking mass producible suit he calls the Yellowjacket. So it is that Pym sets the pieces in motion for a heist, and he knows the perfect guy for the job.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: Hooked on a Feeling

Director: James Gunn
Writers: James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Gunn
Runtime: 121 mins.
2014

First the numbers.

Guardians of the Galaxy grossed $94 million in its opening weekend. The only 2014 movies to have bigger opening weekends were Transformers: Age of Extinction at $100 million and Captain America: The Winter Soldier at $95 million. More notable is the fact that Guardians managed to accomplish these numbers in August; compared to the triad of May-June-July, August box office numbers are usually slight. In fact, Guardians shattered the previous August opening weekend record, which belonged to The Bourne Ultimatum at $69.3 million. That's a solid $25 million margin.

Perhaps most notable of all, Guardians managed to achieve these astronomical numbers despite not being a sequel or a well-known property. Ticket buyers generally flock to the familiar. Take a look at all the other movies mentioned in the previous paragraph: The Winter Soldier, Ultimatum, and Age of Extinction are the second, third, and fourth movies of their respective franchises. Not only that, but two of them feature well-known protagonists who have achieved widespread cultural penetration over the course of decades, and the third features the protagonist of a series of very popular Ludlum novels. My point is that this cume represents an unprecedented level of financial success for a movie starring characters that almost nobody (including myself) had heard of a year ago. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2 made less opening weekend cash despite featuring one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture. Part of that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand, and part of it is Disney's (impressive) marketing campaign. But I have to believe that a lot of this bottled magic has to do with the movie itself. Guardians of the Galaxy has energy, and it has soul; these qualities bleed through the advertisements, critical acclaim, and word-of-mouth.

So now that we are finished parsing the soulless numbers, let's talk about soul.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER - The Man, the Movie, the Mythos

Directors: Joe and Anthony Russo
Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Cast: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie
Runtime: 136 mins.
2014

Part 1: THE MAN

Captain America is a wiener.  This character trait is an established fact, as undeniable as the claim that Spider-Man is a smart-ass, or that Superman is a wiener.

Think of it this way.  Of all the people you know, how many of them would say that Captain America is their favorite superhero?  I have an inkling that the number is zero, but if not... how many of those people would have said Captain America was their favorite hero before, say, the release of The Avengers?  I feel like we've narrowed the sample size to one dude living in Colorado.

How is it, then, that Captain America: The Winter Soldier has achieved such popular and critical success, to the point that some are heralding it as the best Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to date?  And, despite this near-universal acclaim, why do people still feel the need to preface their thoughts on the movie with some variation of the phrase, "I was never a big Captain America fan, but..."?

It has to do with the history of what Captain America means.