I will FOREVER maintain that they did Civil War too fucking early.
That Cap3 should have been a buddy cop flick with Steve and Sam looking for Bucky, while Bucky was trying to piece together who he was and what was taken from him without getting caught.
The addition of Zemo and the “OMG we have to beat him before he gets to the 5 other Winter Soldiers who are way worse than me” plot was stupid- especially since we spent the whole damn movie on it, only for us to make it to the bunker, only to find that he’s killed all of them before they even left stasis. It’s a Deus Ex Machina except worse, because there was no hint at any point in the story that Zemo wouldn’t use the Soldiers. He went to great lengths to get Bucky’s notebook, so he could activate him. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t have used the others.
The narrative we’re given sets this up as the final conflict, only to yank the rug out-
to say, “actually the final conflict is Tony (the guy who started the movie claiming we need guardrails to stop us from making bad and dangerous choices) getting his feelings hurt and deciding that’s reason enough to commit the extrajudicial murder of someone who he KNOWS was a brainwashed captive (because he just made a joke about Bucky being a brainwashed captive five minutes earlier), and Steve trying to stop Tony from committing that murder… and we’re going to narratively frame it as Tony being the one who made the morally correct call.”
Civil War *hurts* in the comics and it has oomph specifically because the Avengers ARE friends. They’re not just coworkers, or people who mostly tolerate each other’s presence because they all have superpowers. And when they’re ripped apart, it fucking hurts.
It didn’t hurt in the movies because they weren’t fucking friends. It wasn’t earned.
Cap3 should have been the search for Bucky, and AVENGERS 3 should have been CW, not Infinity War. Save IW and Endgame for its own fucking mini-saga and phase of films, that way it wouldn’t have felt so rushed or had all these disparate parts thrown together.
Tony wasn’t Steve’s friend, I don’t care what he thinks. Every time I see the scene at the end of CW where Steve says “he’s my friend” and Tony says “so was I”, I’m always like “bitch WHERE?!” Where in the last half dozen movies were you Steve’s fucking friend?
When you treated him like an idiot in Avengers 1, despite him having far more combat experience than anyone at the table save for Thor? (Nat has years of experience, but her expertise is espionage and assassination, not combat. Same with Fury’s.) Or maybe when you consistently let your jealousy over your father’s adoration for Steve color how you saw him?
When you told him that the team needed a safety valve and needed checks and balances, because “a kid died” (who was 22yo, a fully grown adult, who made the choice to go to a war-ravaged country, fully aware of the risks, and ended up dying because TONY couldn’t stomach being told he was wrong about his Ultron idea)…. but the second it suited you, you blackmailed a fucking 15yo to fly halfway across the planet and threw him into the deep end of a fight between adult supers and metahumans?
Mr “how dare we put children in danger” Stark, who had zero fucking problems actively putting a child in danger the moment he was losing control of the narrative, is wondering why Steve might not trust you?
In order for CW to have the emotional payoff it needs to, it doesn’t work if the Avengers aren’t friends. It’s not a betrayal if they never trusted each other. When you set up these sweeping arcs, the dominoes have to be in the right order.
And MCU didn’t do it right.
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