March of the Living (indie game)

Not quite the cruellest month.

No, it's got nothing to do with the Holocaust education program... it's a rogue-lite zombie indie game by Machine 22, available on Steam. Yeah. Not sure they thought that one through. Anyway, this came to my attention because I saw Splattercat playing it. I can recommend Splattercat; I started watching him at random when another indie game, The Forest, came out, and he's the only "Let's Play"-er I watch, mostly because his affable raconteur style, deriving apparently from radio experience, and his academic background, make him appealing to my sensibilities. Similarly, I like atmospheric, emergent storytelling games with pixel artwork graphics, and despite how overdone they are now zombie survival scenarios still interest me, so I kept an eye on March of the Living until it was on sale. The gameplay is obviously, and I believe quite deliberately, reminiscent of FTL: Faster Than Light, except that in March of the Living instead of controlling a spaceship flying through space you're, as is so often the case in zombie games, some guy walking across post-apocalyptic America. You move across a map from point to point and whenever you get to a new point you have some kind of encounter.

This is Greg. He is both marching and alive.

The encounters are more or less the heart of March of the Living. They range from fairly straightforward situations, like finding a place trading supplies or accidentally running into a bunch of zombies you have to fight, to more bizarre ones like finding a hole filled with zombies covered in petrol just waiting to be immolated or a travelling rock band that offers to play you music in return for food. Some of these encounters I found quite atmospheric and mysterious, like one involving seeing a strange girl with an axe in the distance; if you hang back and watch her, she just walks away. Some are rather clichéd and predictable, like one presenting a run-in with a couple who offer you free food which of course turns out to be cooked human flesh. Some I found affected, trying too hard to be cool, like one featuring a well-dressed man with heavily-armed butlers who appears out of nowhere and asks you if you have any collectible bobbleheads.

"We got this, man! We got this by the ass!"

I hate to say it, however, but the biggest problem with these encounters is that there simply aren't enough of them. March of the Living is quite a difficult game, and when you die you have to go back to the beginning. I've seen the same encounters repeatedly, and very rarely see new ones. That wouldn't be so bad if there were more options, but sometimes there is only one way to respond to an encounter; often a second option is greyed-out and unclickable unless you have a particular item that you might have arbitrarily found earlier in the game. As such, a game of March of the Living can easily become repetitive and monotonous, especially if you recognise the encounters you've seen before. Maybe I haven't made enough progress yet but personally I think a game with emergent storytelling like this needs a good deal more content, and perhaps some procedurally-generated content so that certain encounters themselves have randomly-allocated variants to keep things fresh.

What a glorious feeling.

This would also be a little more tolerable if the art was a bit more varied. March of the Living has a few "travelling between marks on the map" backgrounds and a few "in cities" backgrounds but little else in the way of dressing. Sometimes you'll come across a unique location like a lake or a log cabin, but these are rare. When moving between markers you watch the character sprite walking in front of a background, and it would be nice if these had more variety. For instance, if moving between a normal marker and a city it would be good if buildings started to appear, or the reverse if walking away from a city. Similarly, in some of the encounters it would be nice if you could see your character and a few other sprites to give you a sense of the scene. This wouldn't work for all of them, like the mysterious axe-wielding girl, but at other times it would; a campfire with a few people sitting around it, perhaps, or a couple of guys arguing by the side of the road. Judicious use of additional artwork would enhance the atmosphere where appropriate. If it was possible to have encounters in cities it would also enhance the variety. Furthermore, I think it would be more visually appealing if the map screen looked like an actual map rather than just a bunch of lines criss-crossing on a grey space, sort of like the star map in FTL.

Move the glow.

Speaking of cities, the other major element of March of the Living is the survival and combat. Your player characters need food and rest, and if attacked by zombies or, rarely, other people, they have to fight, so you also need to keep hold of weapons, bullets and medical supplies. Each character has different abilities and combat proficiencies with the game's four kinds of weapons: close combat weapons, pistols, rifles and shotguns. Much like FTL you can pause during combat to pick targets and weapons have a timed bar which fills up before they are ready to fire. It's straightforward but at times feels simplistic and lacking in nuance, as battles take place in empty rectangles with the player characters, the zombies or human enemies and no obstacles or environmental depth. In FTL this made sense as the game was set in space, but March of the Living is not, and at times it feels overly reductive and lacking the flexibility and customisable nature of a game like FTL.

Sure is flat in this part of the USA.

The survival aspect is a little better but still lacks nuance. There are different health items that allow you to heal to different degrees, but only generic food rations which always restore your hunger to full. There's an encounter featuring nicking a bunch of cooked rabbits from an unsupervised campfire which always makes me think that my guy is going to get malnutrition from eating them (digesting rabbit uses more vitamins and so on than it restores), but that isn't part of the game, although you can get the zombie disease from eating an infected deer. When you character is fully fatigued you suffer combat penalties so it's good to rest, but for some reason it's only completely safe do so in city areas. If you do it in the countryside between encounters you risk getting attacked by zombies while you sleep. This makes no sense to me; surely there would be far more zombies in the cities than out in the countryside where the population is so much lower. It's possible to get attacked by zombies in both the country and city, but in the country it seems fairly random. There is a "growls" meter at the top of the screen that fluctuates, I think telling you how many zombies you can hear nearby, suggesting that if you get attacked there will be more, but as far as I can tell you can't do anything about it, so I'm not sure what the point is. If there is a point, the game doesn't explain it; I don't recall it being explained in the tutorial.

I bet there are loads of broken umbrellas in the zombie apocalypse.

Getting attacked by zombies in the city is what can happen when you scavenge, which you can only do in cities. You can select a certain amount of time to scavenge for in various locations, and the longer you scavenge the more likely you are to get attacked; you are informed of the percentage likelihood of being attacked. If you are attacked, you need to fight the zombies before you can get any supplies (and you don't always even get supplies) but there are usually so many that it's unlikely to be worth it. You can also flee from the zombies but you lose time, can't loot that location and risk losing items. Anything can be lost as well, no matter how unlikely it might be. If you flee in the country you go back to your last visited location. In the city, the places you can loot offer different items. The police station tends to provide ammunition, the hospital might have medical supplies, the grocery store may have food, the drug store seems to have fairly random things and the apartments often have items that are only useful in encounters. Sometimes this can work in your favour and sometimes it doesn't, and unlike, say, Organ Trail, you don't have too much control over it.

Somewhere in this picture, Greg is sleeping.

There are four storylines in the game but you have to finish each one to unlock the next. I'm still going on the first, so maybe I haven't seen all the game has to offer, but so far it feels a tad limited. Aspects of it feel like a stripped-down FTL and aspects feel like a stripped-down Organ Trail. I don't mean to be too harsh, but I always feel a little surprised when I remember that the game isn't Steam Early Access; it's a full release. The problem, I would argue, is that the game's got a solid foundation, with decent writing, nice art and functional gameplay, but it needs a little more. A touch more artwork and story/encounter content would keep the rogue-lite nature engaging and somewhat more complexity to combat and survival would make the gameplay more exciting. If I was to give some unsolicited advice to the developer I would say that he should develop this game a little further in an update or (preferably free) downloadable content, or build on the experience of this game to develop a more complex title in future. When a solid foundation exists, which this game undoubtedly has, it is an opportunity to be seized, like the horrible cadaverous hands of a pixelly zombie on a victim's reluctant neck.

Hindsight: A 2015 Cinematic Retrospective

It appears that I saw more Hollywood films in 2015 than I did in 2014. Damn. You win this time, culture industry. As usual, let's begin with some films I didn't see.

Six 2015 Films You Might Have Expected Me To See, But I Didn't:

The Bad Education Movie

It's not exactly top-notch sitcom material, but I quite like Bad Education. It has some funny moments; it's better to watch while a bit drunk. Anyway, the film looked pretty uninspiring: the cringe factor of the show cranked up to a million, and the contrast between the "crazy" comedy characters and the scoffing, eye-rolling "straight man" characters exaggerated to an even greater degree. I don't think it would have ever been shown in cinemas over here.

Ex Machina

Apparently this is quite good. I just haven't seen it. Why haven't I seen this?

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was good, and rather challenging to my beliefs. It's odd to think about when apparently the director saw the robot, Ava, as the protagonist, while I viewed Caleb, who ends up trapped in the facility, in this role. Ava ends up becoming a murderer, but in a sense so was Nathan, and Caleb was his inadvertent stooge with a controlling saviour complex. At the same time, I wonder if the film's focus on punishing Caleb for his patriarchal decision-making overlooks the extent to which our actions are influenced by historical and social forces beyond our control. Also, we are left wondering how to view Ava; does she have emotions, but behaves selfishly, or is only following a routine? Is she justified in killing Nathan, who murdered several of her own kind (in a sense) and abandoning Caleb, who tried to save her for arguably selfish, patriarchal reasons of his own, because she was essentially created as a tool to manipulate men rather than as a person with her own identity and individuality? One to think on further, I suspect, and in any modern film that has to be a good thing.

The Hateful Eight

I don't mind a bit of Tarantino and I heard this was pretty decent. I just haven't seen it yet.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was all right.

The Lobster

I understand that this weird dystopian satire is quite good too and I want to see it. It's supposedly a society where if you don't couple up with someone romantically and/or sexually, you turn into an animal. I'd be buggered, then.

Update in 2019: I was motivated to see this after seeing the director's film The Favourite, and I enjoyed both that and this. While as a dystopian text the equally oppressive nature of the City/hotel and the Loners could be construed as a false equivalence, as a reflection on the hypocrisies of both couplehood and singledom it was effective. The dull, stilted delivery really enhances the sense of the artificiality of how many relationships, both romantic and platonic, are navigated, the costuming is simple and effective, and the music and occasional dark humour create a sense of hyperreal oddness that tends to hit the spot for me. It's definitely not for everyone but I enjoyed it a great deal.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

More like the Man from C.U.... etc, am I right? I didn't really want to see this; I can't believe they're still trying to make films by rehashing old twentieth century spy and crime TV shows. Henry Cavill should play James Bond, probably.

Victor Frankenstein

Another horror film featuring Daniel Radcliffe? Can I expect more Woman in Black style quality? Probably not; I understand that this film is quite shit. I still want to see it, but it sounds like Universal is completely fumbling their attempts to bring their classic Horror franchises back to life.

Moving on...

Ten 2015 Films I Did Actually See:

Ant-Man

This was basically the definition of a generic superhero flick. Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd, but underutilising his comedy potential) is an "honour among" style thief with a heart of (stolen) gold who just wants to be back in his young daughter's life. Thus he is hired to become the new Ant-Man, succeeding his new employer Hank Pym as a superhero who can become tiny and run inside people's ears and so on. The plot is incredibly derivative of Iron Man and Iron Man 2: the villain is an evil Ant-Man with his own, more powerful suit, who is going to cause terrible evil by flogging the suits to the military and/or Hydra. He and Ant-Man have a big punch up; Ant-Man wins. There are some good moments where normal things become tiny or huge, although it doesn't really make sense because the technology is said to just increase the space between atoms; if you turned a little Thomas the Tank Engine toy gigantic, for instance, it wouldn't smash through the side of the house, because it's still the same flimsy plastic, just stretched out further; the toy would still be the thing that broke. Also, if it just changes distance between atoms, how can Ant-Man shrink into subatomic size and risk disappearing into some weird microscopic dimension? Anyway, I believe this started off under the direction of Edgar Wright of British comedy fame but he quit part way through because Marvel kept interfering, and the film was finished by another bloke who played it safe. It shows. Rudd's Ant-Man is more interesting and funny in Captain America: Civil War than in this, his own film.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ugh. This sucked. You can read my review of it here. At the time I didn't think it sucked that much, but in hindsight (which is the whole point of these annual articles) I'm pretty sure it did. The Avengers run around and have a fight with a big robot. A city gets smashed up in the process. Everything is basically Iron Man's fault, as usual. It feels like a piece of pointless filler padding out the cinematic universe.

Back in Time

I wouldn't have thought of this as a 2015 film but Wikipedia said it was, so let's say it was. This was a documentary about Back to the Future, because 2015 was when Marty came to the future in the second film. The bits in this where they were interviewing the actual cast and crew of the films was quite interesting, but loads of it was padded out with pointless bullshit like: fans at conventions who build their own DeLoreans (who cares?); some company trying to build a real life hoverboard (who cares?); the bloke who made that cartoon show "Rick and Morty" banging on about "Rick and Morty" (what does this really have to do with Back to the Future?) They should have made this just about the making of the films and reflecting back on it 30 years later, and relegated all the stuff about the tedious fans and the Rick and Morty guy patting himself on the back to a separate "fan" documentary that no one would have to watch.

Cinderella

I thought this was okay, to be honest; nothing special, but a pleasant enough way to pass the time. It's just a live-action remake of the classic Disney cartoon, which might seem like sacrilege to some but I'm just not nostalgic enough about those old Disney fairytale cartoons. It just felt a bit generic, kind of like that Gaiman adaptation Stardust. If they wanted to update the film, they could have provided a more realistic motivation for why the evil stepmother is so horrible. By contrast, if they wanted to keep it a bit absurd (as it still was at points, like when the fairy godmother appeared), they could have had the mice talk and stuff as well. Bonus points for having Hayley Atwell as the mum, but then negative bonus points because she gets killed off five minutes in.

Fantastic Four

Jesus. This was really terrible, and I'm honestly not saying that to go along with the crowd or something. I consider myself more of a Fantastic Four fan than your average punter (I have a medium-sized collection encompassing parts of the Lee/Kirby, Byrne and Hickman eras and, for whatever reason, the whole Waid era)  and this somehow was even worse than I expected. In some ways it tries to be its own thing too much, sort of like a B movie about teleportation rather than a superhero film, but it's also way too similar to the equally derided 2005 adaptation, with Doom having superpowers and the thin characterisation. I reckon this was done on the cheap, too, because huge amounts of it takes place in a single lab set. If you want more of my thoughts, see here, or listen to this podcast for thoughts which suspiciously coincide with mine. This probably gets my "worst film of 2015" award.

It Follows

This premiered in 2014 but come on, it's a 2015 film. Everyone saw it in 2015 (I actually only saw it this year). This was an interesting premise: a murderous "thing" is following a person; the only way they can fob it off onto someone else is by having "sex" with another person, and then the thing will start hunting them instead. They too must copulate furiously with someone to pass the curse or whatever off again. In contrast to The Lobster mentioned above, this wasn't too scary for me because I'd be completely safe from it wahey. Anyway, the idea is engaging and ominous, although the film isn't that scary in general. What it benefits from the most is an unsettling electronic soundtrack (by the same composer as that of the very pleasant soundtrack of the indie game Fez) and a curious dreamlike atmosphere in which the decade and time of year is very hard to pin down; it's sort of the past and the future at once, and the seasons seem to change between scenes. It's a film worth watching even if the premise is rather contrived.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

Much like The Farked Ones last year, I, uh, didn't see this at the cinema. I only saw it the other day, in fact. It concludes the franchise, supposedly, and in a sense it does a decent job in wrapping up the plot: apparently everything that happened was in service of giving the demon a body... in 1992, despite this being set in 2013. As such, the time travel used in The Marked Ones continues here, and permits some unsettling moments. It also follows up the plot of the third film, giving a reasonable sense of closure. My main issue with the film was that there was way too much CGI; a special camera is introduced that allows us to see the invisible supernatural things, and it turns out that Toby the Demon just looks like a mass of CGI smoky shadows with a Voldemort face in the middle. A bunch of big CGI tentacles are used to kill some of the characters, and little girl du jour is abducted to the past through a big CGI time tunnel. That wasn't my cup of tea. It's no better or worse than the last two, really, and more or less gets the job done, but its use of CGI hampers the suspension of disbelief a bit. There are also two secondary protagonists, the main male character's brother and the main female character's friend, who exist purely for comic relief and fan service respectively, which makes this instalment feel perhaps the most "generic horror" in terms of the scenario of all the films.

Spectre

It's a crappy James Bond film starring Daniel Craig with a completely misconceived attempt to reintroduce Blofeld and the eponymous evil organisation. Read my full review of it here and some further thoughts here. The plot and the climax are a complete rip-off of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It's not worth discussing any further. First Craig was leaving, then he wasn't, and now he is again. Who knows anymore. I don't have high hopes for the next one.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Am I still talking about this? See my initial thoughts here and my full review and recap here. It's a mediocre film with a few memorable moments. I rewatched it recently and found it quite dull, especially the middle act on the planet Takodana. The performances and screenplay are all tolerable but the story is cynical and lazy and it doesn't really tell much in the way of a complete story, making it feel far too much like a piece of product designed to keep consumers on the hook (which of course it is) rather than a logical and necessary continuation of the narrative of the original films (which it isn't). Is it better than the Prequels? It's directed in a more interesting way, but feels "off" - it feels like a J.J. Abrams film that happens to be "Star Wars", rather than a Star Wars film that happens to be directed by Abrams. The screenplay is probably less clunky than those of the Prequels, but again, a good deal of that is to do with the direction. In many respects it feels far less original because it relies so heavily on call backs to the original film and The Empire Strikes Back. Its use of practical effects also makes the use of CGI, when it does appear, more noticeable and very irritating. I want Episode VIII to be better than this.

By a process of elimination, because the above films were all mediocre to bad (except for It Follows, which is decent), my top film of 2015 is:

The Witch

This is a weird, disturbing horror film about colonial settlers in North America succumbing to their own isolation, paranoia and religious fundamentalism. It's atmospheric and creepy, exhibiting clearly the traumatic consequences of severe puritanical practices and the repression of human nature. A family of seven are exiled from their colonial town because of the father's heresy and they try to eke out a poor living in the woods, but accusations of witchcraft begin flying around among the family members when the youngest child, a baby, disappears. The characters speak in an early modern idiom appropriate to the time period, night scenes are really dark, and everything feels eminently realistic and believable, even as apparently supernatural things happen. In keeping with some of the best horror narratives, it's never completely clear whether the supernatural events are real or just paranoid hallucinations. Overlaid with this are traditional themes of spiritual terror about the theological complexities of salvation and damnation. It's good.

That's twice now I've given a horror film my "film of the year" award. Do the "good" horror films somehow get more exposure than the "good" films of other genres, like sci-fi, for some reason? Are other genres too saturated with Hollywood action hybrids, so we don't notice when the more cerebral stuff comes out? I guess so. I need to see Ex Machina. (Seen it now, but I think I still preferred The Witch)

Captain America, Hydra and Red Skull: How "Fans" Mix Up Media

"METAPHORICALLY!
I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO START
WEARING DISCO CLOTHES AND
CALLING MYSELF 'NOMAD'!"
(Captain America #176)

As far as I know, there was a bit of a teacup storm recently in the comic book world about a "plot twist" in a recent Captain America comic which claimed that Cap is, and always has been, an undercover Hydra agent. Now I don't read any of the current Captain America comics (I believe this was in a series that is specifically about Steve Rogers in particular because Falcon is currently the "Captain America" in the main comic series) and I don't read them for two reasons:

Reason 1 (Stronger Reason): I don't think modern superhero comics are very good. I stopped reading shortly before the end of the extremely pointless "Avengers vs X-Men" and thus shortly before the start of the "Marvel Now" 2012 "soft reboot".

Reason 2 (Very Weak Reason): I don't like the way they changed Cap's costume. Sure, wings on his head, scale armour and swashbuckler boots are a bit silly, but he's a superhero for goodness' sake. Putting him in a "realistic" or practical costume (ie lots of straps and segmented padding, apparently) while retaining the big "A" on the forehead, the chest star and the red, white and blue scheme seems ridiculous; you may as well just put him in camo.

As such, I haven't actually read this comic, but I have read a synopsis of it, and I've seen the relevant panels online. It didn't sound very interesting, but that's not the point. I understand that some people found this objectionable for two reasons:

Reason 1: It's a cliché lazy plot twist: "The hero is secretly a bad guy! Please be shocked!"

Reason 2: It means Captain America is a "Nazi".

Eight issues (less than a year) later...
(Captain America #184)

Now I don't really have a problem with either of these complaints, and I'll explain why.

Reason 1 (lazy plot twist): This is just fair enough, isn't it? The superhero comic book industry is in its protracted death throes. Maybe they could try to save it by writing comics that had value in themselves and weren't essentially just pieces of merchandise for more successful film properties, but that would require more effort than is necessary to take a little profit from the noisy and critical, but ultimately addicted, fanbase. There's no incentive to do anything else, because comic books these days are mostly just read by hardcore fans, and no matter how much hardcore fans complain, generally they still buy the comics. As such, an attention-grabbing twist like "Cap's a Hydra agent" is sure to provide that thin trickle of interest the small comic-buying market needs to continue to die with indignity.

Reason 2 (Cap is a Nazi): At first I was dubious about this claim; aren't Hydra different to the Nazis in both the original comics books (the continuity of which I believe current Marvel comic books still generally follow, despite the soft reboot of 2012) and the cinematic universe? Then I looked into it in a bit more depth and found out that, as a general rule, Hydra have been pretty closely associated with the Nazis in the comics despite some stories trying to embellish Hydra by claiming that they have existed since ancient times (a sort of "Dan Brown effect" I don't really like). Similarly, for a long time I thought that Red Skull was, in the comics, not a member of Hydra (although he was definitely a Nazi); I thought he was just someone who used Hydra connections (as well as AIM) for his own purposes from time to time. Turns out I was wrong; Red Skull has, on occasion, operated as a member of Hydra and led divisions of Hydra, although as far as I know he was never really in charge of the whole organisation. In the films, of course, HYDRA (as opposed to "Hydra" of the comics) broke away from the Nazis, but they were sponsored by them, and film-universe Red Skull, even if he didn't really believe in the message compared to his own weird philosophy, seems to have still been a high-ranking member of the SS. So if people want to say "Hydra are basically the Nazis", that's broadly reasonable.

Similarly, if people find it objectionable that Cap is, in this storyline, basically a "Nazi" when his creators were Jewish and the character himself is meant to stand for all that's "not Nazi", then fair play to you I suppose. I mean obviously some of the reactions have been completely over-the-top and ridiculous (like death threats and things) but if people find a legitimate grievance with it then that's their prerogative. I was more annoyed to discover the 2012-onwards retcon that Cap's father was an abusive alcoholic. Really? Even Cap needs to have had a bad childhood now? His parents already died young, what more do you need?

Proper supervillain behaviour.
(Captain America #184)

I read an article recently that claimed that fans complaining about this twist and similar franchises were pressuring the current makers too much and treating the properties like they owned them. I can see the point of view, but that's the nature of franchises; the owners are the ones who want things to stay the same, so someone who writes a superhero comic book for Marvel or DC would have to be pretty deluded if they thought that their employers were going to let them make major changes to the characters they were hired to write; the fans in that sense are irrelevant. They're just hired to produce pieces of product to turn a profit, not to be game-changing works of art. I'm not saying that superhero comics shouldn't be game-changing works of art, just that it's the people with the money who aren't interested in them being that way. Possessive, status-quo-obsessed fans are annoying, but blaming them is blaming the wrong people; the ones with the money and power should be blamed.

Anyway, none of this is want I really meant to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was how people were using the history of Captain America to try to make arguments for and against this change; here's my chance to seem like a possessive Captain America weirdo.

The odd thing I noticed in the arguments I read was this: an argument would often follow in this fashion:

Affirmative: Captain America being in Hydra doesn't mean he's a Nazi.

Negative: But Hydra are basically the Nazis.

Affirmative: Please provide evidence for this statement.

Negative: Well, in the film Captain America: The First Avengers/episode X of Agents of SHIELD/whatever...

Or from the other side:

Affirmative: Captain America being in Hydra means he's a Nazi.

Negative: But remember the bit in Captain America: The First Avenger when Red Skull disses the Nazis in the following fashion...?

See the problem here? The "Captain America in Hydra" twist is in the comic book, yet a lot of people were trying to prove that Hydra were or were not basically Nazis by using the films and TV shows as evidence. Now remember, I'm not saying that Hydra aren't basically Nazis in the comic books, just that people were using evidence from the films and TV shows, which follow their own independent storyline, to prove something about the comics.

I'm being pedantic, but shouldn't I expected a little more pedantry from the nerds of the internet? I thought nerds were meant to be pedantic. This happens when people discuss things like The Lord of the Rings as well; people sometimes quote things from the films as evidence of something in the book, but that doesn't work, because even if something is true in both the book and the film adaptations, they aren't the same thing, and one can't be used as evidence for the other.

I beg your pardon?
(Captain America #185)

As far as Captain America is concerned it's particularly dodgy, because when it comes to Hydra and the Nazis, the films and the comic books tend to disagree. Let's see...

Comic books: Hydra was founded after the war by former Axis types (with the head honcho ultimately being Baron Strucker) and developed goals of world domination.

Films and TV: HYDRA was founded during the war by the Red Skull and went rogue from the Nazis, with goals of world domination.

Okay, so both versions want world domination, but their history and association with various Nazi supervillains is a bit different. Let's check out the different versions of Red Skull while we're at it:

Comic books: Red Skull is a very high-ranking Nazi officer whose work involved trying to win the war for the German Reich using terrorism and crazy superweapons (to an even more ridiculous extent than the real Nazis did this anyway). When he was revived after the war he at times worked as a Hydra operative and led parts of Hydra but his motives were mostly his own Nazi ones. Check out the comics from the 60s and 70s. Red Skull cares way more about Nazism than he does Hydra. He only appears to support Hydra's ideology insofar as it corroborates with his own agenda.

Films and TV: Red Skull was a high-ranking Nazi officer who founded Hydra during the war and led it away from the Nazis towards its own independent Hydra-ish goals of world domination. He says 'Hail Hydra' a lot, talks about Hydra as if it's his favourite thing in the world, and thinks the Nazis are actually a bit shit. He accidentally disintegrated himself using the Tesseract in 1945 and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

What are they standing in front of? The sun?
(Captain America #185)

Incidentally, if you're wondering about the fate of the comic book Red Skull, he died in Captain America #600 in 2009; I believe the current iteration is his clone. He'll come back to life eventually. That's another good reason not to read current comics; either kill Red Skull permanently or bring the real one back. Half-arseing it with a clone is another example of cliché comic book laziness.

In any event, trying to argue something about comic book Hydra using film Red Skull doesn't really work because you're using a character from a completely different text with completely different motivations. I also see people saying "Well film Red Skull isn't a Nazi" and then people respond "Oh yeah? Let me show you my evidence from a comic book." And not a film tie-in comic book, a normal Marvel mainstream universe comic book - which therefore is totally irrelevant to the characterisation in the films.

Has the calibre of nerd-dom sunk so low that nerds can't tell their comic book universes apart from their film universes, or think they're interchangeable? Or are people just desperate to appear correct on the internet and will use whatever evidence they can muster, however shaky? Let's face it, it's the latter. On the plus side, I have seen people actually using evidence from the comic books to argue that Hydra are or are not Nazis in the comics, so not everyone is making this inexplicable error, but it's still too prevalent for my comfort.

Red Skull: King of the Comeback
(Captain America #186)

The situation also bothers me because it suggests people think that the films are basically just straight-up representations of the comic books, when actually the films shuffle ideas from the comics around a lot. People risk missing out on a lot of potentially interesting ideas if they just follow the films, and it's worth looking into old comics to see how these ideas first manifested and get away from this film-dominated view of these stories.

For instance, here's what I would have done with Red Skull in the films: For whatever reason, in the films HYDRA basically replace the "Germans" as the enemy about halfway through. I'm not sure why this is; it can't be to avoid European censorship, because they show swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia earlier. It's possibly to avoid seeming like they were making a statement like "We needed a superman to win the war; our own soldiers were a bit shit." They could have avoided this by having Cap fight Axis supervillains (like Red Skull himself, who had superpowers in the film that he generally hasn't had in the comics), but they didn't. I actually think there must have been some behind the scenes production issue because the film seems to switch from being a World War Two film with some sci-fi in the first half (with semi-realistic settings, uniforms, weapons etc.) to being a sci-fi film with a bit of World War Two flavour in the second half (laser guns everywhere, over-the-top tanks and bases, HYDRA soldiers look like video game enemies).

Anyway, this is what I would have done, and all this confusion could have been avoided years later (although obviously it still would be meaningless as evidence in the "Cap is in Hydra" debate; it would have just been more interesting): Hydra, or HYDRA, should still have been this oddball "science division" in Nazi Germany, but no one sees them as important; they're just pissing away money and resources, as many of the Nazis' poorly-organised duplicate agencies did (if you think the Nazis were models of efficiency, the opposite is true; they were exemplars of wasteful redundancy, because often when an organisation fell out of Hitler's favour, instead of revamping it to try to meet his demands, however unreasonable, they would just make a new one with the same duties, only using more "in favour" people, and expect the two to compete with each other for favouritism; the regular Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are a similar, if not identical, case).

"Captain! Stop doing power squats and listen to how
I'm still very much a Nazi even though it's the Seventies!"
(Captain America #184)

So let's say the Eastern Front is starting to look a bit wobbly and they've rather recklessly declared war on the United States and the Nazi leadership are having a big argument about what to do to ensure they win the war. They can't agree on anything; then who should come in but Schmidt, a high-ranking Party "enforcer". He might even throw down his Skull mask on the table as he's literally just come back from a mission, but we possibly don't see his face. We can tell, however, that he's serious business. Even hard-bitten horrible Nazi bastards with monocles and scars on their faces don't want to meet his eye. Red Skull has a solution: those oddballs might be onto something; he says it's time to bring HYDRA into line.

The film then goes more or less as planned, but instead of being the founder and leader of HYDRA, Red Skull is the Nazi enforcer who shows up with his own men and starts bossing around the regular HYDRA leadership (who have been having a jolly good war wasting time and money on weapons prototypes that never get finished, let alone used). Every time HYDRA tries to do anything too independent, Red Skull reigns them in and directs their efforts towards the Nazi war machine. Then we can still have Zola betraying HYDRA (the others all kill themselves because they're scared of Red Skull) and Cap's confrontation with Skull is more thematic to the actual war. In fact the whole conflict feels more like the actual war, without suggesting that the regular armed forces couldn't handle it; we now have Allied superhero versus Axis supervillain, not "Allied superhero versus random HYDRA diversion". Furthermore, it means that when HYDRA reappear in the sequel with their own agenda, it has more impact; before, they were just the Nazis' slaves. In the sequel (perhaps unpleasantly inspired by Red Skull whipping them into shape during the war) they've developed serious ambitions of their own.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Remember these lessons:

1. You can't use something from one "universe" to try to explain what happens in a completely different "universe".

2. Nerds aren't as stereotypically pedantic as it might appear, and that might actually be a bad thing.

3. With hindsight, it's very easy to think of simple ways the Marvel films could have been dramatically improved.

I don't have a smart arse caption for this. This is what genuinely good comic book writing looks like,
and this was an issue that the bosses actually did muck around with because it was too challenging.
Check out http://www.jmdematteis.com/2012/03/mysterious-michael-ellis.html for more details.
(Captain America #300 by J.M. DeMatteis.)

Auf wiedersehen!

"Captain America: Civil War"

"I can't breathe in this thing!"

When the subtitle of the third Captain America film was revealed to be "Civil War", I was disappointed but not surprised. I must admit I've never actually read the "Civil War" Marvel comics event, but there's a good reason for that; I was going to, but other than the fact that I would have had to have purchased about a dozen trade paperbacks in order to get the complete story, I did some research and found that it apparently wasn't very good. Added to this was the fact that I was introduced to the storyline by reading the first Omnibus collection of Ed Brubaker's celebrated run on Captain America, and I remember feeling rather annoyed at the time that Brubaker's standalone storyline featuring the reintroduction of Bucky as the Winter Soldier was interrupted so that Captain America could go off and get himself arrested in a completely different comic book. They even had to put a page into the omnibus explaining what had happened in the comics from Civil War that they naturally hadn't included as they weren't by Brubaker. All of those things put me off reading Civil War, along with the fact that it's by Mark Millar, who has gone from writing interesting character studies like Superman: Red Son to being a purveyor of adolescent shock-schlock which seems to think that the best way to do something original with superheroes is to have them swear a lot.

"Just have a chin strap, like me."

The trailers for this third Captain America instalment did little to improve my disposition towards the film. It looked, much as The Winter Soldier was in some respects "Avengers One and a Half", to be "Avengers Two and a Half", as not only was almost every Marvel Cinematic Universe hero other than Hulk and Thor going to appear, two more would be introduced: Black Panther, a character in which I've never been interested, and Spider-Man, who in my opinion was never been handled successfully in any of his 21st Century iterations. I had to find out, however, so like a good little consumerist slave I went and dutifully saw Captain America: Civil War today, fully expecting more of the "well-presented mediocrity" which has become my personal subtitle for the entire cinematic franchise. Would this be more like Captain America: The First Avenger, my favourite Marvel film but one which is regularly mocked for supposedly being stupid and/or boring by many with whom I discuss it, yet is the one that made me interested in Marvel comics and the character of Captain America in particular, who is one of my favourite superheroes, or would it be more like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the highly-acclaimed sequel which I personally found to be dry and repetitive?

"Your chin strap looks stupid."

We begin in 1991 with - who would have guessed - HYDRA, although at least in this case they appear to be Russian HYDRA people using some old Soviet "manual" for operating Bucky full of code words to control him. Obviously they have to use HYDRA but I'm certainly getting tired of seeing them. It also confuses the issue. Is Bucky a Soviet and HYDRA creation simultaneously? Was he created by HYDRA operating within the USSR? I guess so, but it's not terribly clear. Bucky's sent on a mission to go crash a car and kill any witnesses, so hopefully there were no wilderness ramblers nearby as he easily dispatches the vehicle in the woods somewhere. In the boot of the car are five blood bags full of blueberry Gatorade. How mysterious. One thing that I'm starting to find very tiresome about these films is their penchant for glowing McGuffins and pieces of science-fiction technology appearing in a present-day setting with no explanation. No one like Tony Stark exists in the real world; we don't have floating hologram diagrams and technology isn't made of blocks of metal covered in glowing lights. It's a petty complaint but it does cause me to struggle to suspend my disbelief a bit.

In the present day, Captain America and his backup singers are in Nigeria, preventing Crossbones from nicking some biological weapon. He was clearly a convenient supervillain to use at this point, but his presence feels arbitrary. If you're not familiar with Crossbones, he was traditionally one of the Red Skull's main enforcers, hence his name. In this he's more or less a stooge who has a punch-up with Cap while the Avengers dispatch his team. When he tries to blow himself up, however, Wanda the Scarlet Witch catches him in a red energy bubble or whatever it is she does, throwing the explosion up into the air and causing more of the collateral damage we've come to know and love from modern action films.

"What did you just say to me?"

I can't quite remember if it's the sequence immediately before or after this, but at some point we see Tony Stark giving a speech at MIT alongside a disturbing recreation of the last time he saw his parents, including a characteristically rubbery-looking CGI young Robert Downey Jr., whose voice still sounds like that of a middle-aged man. We also see old Howard Stark again; I was surprised enough when he reprised his Iron Man 2 role in Ant-Man. I wonder how much they offer these actors for these bit parts? I guess for a lot of them any Hollywood exposure is worth the triviality of the part. Stark the Younger gets all sad when the autocue mentions Pepper, who has apparently pissed off, probably because Gwyneth Paltrow got sick of the role, and he's confronted by a woman from the State Department whose son was killed in the Former Soviet Republic of Fictionalia, aka "Sokovia" in Age of Ultron. Time for Tony Stark to have his third or fourth emotional breakdown in as many film appearances. Back at Avengers HQ, the actions of Cap and his team in Nigeria turn out to have been a bad move PR-wise; despite appearances (and the fact that they saved countless people from a biological weapons disaster), apparently there were casualties from this mission and people are questioning whether the Avengers are being held sufficiently accountable for the damage. Notice anything, like for instance that this doesn't have a great deal to do with Captain America specifically? He's the leader of the team, I suppose, but these links aren't made especially firmly. Paul Bettany's Vision, introduced in Age of Ultron, makes a welcome reappearance and is amusing-looking in casual clothes. Where was he when they went to Nigeria? Watching the base or something? It's like Red Tornado in the Justice League Watchtower; what's with superhero teams leaving their android member behind to keep the seats warm?

"Oh you heard me."

What is more surprising is seeing William Hurt reprise his role as Thunderbolt Ross from 2008's The Incredible Hulk, which I assumed had quietly been more or less dropped from continuity after they failed to secure Edward Norton as Bruce Banner for any future films. This further raises the question I asked in my review of Age of Ultron: what happened to Betty? Does Banner not care about her any more now that apparently he's into Black Widow? Anyway, Iron Man's brought him along to tell the Avengers (Cap, Falcon, War Machine, Black Widow, Vision and Scarlet Witch) that everyone's getting fed up with all the mess that's left behind whenever the Avengers go into action and the UN wants them to be brought under their supervision. Apparently whenever the Avengers have finished blowing things up all over the world they then piss off back to their headquarters and shoot pool or something because there's an implication that they never stick around to clean up the damage they've caused. I found this a surprising remark. Surely Cap would stick around; part of the climax of The Avengers involved him working to get civilians to safety. The problem seems confused to me. Is it that the Avengers are seen as a private organisation that acts without jurisdiction or permission in foreign nations, or the fact that they cause collateral damage, or the fact that they don't help clean it up afterwards? I suppose it's all of these things, and Ross does hand them a document like a phone book which is meant to contain all the details, but the actual problem with the superheroes wasn't made sufficiently firm for my liking.

"Did I lock my front door?"

Much debate ensues; Vision claims that since the appearance of Iron Man on the scene the number of incidents has steadily risen, and that there might be a causation at work. He completely fails to recall, of course, despite being a genius android, that correlation is not causation. I can't remember what Black Widow's reason for supporting the "Accords" is, nor what Falcon's are for not doing it, or indeed Rhodey or Wanda. Iron Man feels all guilty about this chap who died in "Sokovia", and I suppose that's legitimate because Ultron was his creation. Maybe he's the only one who needs to be kept on watch; it's not like what Loki did in The Avengers, or what HYDRA did in The Winter Soldier, were the fault of the Avengers. In fact, everyone would have been buggered if superheroes hadn't been around in those scenarios, yet they're used as examples in addition to what happened with Ultron. It all seems a bit inconsistent to me. Maybe if they focused purely on Ultron and what happened in Nigeria in would make more sense. Cap's not having any of it because he reckons being at the beck and call of the UN will compromise their personal moral discretion, which is a reasonable argument, but it hasn't nearly the strength of his argument in the original comic, which was calling for all superheroes to reveal their true identities to the government. Then again, the dilemma in the comic was a stupid one in the first place, so it doesn't really make a difference. Perhaps Cap should have called Iron Man out for trying to make the whole lot of them shoulder his mistake for creating Ultron, but that would have run the risk of making this Captain America film even more about Iron Man than it already is. All this is cut short, however, when he gets a text saying that Peggy's died.

"My mutant power is to generate edible quantities of fairy floss from my hands."

I've been watching Agent Carter and while it's by no means perfect I find it enjoyable enough, primarily carried by Hayley Atwell's charisma and the confidence she brings to the role, so I was a little disappointed upon realising she wouldn't get at least a cameo here. At the funeral we discover, unsurprisingly, that Agent 13 from The Winter Soldier is her "niece", Sharon, like in the comics. I say niece, of course, because she calls Peggy "aunt" Peggy, which is what their relationship was changed to in the comics as time wore on; originally she was Peggy's younger sister and Peggy had gone a bit daft in middle age. Anyway, surely Sharon would have to be Peggy's great-niece or something. It seems very unlikely that Peggy, who would have to have been in at least her late nineties when she died, would have had a sibling who was Sharon's parent. It can't be Peggy's brother, because we saw in a flashback in Agent Carter that he was killed in the war. What am I going on about? Anyway it's good to see Emily VanCamp reprise her role as Sharon and, despite my fears, she actually gets a fairly decent bit of time in the film as a supporting character for Steve, although it really isn't enough. I can't help but feel that the fact that Cap's supporting cast for the second and third films have often been established superhero characters means that, other than Falcon and, to an extent, Bucky, Cap's supporting cast from the comics has never really been allowed to develop. Sharon's eulogy for Peggy includes a comic book quote, originally from Cap himself, that I recognised because I'm a huge nerd. After the service, Black Widow tries to convince Cap to come sign on the dotted line and put himself under the UN's jurisdiction but he politely gives her the one-fingered salute and she heads off to Vienna alone.

At some point in all of this we're introduced to Zemo, antagonist du jour, who tracks down Bucky's old Russian handler from the opening, nicks his book of secret game-winning cheats and passwords, and drowns him in his own sink just to add insult to injury. I'm not surprised that they used Zemo eventually, as he's probably Cap's next-biggest villain after the Red Skull, but personally I prefer him with a purple sock on his head. He's not a Baron, either. He wants to know about Bucky's mission back in 1991 for some reason, but the Russian gentleman won't play ball, his loyalty to, apparently, HYDRA, outweighing his desire to keep living. HYDRA must have had a pretty great benefits package to ensure such loyalty in its members.

They're grrreat.

This is one hell of a long film, and I was starting to wonder where things were going at this point; by now we're introduced to T'Challa, the Black Panther, whose father, as King of Wakanda, Marvel's go-to fictional super-advanced African nation-state and Vibranium-supplier, is supporting the Accords. Before anyone can so much as unscrew the top off their pen, however, one of the film's many bombs goes off, killing the king. The king is dead. Long live the king. The suspected bomber is none other than Bucky, who's been missing since Cap fought him in the last film. Despite the fact that they've been looking for him for two years without success, Sharon is swiftly able to provide Cap and Falcon with intelligence allowing them to locate him in a flat in Bucharest a couple of scenes later, after T'Challa has sworn revenge for his father's death and Cap has once again redundantly informed Black Widow that he won't sign the document. Heavily-armed policemen storm Bucky's flat but he and Cap fight them off, leading into one of those ubiquitous "car chase on a busy urban highway" sequences that seems to occur in almost every action film these days; we already had two or three of them in The Winter Soldier and at least another one in Age of Ultron. Batman v Superman had one as well. I blame whichever Matrix film it was that had Neo flipping petrol tankers over and stuff. Black Panther is in pursuit, his costume turned into a generic Marvel Cinematic Universe "panels and unnecessary-seeming textures everywhere" design, and Falcon executes some tricky manoeuvres flying through tunnels, achieving something that the Luftwaffe pilot chasing Indiana Jones couldn't in The Last Crusade. There's a decent bit where Bucky nabs a guy's motorcycle in a sweeping motion, but I always feel bad for the people whose vehicles get nicked in these sequences. I instantly thought of Cap's cheesy 70s era "Captain America Van" and wished he had it here. Despite their best efforts they get caught and to the surprise of hopefully no one the Black Panther is revealed to be T'Challa.

"...I fell down the stairs."

I wondered about their use of Black Panther here; he gives a little info about himself while he, Cap and Falcon are being driven off to the UN or wherever it is, but I can't help but feel that his back story was kind of assumed knowledge, and I wondered if anyone who'd never heard of the character before would have a clue what was going on. At this prison or facility, wherever it is, they meet Martin Freeman putting on an America accent and doing "Martin Freeman smug and ebullient mode", the less well-known but nonetheless recurrent twin of "Martin Freeman bemused and quietly surprised mode". Apparently he's playing a Black Panther supporting character and is presumably being set up for a future role. Sorry, I know very little about Black Panther. I've never found the character very interesting and only know him from a couple of issues of 70s Captain America in which he helps Falcon, a couple of 2010s Fantastic Fours, and the Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon, in which I thought he was presented as a boring character who had no flaws, was never wrong about anything and was never defeated in battle. I sometimes suspected that there was a Black Panther fanboy on the writing team for that show who couldn't help but portray the character as near-perfect. Anyway, back to this film...

"Allow me to bust some moves for you."

At some point in all of this we also see Wanda and Vision back at HQ, and after a bit of a deep and meaningful we discover that Iron Man wants vision to keep Wanda on site because the public is uncomfortable with her abilities. Vision is an android and all that but he really displays an inconsistent grasp of things in this film, at times being insightful and at other times failing to see the inconsistencies in what he does. If he wants to help Wanda, what good is hiding her from the public going to do? This comes to a head at the UN or wherever the hell they are - in Berlin somewhere, maybe? Iron Man makes another attempt to get Cap to sign, but Cap isn't having any of it after he hears that he's keeping Wanda behind closed doors. I can't really remember their conversation at this point apart from the pens Iron Man brings having been used to sign the Lend-Lease agreement in the war and Iron Man mentioning Ultron. This can be quite a talky film at points, but not everything the characters say is enormously memorable, and I think the characters' failures to effectively articulate their positions and standpoints on the issues they're facing is one of the film's shortcomings. If your characters are going to talk so much, at least have them say something coherent. I wondered at points, given Disney's historically softly-softly approach to any and all issues of social interest, if the screenplay was encouraged to not include the characters ever saying anything that might be construed as too specifically political for fear of pissing off one wing or another.

"I only know how to boil eggs."

Meanwhile, a man at the nearby power facility receives a mysterious package containing a device we saw in Zemo's hotel room earlier, as Zemo himself appears as the psychologist who's come to analyse the captured Bucky. Cap, Falcon and Sharon somehow figure out that Zemo's the suspicious one in all of this, although I can't recall why, but before they can do anything about it the suspicious package goes off; it's some kind of electromagnetic device that causes a city-wide blackout, leaving Zemo unobserved as he reads off Bucky's code words to him, eventually managing to get him under control so that he can ask him about the events of 1991. Cap and Falcon show up but in the ensuing confusion Zemo escapes. T'Challa tries to stop Bucky but gets owned, and then Bucky tries to escape as well, in a convenient helicopter which, much like Poe and Finn's tie fighter, is tethered down. Is that a real thing? Cap uses his burly muscles to hold the helicopter down in a quite decent moment. The two of them fall into the river; Falcon wanders outside the building while everyone's running around screaming (I can't quite remember why everyone's in such a flap at this point) and no one tries to stop him even though he was practically arrested a few scenes ago and had all his gear nicked. Cap and his newer sidekick take his older sidekick off to some warehouse somewhere, where Bucky reveals the truth behind the exclusive Gatorade variety from the opening: they were samples of super-soldier serum, used by HYDRA in the 90s to create five more super-soldiers even more dangerous than him. Now Zemo knows where they are: at HYDRA's old facility in Siberia. Obviously, everyone's very concerned about this.

Time to assemble a whole film from all of her scenes.

Cap and Bucky need to go and stop Zemo from presumably reviving the HYDRA super-soldiers and wreaking havoc, but rather than just going and doing it immediately they somehow figure that Iron Man is going to try to stop them because they're protecting Bucky, who's still wanted for the attack on the UN earlier; I'm having to remind myself of this because this is such a long film I'm starting to lose track of what's going on. Both leaders conveniently figure that they need to boost the strength of their respective teams. Iron Man's already got War Machine, Black Widow, Vision and Black Panther on side, but he pops home to New York to recruit our new Spider-Man. I ought to take a moment to digress on the friendly neighbourhood superhero; I've never thought the character has been done well on screen. The Tobey Maguire incarnation in the Sam Raimi films was, in my opinion, too shy and quiet even when in costume. I only saw the first of the two Andrew Garfield ones, but apart from the "small knives" joke that they gave away in the trailer his character seemed flat and lifeless. Although I think Marvel Studios plays things pretty safely these days, they seem to be on the right track now that they've negotiated with Sony to use the character. The new Tom Holland incarnation felt fairly convincing to me, good natured while also awkward and a bit glib. He's definitely one of the strengths of the film and we'll get back to him later.

"Hey... Mike!"
"...yeah?"

Cap, meanwhile, gets Hawkeye back in, who hadn't previously appeared in this film, having allegedly retired after he was nearly killed in Age of Ultron. He comes to rescue Wanda, who is forced to use her powers on Vision in order to free herself. They do sterling work with limited time developing the relationship between Wanda and the Vision here; Hawkeye's presence, by contrast, feels a little arbitrary, in my opinion. Sharon meets Steve to return his shield and Falcon's gear, and there is some good humour, like Bucky asking Falcon to move his seat forward and amusing image of the buffed-up Cap driving a tiny VW Beetle around the place. No one points out the irony of him driving a car designed during the Nazi era, however, nor does anyone question the point when he and Sharon kiss despite the fact that used to be in love with her aunt; the shot of Bucky and Falcon smirking after witnessing this tender moment makes up for this a tad. At times the film is quite light-hearted and amusing, although I feel it was a little inconsistent in this regard. They head for the airport, meeting up with Wanda and Hawkeye, who has also brought along a sleepy Ant-Man who gets to crack a few jokes as well. Despite the fact that I found Ant-Man (the film) pretty generic, I found that I was looking forward to the return of Paul Rudd's size-changing superhero, and in my opinion he's actually handled better in this film than he was in his own one. His segments are both more visually interesting and funnier.

"Quickly, before you're rebooted again!"

Cap and Bucky march brazenly out to their waiting helicopter ready to ferry them off to Siberia, even though we saw Zemo flying to Moscow ages ago - a day earlier or so according to how long Thunderbolt Ross gave Iron Man to find Cap - but predictably enough Iron Man and War Machine show up to tell Cap off. Spider-Man makes his entrance in his fancy new costume. They get into a big fight, however, with Spider-Man taking on Bucky and Falcon while the others have a general scrap. Spider-Man is done well here, talking constantly and cheerfully, bringing the energy and enthusiasm to the character that has been sorely lacking in previous iterations, but the show is stolen by Ant-Man, who jumps inside Iron Man's armour to start damaging it from within and performs the classic move of riding one of Hawkeye's arrows. Vision arrives to lend his overwhelming fire power to proceedings, halting the escaping Cap and Bucky in their tracks, and the two teams decide to adopt First World War tactics, lining up on opposite sides of the tarmac and running at each other purely for the sake of the trailer, which looks visually impressive, I suppose, but seems out of place given how much careful strategic placement has gone on earlier. The best moment comes when, to create a distraction, Ant-Man does the opposite of his normal effect and becomes Giant Man, grabbing a flying War Machine out of the air. Cap and Bucky high-tail it to the Avengers' jet, with the help of a coat-turning Black Widow. In the ensuing efforts to prevent their escape, Falcon dodges an attack from Vision which instead hits War Machine, causing him to crash from a rather uncomfortable height. The rest of Cap's team are imprisoned and Rhodey is left with paralysis. Given the fact that the power had failed and he was wearing metal clothes, I'm extremely surprised that he survived at all. Why didn't the suit have any kind of emergency eject system? Seems like one of the first things you'd put in. Also, they really need to put some kind of mantle over those arc reactors on the front of their armour. Those things seem vulnerable.

The illusion of three-dimensionality.

In Zemo's hotel room, the body of the real psychologist is discovered, as well as, according to the report, a Bucky disguise. So the dramatic irony is brought to an end; Iron Man now knows that Cap and Bucky were telling the truth. He flies off to the Raft, one of the traditional Marvel habitations of supervillains awaiting "rehabilitation", to tell Falcon that he believes Cap and to find out where he's gone so that he can, in fact, help. So currently he's looking pretty stupid, despite telling off Black Widow for effectively changing sides. I was actually expecting Spidey to switch like he did in the comics. This sequence on the Raft feels a bit like padding and I'm not sure it was really necessary. A couple of locked-up supervillains would have added to the atmosphere; the problem is that, unlike the comics and the cartoon adaptations, supervillains rarely survive for more than one film, so I can't imagine who would be in there. Was Blonsky killed in The Incredible Hulk? I haven't seen that film for a very long time, and the one time I did see it was by accident. Perhaps Batroc could have been in there. Incidentally, when Iron Man discovers Zemo's identity - in this he's a former colonel in Sokovian special forces or similar - there should have been a picture of him in a balaclava to evoke the character's traditional purple head-sock. Marvel normally loves doing those kinds of fan-titillating references, so I'm surprised it didn't occur here.

"Hey, a penny!"

Zemo opens up the old HYDRA base in Siberia and finds the super-soldiers while Iron Man heads there to help Cap; Black Panther is in pursuit too, now knowing the true identity of his father's killer. Cap and Bucky arrive at the site, believing that they must only be a few hours behind Zemo, I guess because he couldn't fly there directly. They meet up with Iron Man and go forth to take down Zemo. He's in a sheltered room, however, having killed the super-soldiers, having had no intention of using them. His real intention was to reveal to Iron Man through the magic of inexplicable security camera footage on a lonely 1991 road that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, was the one who assassinated his parents. Cap, of course, was told by the computer-record of Arnim Zola in the previous Cap film that HYDRA were responsible for the Starks' deaths, and apparently he had never told this to Iron Man, although he did not know that Bucky was the one who had done it. Iron Man doesn't particularly care and starts fighting both of them, experiencing such important dramatic emotions as anger, grief and a sense of betrayal, while Zemo pisses off. Outside on the tundra, he reveals to an approaching Black Panther that he decided that the only way to defeat the Avengers was to cause them to fight each other rather than to battle them directly. He was motivated to do so out of a desire for revenge on them after what happened in Sokovia, as his family was apparently killed despite believing they had escaped to a safe distance. Personally I found this to be too similar to Wanda's motivation from Age of Ultron; she initially wanted revenge on Iron Man for building the weapon that had killed her parents. I also simply thought that this was a cliché motivation in general, seeking revenge for dead loved ones being a fairly common device in fiction. It also suffers from the fact that really his loss was Ultron's fault, and Ultron was Iron Man's fault, not the fault of Cap, Bucky or indeed any of the other Avengers. They can't really say this, however, even if they thought of it, because this is meant to be a Captain America film. Things like this, however, make it feel worryingly like "Avengers Two and a Half", if the saturation of heroes hadn't already caused that impression.

"Ow, my helmet."

Iron Man literally disarms Bucky but ultimately has the ever-loving shit beaten out of him by Cap; Cap says that Bucky's his friend, while Iron Man says that Cap used to be his friend as well. The whole situation seems a bit contrived. It's a touch dodgy that Cap never told Iron Man that HYDRA killed his parents, which was all he knew, but could easily have slipped his mind if nothing else. Similarly, it's well-established that the Winter Soldier acted under mind control, not of his own will, and is hardly accountable for his actions. In that sense Bucky acts as an analogue for what the Avengers would become, in Cap's view, if they were held to these UN "Accords". The idea of them, however, was to make the Avengers accountable. So is the film ultimately saying that if Iron Man is right about Bucky, then Cap is right about the Avengers? Both Iron Man and Bucky himself question whether it matters that Bucky was acting of his own volition, although in my view that doesn't really make sense. That's like blaming an unconscious person if you were slapped because another person grabbed their arm and slapped you with the unconscious person's outstretched hand. In any event, Iron Man tells Cap that he doesn't deserve the shield, although I don't actually see why he doesn't, but nonetheless Cap ditches it and pisses off with Bucky. Zemo's imprisoned with no-one but Smug Mode Martin Freeman for company, Rhodey can barely walk, Cap's allies are in prison and the Avengers have basically collapsed. Stan Lee gets his cameo delivering Iron Man a letter, Cap busts his guys out of the clink, Bucky volunteers to get put back on ice in Wakanda until his mind control can be cured, and the rather pointless final post-credits sequences informs us that Spider-Man now has the Spider signal torch thing. Big deal. Thus endeth Captain America: Civil War.

"If you had an 'A' on your head, Tony, it'd stand for 'asshole'. You dick."

The film has a few key strengths. Its uses of humour, while sparing, are generally effective. It also probably gets more out of its enormous ensemble cast than either of the Avengers films did despite the fact that it has more of them than ever. It's a good introduction to the new version of Spider-Man, Vision and Wanda are both used pretty well and Ant-Man gets a really good chance to shine. On the other hand, the main conflict feels, in my opinion, very contrived. No one points out that, without the Avengers and/or Cap and his allies, Loki and/or HYDRA would have taken over the world. No one points out that only Iron Man is really to blame for what Ultron did, and that it's unfair of him to want to punish them all for what was really only his fault. It's never really clear if the Avengers are under scrutiny for the fact that people die in the battles in which they fight, even though they are generally started by villains and not by them, or if it's just for all the mess and diplomatic bother they cause when they act. We're expected to believe that, after something like the Lagos mission, Cap and chums just piss off without bothering to help anyone any further and leave the emergency services to take care of it. Does this seem very fitting with Cap's character? They could have made more of the Lagos mission, I suppose, and argued that Cap acted too soon and shouldn't have attacked in an urban area in which there was a higher potential for casualties, but they don't. They also don't really dwell upon the idea that while Cap's discretion might be reliable the discretion of the others isn't, necessarily. Are we being led to believe that when Cap identifies a threat he and the Avengers just barge in without even bothering to try to contact the local government first? They could have focused it on Cap more, perhaps, and argued that he was treating the Avengers like a combat unit in the war rather than a modern task force trying to protect innocent people in peacetime. Of course, had they taken such an angle, the film could have been more of a personal journey for Cap trying to find his place in the modern world, but they botched that a couple of films ago really.

"What happens if he gets too close?"
"Uh, he can try to whack people with his arrows, I guess?"

As it is, it feels like the entire conflict is based on a premise so flimsy that it seems completely unreasonable that such a massive feud would erupt over it. Cap doesn't agree that the Avengers should operate under UN jurisdiction, but never really has the time or opportunity to properly explain the weight or nuance of his reasoning in detail. He only has the opportunity to inform us that he believes that his conscience is the best arbiter available. Ultimately it comes down to the following dilemma: what's a better way of making decisions: the agreement of many diplomats or the conscience of one good man? Captain America is shown to make mistakes, but the most serious consequences are for his relationship with Iron Man. The question of the authority under which the Avengers should operate is, to my mind, never really resolved. The problem with making his deteriorating friendship with Iron Man the dramatic centre of the film is that, in my opinion, the friendship between them has never really been established that well anyway. In The Avengers they frowned at each other in a flying conference room for a bit. In Age of Ultron I can't really remember what the two of them discuss, if anything. As such, I don't see the great tragedy in the destruction of this friendship. While it's obviously a shame to see the Avengers fall apart, and a problem given that horrible alien menaces are apparently in their future, the core character drama is, in my opinion, robbed of most of its pathos due to the fact that it is built on such weak foundations in the first place.

Don't forget your stick, lieutenant.

My evaluation, therefore, largely comes to this: the "Civil War" storyline should not have been the storyline of "Captain America 3". The fact that it's a Captain America film means that it's going to be a sequel to The Winter Soldier, but they're trying to make it a sequel to Age of Ultron as well. The problem with this is that they have to merge the "Captain America" plot with the "Avengers" plot, and as a result they get one weak plot when they could have chosen one of these two storylines and had one strong plot. This is a film that, in my opinion, was actually weaker than the sum of its parts. In some respects, this is the same frustration I had with The Winter Soldier, in that it tried to make a personal story for Cap and a wider story for the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" as a whole into catalysts for each other to the enfeeblement of both. Iron Man and Thor, by contrast, have had multiple films that add to the "Cinematic Universe" plot while to a reasonable extent standing on their own. For whatever reason, Cap is not afforded this luxury, his films being expected to pull double duty as a Universe-progressing event as well. This means that as a "Marvel Cinematic Universe" film its main weaknesses are the fact that Cap's friendship with Iron Man has never been sufficiently well-realised for their conflict to have enough impact and the fact that the need to focus on Cap and Bucky's storyline means that the "Accords" storyline is contrived and weak. By contrast, as a "Captain America trilogy" film its weakness comes from the fact that it barely qualifies as a Captain America-specific outing at all; his last film had the unnecessary presences of Black Widow and Nick Fury, while this one is burdened with every other hero under the sun. At times it actually feels like a Captain America-Iron Man double bill rather than Cap's own film, and at times it actually feels like Iron Man, not Cap, is the main character, and as a Cap fan this pissed me off.

It only has a flag inside.

It strikes me that the Russo brothers don't really know what to do with Cap or don't find him to be a particularly interesting character, and have basically been using Cap's films as Avengers-lite (or in this case, Avengers-rather-heavy) as ensemble piece show reels to get the Avengers 3 gig. Rather than bothering to explore Cap and what he means and stands for in any particular detail, they'd rather just make quasi-thrillers which happen to, perhaps begrudgingly, feature Captain America as the protagonist. This obviously takes inspiration from Ed Brubaker's run on the Captain America comics, which took a spy-fi approach to the character, but Brubaker simultaneously confined his story largely to Cap's core supporting cast, Falcon, Sharon and to an extent Nick Fury, with only cameo appearances by Black Widow, Iron Man and the like, while also revelling in the rich history of the character and the idea that if we could have a hero from the past who was a man out of time, the evils of the past might disturbingly survive into the present day as well (usually in the form of surprisingly longeval Nazi supervillains or their descendants). There was talk shortly after The Winter Soldier that the third film would feature the insane impostor Captain America, the racist McCarthyist who made the Cap identity look like that of a reactionary paranoiac, but obviously this never came to fruition. This would have been a great way to explore Cap's identity, perhaps with Chris Evans portraying both Steve Rogers and the deluded William Burnside, but I'm sure the idea would have been too politically charged for Disney. Thus I think there are several factors for why I was personally unsatisfied by the film. Firstly, it's too focused on Iron Man: it's his emotional state, and rather little to do with Cap, that drives the conflict of the film and the final drama, and furthermore Cap's beliefs and opinions are given shockingly little attention considering that he's notionally the protagonist. Secondly, it's too much like "Avengers Two and a Half" and it feels too much like something slapped together to check executive boxes: tie heavily into the wider universe as audiences like that; now that we've got him, have lots of Robert Downey Jr., because audiences like that; have very little weighty political content, as audiences prefer not to be challenged.

"Don't make me push you down the stairs again, Tony."

If they'd gone down the route that seemed to be proposed early in marketing, in which Iron Man was actually the villain of the film, trying to hunt down a persecuted Cap who was only trying to do the right thing, it might have been a more effective "Captain America" film, but as it is it just feels like a heated debate over a rather trivial philosophical point with punching thrown in. Zemo's method is ultimately fairly compelling; I only felt that his motivations could have been more interesting. Also, despite the more effective aspects of Zemo's realisation in this, the Cap fan in me would also have dearly loved to have seen him with a purple sock over his head and furry shoulder cuffs, fighting Cap with a sword. All in all, Captain America: Civil War has its strengths but I believe it's let down by some shortcomings I simply can't overlook. It is, however, probably better than The Winter Soldier in that the action scenes are less repetitive and the portrayal of, ironically, the Winter Soldier himself is more interesting. As a viewer of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" I found it to be better than Age of Ultron but more or less as average as most of the stuff they've been releasing for the last few years. As a Captain America fan in particular I found it deeply unsatisfying, but I fear that, absurdly, Captain America fans are not the target audience of Marvel's Captain America films. My knowledge of the character's very long published history is not comprehensive, but if you want some entertaining eras deriving from my own knowledge, I would recommend Brubaker's run, naturally, especially the first 50 issues or so, and Cap's outings in the early 70s.