Captain America: Civil War (4/5 Stars)

At least once a year I feel the need to point out the moral ambituity of large-scale action sequences in modern blockbusters, specifically the untold and unfelt thousands of deaths that necessarily must occur when entire cities are reduced to rubble. I had been crying in the wilderness to nobody in parituclar about this for so long that I expected that I would continue to do it indefinitely. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when Marvel’s new movie, “Captain America: Civil War” not only admits the reality of human collateral damage but makes it the focal conflict for the entire story.

It starts with a covert operation in an African country by Captain America, Black Widow, Hawk, and Scarlett Witch (new to me but apparently introduced before). A bad guy is trying to steal a biological weapon. The fight starts in a parking lot moves to an office building and finally ends in a crowded marketplace. The bad guy has a suicide bomb in which he means to kill everybody. Scarlett Witch, whose mutant power is to telekinesis, moves the bomb explosion from the marketplace to the air but miscalculates and ends up killing about fifteen people in an office building. The Avengers given that they are conducting vigilante military operations are held suspect for this outcome. A proposal is passed to give the United Nations oversight over the Avengers.

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, feels guilty enough for this occurrence (The fifteen dead were charity workers although any fifteen dead people would have been good enough for me) to support the resolution. Captain America, coming out against democracy, believes that the resolution would stop him from taking action for or against whatever he deems himself to be important. It may be obvious whose side I am taking in this conflict. I’m with Iron Man all the way. Captain America apparently thinks he knows better than entire democratic societies. That is the sort of behavior that gives Freedom a bad name.

The amount of characters and superheroes already introduced in this umpteenth of Marvel movies makes listing all of them and the actors playing them time prohibitive, but they line up in equal numbers on each side. Thankfully Thor and The Hulk are somewhere else, as their presence would seriously tip the scale against the more destructible members of the Avengers. The action sequences are better and more entertaining than previous Marvel movies. This is because instead of relying on the spectactles getting bigger and more explosive, the superheroes fight themselves (and thus aren’t nameless pushovers) and thus humor and creativity have to be employed to make sure nobody gets embarrassed. The abandoned airport fight is especially good. Also, as I said before, no massive human collateral occurs. The result is a very enjoyable movie and my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Joining the Marvel universe for the first time is SpiderMan (the other two Sony franchises have not happened in this particular franchise) and Black Panther. Now this is a good opportunity for a compare and contrast between what is considered to be one of the most beloved characters of Marvel and what is sure to be the most boring.

Spiderman, aka Peter Parker, is a dorky teenager who lives with his Aunt May in Queens, New York. Black Panther is the handsome well-mannered prince of the aforementioned African nation. When Stan Lee created Spiderman, his stated intention was to give the character all the regular flaws a teenager generally has like immaturity, acne, and a hopeless crush on a girl. Such honesty and relatability became endearing pushing Spiderman to an upper echelons of popular superheroes. Black Panther, in contrast, seems to be a corporate marketing committee’s response to an outcry for political correctness. He stands in like Two-fer in “30 Rock” as proof that the corporation believes black people can be noble, properly educated, and not sidekicks. It is perhaps a good thing that the effort was made but the fact that they went about it in a way that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s goes a long way in making the character generally unrelatable and almost as important, boring. He has no flaws and by the end of the movie his one conflict is resolved. I can’t imagine what will happen in the next movie that will allow the character to learn and grow in complexity. Perhaps he will join Thor battling interstellar ice monsters. Peter Parker as we all know has a long journey ahead of him since not incidentally he starts from a far humbler beginning.

(I doubt anyone else has noted this but the term ‘black panther’ refers to the militant wing of an oppressed poor minority group. Is it not culturally insensitive for a wealthy member of a ruling majority class to appropriate the moniker? Or does this not count because they are both black.)

But enough about this. I really liked the movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a blockbuster. The humor, the action, and most importantly the maturity set it apart from most others. Finally I have added the original Captain America movie to my DVD queue. For the first time I have wanted to see it and fill in that particular gap in my Marvel movie knowledge.

The Avengers (3/5 Stars)

It’s Okay!

 I never read comic books as a kid nor did I have a ton of video games, but I did own action figures, mostly Star Wars and Legos. Action figures, unlike books and video games, do not come with their own story lines so kids had to use their imaginations in order to have fun. I do not recall any particular story of mine that is worth repeating suffice to say they all had one thing in common: continual cartoonish violence. You know the kind where you take two action figures and you harmlessly smack them against each other and make kablooie noises. I remember it fondly in that odd nostalgic way people tend to glorify the stupidity of children (or innocence, either one), but I would not insist on making a feature film out of it, which, I would argue is essentially what “The Avengers,” is: A story composed of the kind of action sequences I would have come up with when I was ten years old....and had access to several hundred million dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. “The Avengers,” is okay and I must admit I haven’t the slightest idea how they could have made it better. It seems fated to be mediocre due to the cast of characters that are included. The Avengers are composed of Iron Man/Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.) a genius mechanic/billionaire who wears an indestructible suit that can fly and has plenty of machine guns and missiles. Then there is the Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is good at martial arts and uses pistols. Then there is Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) who is good at archery. Then there is The Hulk/Bruce Banner (played by Mark Ruffalo) who is a brilliant scientist who involuntary turns into an uncontrollable green monster with unlimited strength whenever he gets angry. Then there is Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth) who is an immortal demi-god with an all-powerful hammer that can summon lightning storms. Finally, there is Captain America/Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans). He has a patriotic uniform and a nifty shield. It should be fairly obvious that these superheroes aren’t exactly equal. I mean Captain America may be strong, but not as strong as the Hulk, and he can’t fly like Iron Man, and he has no ability for stealth like the Black Widow, and he has no long range ability like Hawkeye, and he isn’t educated like Bruce Banner or Tony Stark. In fact, he really doesn’t know anything about the last fifty years because he was cryogenically frozen during that time. (He is otherwise their leader though.) Contrast that with Thor, who as an indestructible and immortal god should be able to beat the tar out of every other Avenger in every scenario. The presence of a superhero such as Thor also requires the story to have a super-villain with an almost equal amount of power as him. Enter his brother, the semi-god Loki and an army of mean-looking aliens with supposedly superior technology.

The movie stages two rather huge battle sequences. One takes place on a flying aircraft carrier (largest waste of taxpayer money EVER) and another in Midtown Manhattan. Besides the death of one person, it may surprise you that nobody else gets seriously hurt or dies. No superheroes, no military personnel, and no civilians end the movie with anything more than the faintest scrapes, cuts, or bruises. In fact, I would argue the greatest special effect used during the full scale destruction of a completely inhabited Manhattan is the framing of the shots in such a way that we never actually see anybody getting hurt. This sense of total unreality is what reminded me of playing with plastic toys as a kid. Nothing is real. Otherwise Tony Stark would be dead ground meat in his fancy suit after every battle he is in. And can the Hulk really survive a multitude of rockets launched point blank into his face without a single blemish occurring?

 For some reason it has become increasingly difficult for blockbusters to achieve the very reason they exist: to excite and thrill. It is not hard to have violence that is exciting. It simply must include actual danger or actual pain or the threat of actual pain. To demonstrate how little you need, take a look at the movie, “Black Swan.” In particular, the scene where the main character notices a cut near her nail cuticle, tries to fix it, and accidentally pulls off a strip of her skin. When I watched that it made me recoil. Why then would Thor knocking Iron Man 100 feet into the air with his magic hammer have little to no effect at all? Well, because it results in nothing but a dazed look. It must not have hurt. A movie with action sequences that have no effect on the characters is not exciting. It is desensitizing. Pretty soon it does not matter how big the explosions are, all I recognize is their impotence. What is more, when I do not understand how things happen, I stop caring pretty soon if they happen at all. I don’t get how Iron Man can survive all the blows he takes. I don’t understand how The Hulk can beat up a floating leviathan one thousand times his size. And will someone please tell me how the hell Scarlett Johansson can beat up burly men three times her size. She has no muscles. None.

 I suppose some of this has to do with the MPAA. There is this strange rule out there that allows PG-13 movies all the gunfire, explosions, and metropolitan destruction they want just as long as you do not see anybody getting hurt. However, if you wanted to see a man realistically cut off his own arm like James Franco does in “127 Hours” you would get an R rating. In effect, violence is morally okay just as long as you don’t show the consequences of it. Oh, will someone think of the children. They are our future. But unreal hammed up violence is not in itself bad. I’ve seen plenty of movies I loved that worked just like that. The best of director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete, Desperado) excels in that sort of thing. The difference though is that these movies are fun exploitation movies that don’t give us a bunch of scenes containing impassioned speeches about the importance of it all. “The Avengers,” needs to be more uniform in its purpose. If you are going to make the action sequences ridiculous then make the characters and dialogue ridiculous, and do it the whole way through. And please no intended-to-be-taken-seriously-patriotism. This country deserves better than that. “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” was a great action movie. So, for that matter, was “Black Dynamite.” “The Avengers,” works best when it treats itself like it should: a joke. There are enough self-referential and belittling jabs that make the movie pretty funny throughout its run time. Quite a lot of these are provided by the best character, Tony Stark, played brilliantly as always by Robert Downey Jr. Mark Ruffalo, the nth incarnation of Bruce Banner, does a solid job as well. I still wish Thor’s weakness was stupidity and not arrogance (see my review of “Thor”) and I never saw Captain America’s movie so I guess I missed the part where it makes sense for our symbol against Nazism be a guy that looks like the poster child for Aryan machismo. Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner like most interesting actors continue their star rising descent into less interesting movies.