Title: Comic Book Features: Captain America: Civil War – Does The Movie Do The Comic Justice?
Author: Metal Pangolin
Recovered Author: Metal Pangolin
Published Date: 2016-05-11
Original URL: https://geeknode.co.za/2016/05/comic-book-features-captain-america-civil-war-does-the-movie-do-the-comic-justice
Wayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20170713113849id_/http://www.geeknode.co.za/2016/05/comic-book-features-captain-america-civil-war-does-the-movie-do-the-comic-justice/
Recovery Confidence: high
Categories: Comic Book Feature
Tags: Captain America, Captain America Civil War, comic book feature, comic books, featured, Iron Man, Movies

- Metal Pangolin

- 1 year ago

- 0 0

Following the events depicted in the movie “Captain America: Civil War”, a lone figure, acting without oversight, decided to take it upon himself to uncover the truth. Some have said that the movie did not accurately portray events as they had transpired according to the books of Millar and McNiven (2006). These are the findings of Metal Pangolin, in what went on to become a controversial piece that divided the nations.

Before continuing further, be warned: The following transcript contains heavy spoilers. Which side will you choose to ally yourself with?

[Team I want Spoilers] vs. [Team I don’t want Spoilers]
Civil war was written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Steve McNiven. Mark Millar is the guy who wrote a number of popular comics that, in recent times, have been turned into movies. These movies are “Kick ass”, “Wanted” and “Kingsman: The secret service”. To top it off, his “Ultimates” comic book series that he did for Marvel, which was set in an alternate universe called the Ultimate universe, became the basis for some of the elements on which the Marvel Studios movies are based on. The Civil War comic books were controversial from the onset, seeing as they were seen as criticising the policies of the US. Government, at a time when America was engaged in conflicts in the Middle East. The issues surrounding government databases for people who were deemed most likely to be terror suspects, paranoia over the loss of privacy as well as the increase in the powers given to the American government to monitor individuals in the name of national security, made the release of the Civil War comics in 2006 a talking point.

The issue being addressed in the series of books, and their associated tie-ins, was whether costumed heroes should be registered with the government and as such have their secret identities kept by government officials in a database which would in effect, mean that they would be acting (to use the analogy) like guided missiles: aimed by the government wherever it deemed them to be most useful. This also meant that the powers that be would dictate who the enemies were. Captain America took this point of view in both the comics and the movie

To counter this argument, was Tony Stark who believed that costumed heroes had been running rampant throughout the world helping out where they could, while at the same time they were causing collateral damage which in turn governments needed to clean up thereafter. They also left civilian deaths and injuries in their wake. Another issue was that if they were under government control, up and coming heroes could be trained to better use their powers and would be able to put them to better use and as such limit collateral damage upon civilians and infrastructure while defending the innocents. The fact is that these heroes were also in some cases, prone to becoming villains and as such if there were checks and balances in place, someone would be able to stop them before they were to turn to the dark side.

It should be noted that the inciting incident in both the movie and the comics is an explosion due to an inexperienced hero trying to do the right thing: In the comics it was a member of the team called The New Warriors trying to stop the villain, Nitro, who used his explosive powers to blow himself up as well as an adjacent school full of kids. While the movie had Scarlet witch trying to save Cap when Crossbones blew himself up. There’s a brief exchange between the mother of one of the kids who died while in Sokovia and Tony stark which harkens back to a similar scene in the comics.

The movie and the comics actually feature similar arguments regarding whether heroes should be regulated or not, the difference being that in the movie, they don’t go as far as to say that all costumed heroes should be registered, mostly because The Avengers are the ones who are seen as being to blame for most of the cataclysmic events around the world. The Sokovia Accords were put in place to regulate The Avengers only while in the comics, The Superhero Registration Act was enacted to cover all costumed heroes regardless of affiliation.

The major difference that most people see are the number of heroes who are engaged in the conflict. For starters, Fox studios owns The movie rights to The X-men, Fantastic Four and their associated characters. This limits the number of characters they could have added to the movie. The major players in Civil war were The fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-man, members of the X-men and the rotating roster of The Avengers. The fact is that The Avengers roster has included so many characters over the years, that someone once said “which character in Marvel hasn’t at one point been an Avenger?” Case in point, Deadpool. He was recently included as an Avenger in the comics.

My point is that since The Avengers movie, Marvel Studios has been moving the chess pieces in a specific direction, one in which it all culminates in the final “boss battle” between all the introduced characters and teams against Thanos who has been pulling the strings behind the scenes all this time. Yes, they could have waited and made a Civil War story when they had all their characters rights back, but by then the actors contracts would have elapsed. I do think that they made the right decision by making the cast as small as possible and not crowding the screen with as many heroes as possible. The airport sequence was amazing but it illustrates this fact. If there were more characters, the whole sequence would not have come out as it did since everyone would want to follow a specific character and not enough time could be afforded to each one for them to have their moment to shine. It will be interesting to see where they take the story forward from here on. The expectation was for Captain America to die at the end of the movie as in the comics but then again this was not the case in the Civil war comics either since his death took place following his surrender.

The Inclusion of Helmut Zemo as the orchestrator of the whole thing was an interesting choice for the major villain seeing as he is part of Captain America’s rogues gallery. They in effect took elements of the winter soldier storyline and stretched it along until it reached Civil war since the search for Bucky wasn’t a plot point of Civil War but in the movie it was what drove the story forward. The final confrontation between Steve and Tony was as intense as it was in the comics but I think the movie did a better job than the comics. In the comics, the battle still rages on when Steve looks around and realises that what he’s fighting for is tearing everyone apart which, in my opinion, he would have realised earlier on instead of acting like a kid and throwing a fit and proving the governments point: that superheroes are dangerous due to their reckless behaviour which causes undue damage. In the comics, the final battle took place right in the heart of New York and I think that Steve would have placed the lives of the civilians first above his own petty feelings regardless of how strongly he felt. This is where the comic fails and where the movie succeeds.

Civil war as a comic was rife with moments that were out of character for a lot of the heroes. When reading the book, while you would agree with the sides chosen and their principles, you wouldn’t help but feel that the heroes were acting in ways that were not in concert with their established views. In the beginning of the series for example, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) uses DNA from a strand of Thor’s hair to create a clone/robot, jokingly referred to as “Clor”. Now, Reed and Thor are friends, why he would clone Thor to use him to gain an upper hand against his own friends in a conflict over ideologies which could be solved if they just sat down and talked it over instead of battling it out, is baffling. The movie triumphs because it removes such uncharacteristic moments by telling a leaner story with a third wheel orchestrating the whole affair. In essence, the movie does more than do the comic justice.

One can never take away the feeling of waiting for the next issue of the comic to come out or buying the completed collection and reading the entire saga instead of sitting in a packed cinema with strangers to enjoy a movie. While the movie and the comics are two separate beasts, one cannot help but see the way that the movie transcends the comics in places even though there are moments where you do wish that they had used characters and moments drawn from the comics. That aside, I think that the movie does do a good job juggling the plot of the comics while laying out a way forward for the next wave of movies to follow.

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Metal Pangolin

His arms are heavy, knees weak, eyes are straining, ‘cause he’s been reading comics from DC, Marvel, Image etc. more than even he can name them. He’s nerdy, but on the surface he looks calm and ready, to review comics, and lets not all forget that, when he writes stuff, it makes people laugh out loud, in real life, he almost never opens his mouth , so watch out....

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Captain America · Captain America Civil War · comic book feature · comic books · featured · Iron Man · Movies

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