jamyskis: Civil War inexplicably reduced him to a sycophantic wreck who spends most of the time pining over Pepper Potts (whose absence is due to no other reason than Gwyneth Paltrow couldn't be signed on), sucking up to Thunderbolt Ross, and lashing out irrationally without any consideration of the circumstances, all of which basically toss away everything that the past MCU set up so beautifully.
The thing with Pepper really bothered me. Her absence didn't really need to be adressed, in a movie so full of characters no one would really notice. Instead they drew our attention to the fact she's not here, and made that, instead of any actions at hand, the crux of Tony's bad mood and his decisions. Yeah, bless Robert Downey, for he really is trying his best to salvage what he can here, but it's like he's playing a different character.
The whole movie reminds me of an X-File episode, where because of some weird astrological thing, some "bad conjunction of the planets" or something everyone is acting out of character. Mulder and Scully are at each other's throats, he drinks, she's jelous of him etc.
jamyskis: Spiderman and the airport scene were fun though. In the general context the scene made little sense other than to pit all the superheroes against one another, but Spiderman's running commentary almost had me on the floor laughing.
The meeting between Tony and Peter wasn't bad in and of itself, it might have been a great scene in the Spider-Man movie. It's just that here it felt wrong, and placed in a bad moment. It was really jarring to me how we shifted gears from "shit's getting real" to "your sexy aunt makes great pie". And it went on for so long whatever tention to movie build up was gone when we got through it.
Likewise, the airport fightscene wasn't bad in itself, (in some ways yes, it was great fun), but it felt like they couldn't quite commit to making it serious, to making it an actualy "civil WAR". With so many jokes, even good ones, it's hard to feel like something really bad is happening between these characters.
jamyskis: I will say that Daniel Brühl put in a great performance, especially given the poor role that he had to work with. He had two standout scenes: the torture scene at the start, and his tete-a-tete with Black Panther. But beyond that, the overly convoluted nature of his plan and the rather idiotic way the heroes just fell for it rank and file went beyond suspension of disbelief. Lex Luthor may have had a similarly convoluted plan, and his reasoning may be extremely vague in BvS, but the way it was carried out was such that you could actually believe that Batman and Superman would both fall for it.
Exactly right on all counts.
jamyskis: Funnily enough, one of my favourite MCU movies after the Iron Man trilogy and Avengers 1 is Thor: The Dark World, despite it having the second-worst villain in the stable. There's one scene where it looked like the MCU was finally taking a risk: Frigga's death. OK, she was a comparatively minor character, but the loss was felt, the funeral scene was beautiful, and the way it changed (perhaps a little heavy-handedly) the dynamic between Thor and Loki was outstanding. It didn't matter that Malekith was about as interesting as a Windows manual - the film was never about him. It was about Thor's relationship with his family. MCU characters need to suffer genuine loss to make the lasting relationship dynamics more interesting.
I hate Dark World, but I totally agree on Figga's death and everything you said. A pityit ruins that all that emotional build up and character's development on terribly slapsticky final fight and a nudge-nidge wink-wink Loki "twist" at the end.
jamyskis: Were it not for the very last shot of BvS (which strangely reminded me of the final "Phoenix" shot of X2) and WB's sloppy marketing that made it clear that Henry Cavill had already been cast as Superman in Justice League Part 1, the ending of BvS would have been incredible. Nobody could have imagined that a movie would have dared to kill off Superman. It was a film that took a clever risk that, for various reasons not directly related to the film, didn't quite pay off.
I liked the ending. It's not like anyone could have any doubts about it anyway. It's not like even without marketing we'd actually believe they'll make a Justice League without Superman. And anyone who knows a damn thing about comics knows he came back. And let's face it, BvS is aimed at that comic-book fan audience way more than Civil War (or most of the newbie friendly MCU relly, which). I still liked how they only tease his return, with a scene that is rather nicely mysterious. Just a split-second of the dust flying up, and the music.
Oh, and that brings me to something I forgot- BvS has way, waaay better music. In fact Civil War has a terribly generic soundtrack, with not a second of memorable music. BvS isn't exactly going to make the top 5 superhero soundtracks, but next to Civil War it's sounds like freaking Blade Runner.
