Review of Captain America: Civil War (2016) by Thewaffle — 06 May 2016

It's not "the greatest superhero movie of all time" as some have claimed. It's decent. The action is average and the pacing is terrible, but the overall divide between Stark and Cap is clear and believable, which is what really matters most. However, the film is not always terribly clear why the others picked the side that they chose. This is most obvious with Clint and Scarlet Witch, both of whom seem very out of character with the choices that they make. It is worth noting that this may be my favorite villain from all of the Marvel movies so far.

The stark difference between the critical reviews of Civil War and Dawn of Justice is utterly baffling to me. The films share similar strengths and similar weaknesses. Both film studios need to straight up fire their editing crews, because Civil War (like DoJ) suffers from jarringly bad editing. Where DoJ suffers from scattershot editing that puts together the scenes in an unintuitive way, Civil War seems to start and stop multiple times before it finally hits its stride about halfway through the film. This is made even more clunky as the film tries to introduce multiple new characters without ever slimming down the main cast. Fortunately the new heroes are all well played. Also, Civil War's actors are often talking off-screen even during pedestrian conversations, and it's really obvious that the two actors are not in the same room, which dramatically weakens a couple key scenes.