“CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR” and “BATMAN V SUPERMAN.”

As we draw nearer to “Avengers: Endgame,” I wanted to take a second to ponder on the best of all Marvel movies, “Captain America: Civil War” (“Avengers” is very close). It’s well-acted and technically impressive, like all or most Marvel movies, but what separates it is how savvy its script is in tackling that age-old “make my favorite heroes fight each other” trope.

Probably the best way to appreciate what “Civil War” does and why it’s so smart is to compare it against another movie that had more or less the same goal–make the heroes fight!–but utterly, colossally failed in its execution, the ignoble “Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.” At every step, Marvel demonstrated a better grasp of their characters, and what’s fun (and NOT fun) about seeing them come to blows.

Let’s dig in!

“Civil War” works for two reasons…

1. Simplicity. It gives its heroes a clear, simple point of disagreement that can be reduced to an emotional concept for each character: should superheroes be regulated? Some feel they should, others they should not. This debate can be set up in two seconds, but has tons of angles and shades of gray, and characters can sympathetically be on either side. CW was also smart to invert the expected allegiances: Captain America, Mr. Do Good, comes down on the side of no regulation, while Iron Man, mercurial to a fault, actually supports government control (I suspect they borrowed this from the comics, but it’s still wise). Even when the plot gets more complicated later, it always boils down to a simple concept: Iron Man’s parents’ murder, and the man responsible. Simple, clean, relatable.
2. Two Fights. This is the one I can’t get over. Everyone wants to see their favorite heroes duke it out, but if they’re actually trying to hurt each other, that’s a bit of a bummer. On the other hand, if they fight over nothing, there are no stakes. And when should they fight? If you put it off to the end, the rest of the movie is just a holding pattern, but if you front-load it, you blow your wad too soon. Marvel answered all these concerns with a graceful solution: have two fights. The first one, at the midway point of the movie, is w-stakes, high-entertainment. The characters disagree, but are explicitly NOT trying to kill each other, it’s almost akin to a sibling squabble. This lets you go nuts with big set pieces and “what if Ant Man did x to y hero” hypotheticals that your fan base is desperate for. The second fight is a photo negative of the first: small number of characters (just the key players, bye Ant Man), extremely high stakes, much tonally darker and less spectacular, and this time, they are trying to seriously harm one another. See, the only problem with the first fight is that it’s cotton candy, it isn’t substantive enough to warrant a feature film, and it doesn’t rise to the occasion of the titular “Civil War.” You NEED a high-stakes battle, but you have to go into it knowing it won’t be fun. The audience should grimace during it, not smile. But that’s okay, you gave them the fun one, and now you give them the un-fun (but necessary) one. By not trying to have a single fight encompass everything your audience wants, you liberate yourself from a ton of potential pratfalls and the result is a highly entertaining but substantive film.

Now let’s look at “Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” which gets almost everything here completely wrong…

1. Complexity. This plot is a wall of overthought nonsense. Batman’s motivation to fight Superman is simple (sort of), but it’s hard to buy, which is why the movie spends SO much time trying to get you to. The notion that a pre-emptive murder of Superman is the ONLY possible recourse for Batman is paranoid, unsympathetic, and kind of vague and abstract. But honestly, that would’ve been fine if that was the only problem, you could make that work. The problem is that the movie decides to separately motivate Superman to fight Batman (why?) with a convoluted Lex Luthor plot involving kidnapping Martha Kent. So now you have a fight where one guy is a paranoid lunatic, and the other is an incompetent boob getting duped by a Mark Zuckerberg knock-off into a fight he has no real reason to even engage in. Nobody has a clear, compelling motivation: Superman’s is too complicated, and Batman’s makes sense but isn’t compelling. WE know Superman isn’t a threat, so Batman’s argument that he IS is hollow. The movie tries to show you Superman’s behavior from Batman’s POV to make their case, but it’s never going to work because they’re fighting six decades of “Superman=good guy” cultural programming.
2. One Fight. BVS decided to have Batman and Superman fight once, fairly near the end of the movie. This backfired on them for two reasons. First, everything before the fight–including many attempts to hype it up–is boring, and people check out. Second, and much worse, is that the fight itself is a gruesome slog. Setting aside the choreography of the combat (which is atrocious, it feels like they were saving the budget for Doomsday, whom no one wanted in this movie), the scene is just joyless. You spend 90 minutes waiting for these guys to go at it, and then when they do, it’s kind of a bummer. I found myself squirming in my seat and wincing at every blow. Batman and Superman got less heroic to me the longer it went on, to the point that I didn’t even recognize them anymore. Who are these idiots bashing each other’s brains out over things that a semi-intelligent person could resolve in ten seconds with a conversation? I didn’t care who won because I didn’t like or sympathize with either of them. You can see when you look at how poorly this scene works why Marvel chose to have TWO fights: a fun one, and a serious one. They didn’t wanna keep the audience waiting, but they also knew that heroes fighting is a delicate thing, and involves a lot of emotions from the audience. Sure we want to see our heroes fight, but the more you think about it, do you want to see them FIGHT, or fight? Do you want to see “I’ll f*cking KILL YOU Hulk?!” or do you want to see “I’m gonna put you in a headlock till you calm down!” It’s really the latter. We want to see who would win the proverbial arm wrestling contest, but we don’t actually want two heroes we love who are supposed to be defined by their goodness on opposite sides of a real conflict. When “Civil War” makes that happen in their finale, they know full well that they’re showing you something that’s cool but also painful. You go along with it because you get why the fight is happening, and you had your fun one earlier. BVS, on the other hand, shows you pain with no reason, and gives you nothing else.

It brings me no joy to rake BVS over the coals like this. I’m a lifelong DC fan. But I think it’s important to acknowledge how savvy “Civil War” was, and how profoundly unwise the key creative decisions at the heart of “Batman V Superman” really were. The two films are a perfect yin and yang of one another. One is a triumphant success, the other a cautionary tale.