Dream a little bigger, darling
May. 8th, 2016 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sasha_featherSpoilers below for Captain America: Civil War. This isn't the squee you're looking for.
I have this tendency to enjoy some stories while they are happening and later be like, you know what? No. That bothered me. I can't always put my finger on what exactly bothered me; sometimes it'll come to me through discussion or just thinking it over a lot and I'll figure it out long afterwards. This happens most often with books. So, I'm going to try and write out some of what bothered me here and get it off my chest.
1. The whole idea of friends fighting is stressful, and then to add to it they actually fight-- they use violence. It seems so juvenile and so full of toxic masculinity. I can believe that Magneto and Professor X would go there, and I like the idea of their life-long personal frenemy feud, which echos ideas of assimilation vs. separation. I had a harder time with the build up here. It just didn't seem justified; I didn't believe it. I didn't believe that Clint and Natasha would fight over... politics, essentially.
2. Not enough women. (I feel like Pepper Potts would never have let the situation get so out of control anyhow. She would have back channeled some kind of solution, put the Secretary of State in his place, and handled the whole thing in a day.)
3. Bucky going back into cryo. Zee goes there breaks this point down.
4. Tony's losses are more important than anyone else's losses! And, he uses a racist phrase.
5. The ending seems so hopeless.
6. Spider Man and Ant Man seemed like needless marketing additions. Time spent on them could have been spent elsewhere-- like with T'Challa, or letting a woman speak.
7. The villain, Zemo, didn't interest me, and seemed to also have a revenge / manpain motivation. Although! I read some meta on Tumblr about how possibly he too was a sleeper agent a la the Manchurian Candidate; this is a much more interesting theory.
8. The phrase "Super-powered individuals" is used several times to refer to the Avengers et al; but several of them don't have super powers: Tony, Rhodey, and Sam all use advanced technology. I suppose one could argue that their assistive tech makes them super-powered. But then individuals in the film (I don't recall who) call super heroes "nuclear warheads" to indicate how dangerous they are. And no one questions this. Again, I feel like the X-Men franchise makes this point better: people's bodies should not be politicized in this way. A person's body is not inherently a weapon.
That said. There were things I did like.
A. Everything with Bucky. I used to not really care about him. OMG, I care now. His face. His layers of dirty clothes. I don't know; I suppose looking at Sebastian Stan's face on Tumblr has had an effect.
B. The Bucky and Sam adventure hour. I wish the whole movie had been this.
C. T'Challa is amazing. I love that he consciously decides not to pursue revenge. I wish more characters did this on a daily basis; maybe it could be part of the teaching and the catch phrases of cultures and groups of superheroes. A quote attributed to Confucius goes, "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." (One for the person you are going to kill; one for yourself.)
I wonder if part of the problem in these Avengers movies is that there are simply too many characters; the writers try to give time and arcs to all of them and end up mangling the story. CA: The Winter Soldier succeeded in part because it focused down on fewer people and gave them more time to develop relationships and grow.
My roommate and I talked a little bit about how else they could have approached resolving some of the issues that came up in this film. If the problem is that superheroes kill bystanders and cause damage in trying to do good works, and so people are angry at and afraid of them; why not do PR? Reparations? Go to the places affected and do reconciliation work?
Also, what would a pacifist super hero look like? Can you imagine an organization of non-violent superheroes? What would their techniques be?
I have this tendency to enjoy some stories while they are happening and later be like, you know what? No. That bothered me. I can't always put my finger on what exactly bothered me; sometimes it'll come to me through discussion or just thinking it over a lot and I'll figure it out long afterwards. This happens most often with books. So, I'm going to try and write out some of what bothered me here and get it off my chest.
1. The whole idea of friends fighting is stressful, and then to add to it they actually fight-- they use violence. It seems so juvenile and so full of toxic masculinity. I can believe that Magneto and Professor X would go there, and I like the idea of their life-long personal frenemy feud, which echos ideas of assimilation vs. separation. I had a harder time with the build up here. It just didn't seem justified; I didn't believe it. I didn't believe that Clint and Natasha would fight over... politics, essentially.
2. Not enough women. (I feel like Pepper Potts would never have let the situation get so out of control anyhow. She would have back channeled some kind of solution, put the Secretary of State in his place, and handled the whole thing in a day.)
3. Bucky going back into cryo. Zee goes there breaks this point down.
4. Tony's losses are more important than anyone else's losses! And, he uses a racist phrase.
5. The ending seems so hopeless.
6. Spider Man and Ant Man seemed like needless marketing additions. Time spent on them could have been spent elsewhere-- like with T'Challa, or letting a woman speak.
7. The villain, Zemo, didn't interest me, and seemed to also have a revenge / manpain motivation. Although! I read some meta on Tumblr about how possibly he too was a sleeper agent a la the Manchurian Candidate; this is a much more interesting theory.
8. The phrase "Super-powered individuals" is used several times to refer to the Avengers et al; but several of them don't have super powers: Tony, Rhodey, and Sam all use advanced technology. I suppose one could argue that their assistive tech makes them super-powered. But then individuals in the film (I don't recall who) call super heroes "nuclear warheads" to indicate how dangerous they are. And no one questions this. Again, I feel like the X-Men franchise makes this point better: people's bodies should not be politicized in this way. A person's body is not inherently a weapon.
That said. There were things I did like.
A. Everything with Bucky. I used to not really care about him. OMG, I care now. His face. His layers of dirty clothes. I don't know; I suppose looking at Sebastian Stan's face on Tumblr has had an effect.
B. The Bucky and Sam adventure hour. I wish the whole movie had been this.
C. T'Challa is amazing. I love that he consciously decides not to pursue revenge. I wish more characters did this on a daily basis; maybe it could be part of the teaching and the catch phrases of cultures and groups of superheroes. A quote attributed to Confucius goes, "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." (One for the person you are going to kill; one for yourself.)
I wonder if part of the problem in these Avengers movies is that there are simply too many characters; the writers try to give time and arcs to all of them and end up mangling the story. CA: The Winter Soldier succeeded in part because it focused down on fewer people and gave them more time to develop relationships and grow.
My roommate and I talked a little bit about how else they could have approached resolving some of the issues that came up in this film. If the problem is that superheroes kill bystanders and cause damage in trying to do good works, and so people are angry at and afraid of them; why not do PR? Reparations? Go to the places affected and do reconciliation work?
Also, what would a pacifist super hero look like? Can you imagine an organization of non-violent superheroes? What would their techniques be?
no subject
Date: 2016-05-09 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-09 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-09 01:41 pm (UTC)OMG I also loved the Bucky and Sam adventure hour!! I didn't think I would but I did. I would watch an entire spinoff show of those dorks. <3
And now that you mention it, yeah, holy crap is there a big Pepper Potts-shaped hole in this movie. I can't imagine any of this happening if she were there, and it seems implausible that she would just sit this out, no matter how mad at Tony she was.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 04:38 am (UTC)Indeed. And my pain at the idea of Bucky in stasis rather than protective custody and treatment feels like grief for a friend, given how many stories I've read where his neurological and psychological injuries have been treated thoughtfully and with care and common sense.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-10 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-12 12:39 am (UTC)Aang.