It’s all well and good cramming countless popular heroes into your movie, and then making your movie about those heroes being on two sides of an epic conflict, but it’s tricky to keep the individual plot arcs straight in the mind. With the exception of Black Panther and Spider-Man, each of the heroic characters in Captain America: Civil War is coming in to the movie with a history and plot that is already established in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s at least 11 threads to tie together in a coherent fashion.
If anyone can succeed in that task, however, it is filmmaking duo Joe and Anthony Russo – directors of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Without entering spoiler territory, and based solely on information that is available from the trailers and cast listings, it seems that the Russo brothers, along with the film’s writers – Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely – are using the characters of General Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt), Baron Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) and Crossbones (Frank Grillo) to propel the conflict and the action. These characters – bringing with them a demand for superheroes to submit to government oversight and control, and a threat to innocent lives, respectively – set the stage for our heroes to disagree, and engage in battle, with each other.
But, if the issue between them is whether or not they should be accountable to a higher authority, then – provided this is a well-written movie – they will each make their decision based upon their own history, and where they are in their own story. These are the things that have brought them to the point where they must pick a side.
So, with the release of Captain America: Civil War now just days away, let’s take a look at who will be battling and what their motivations are likely to be.
