Captain America: Civil War trailer breakdown
Captain America: Civil War trailer breakdown
Chris Hewitt
25 Nov 2015 15:09Last updated: 25 Nov 2015 20:08
The first trailer for
Captain America: Civil War, one of 2016’s most eagerly-awaited movies, finally ventured forth online today. It was packed full of tantalising teases for the 13th Marvel movie, in which the budding enmity between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark finally explodes into full-blown war. There will be blood. There will be biting, scratching and super-powered wedgies.
As ever, we wanted to bring you a breakdown of the trailer’s twists, turns and teases, and to help us do it, we spoke to two people in the know: Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers who directed the last
Captain America instalment,
The Winter Soldier, hold the reins for this movie, and will next be directing the mammoth
Avengers: Infinity War two-parter. Read on for their thoughts (and ours) on the trailer…
Hello Again, Cap (And Falcon. And Bucky.)
The first shot is a reprise of the post-post-credits tag on
Ant-Man, in which Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) seem to have finally completed their long search for Steve’s childhood friend, Bucky Barnes, AKA former Hydra assassin
The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan); a search that began at the end of
Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So, by putting this upfront, does that indicate that the search for Bucky is wrapped up fairly quickly in
Civil War?
“That’s not early in the film,” reveals Joe Russo. “But we felt like it was the cleanest way to draw a line and highlight that this is
Captain America 3, and not
Avengers 2 and a half.”
“There is a story about how Cap gets to Bucky,” says Anthony Russo, “and that’s fairly involved.” One thing that’s still to be resolved: why, exactly, Bucky has managed to get his metal arm trapped inside what looks like a giant vice. Silly Bucky.
Check Out The Big Brain On Buck
“Do you remember me?” asks Steve. “Your mom’s name was Sarah,” replies Bucky. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.” So, despite being brainwashed by Hydra for the past half-century or so, it seems that The Winter Soldier’s memories of his childhood friendship with Steve are thawing.
“His memories are foggy,” says Joe Russo. “But he has them. He’s also different now. There’s a part of his personality that was under mind control, and he murdered a lot of people. So he’s got a very complicated history. Who is that person? How does that character move forward? He’s not Bucky Barnes anymore. He’s not the Winter Soldier anymore. He’s something inbetween.”
In The Frame
“You’re a wanted man,” says Steve. And now we see why – an explosion rips through an important-looking government building. Is Bucky responsible? “I don’t do that anymore,” he says. So, is he being set up?
“All we can say about that,” says Anthony Russo, “is certainly The Winter Soldier has a very complicated history as an assassin and a weapon of Hydra – and that history ends up pulling him into a new conflict.”
It seems clear that Bucky is being framed. But by whom?
“Well, the people who think you did are coming right now,” says Cap, over shots of a heavily-armed SWAT team heading their way. “And they’re not planning on taking you alive.” We then see brief shots of Cap and Bucky fighting their way out. (Presumably by this point, Ant-Man has been called in to help free Bucky from the Vice Of Doom. Or a man from AA Roadside Assistance.)
The final shot, before the Marvel logo flashes up, is of Bucky leaping off the roof of a building. It’s interesting that Bucky, not Cap, gets the big hero shot at this point. In the comics, both Bucky and The Falcon have become Captain America – is
Civil War setting Bucky up for a similar succession?
Thunderbolt And Lightnin', Very Very Frightenin'
Next, we see an old – but largely-forgotten face – enter the scene: William Hurt as General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, nemesis of Bruce Banner and last seen in the neglected stepchild of the MCU, 2008’s
The Incredible Hulk. “The job is to tie all these films together,” says Joe Russo. “To be able to pull from
The Hulk, which may have been forgotten about a little bit, and make it relevant again within the cinematic universe, is important to us.”
So, what’s old Thunderbolt up to, then? “Captain, while a great many people see you as a hero, there are some who prefer the word, ‘vigilante’.” It would seem that he’s not on the side of the angels – in fact, it’s clear that Ross is a driving force behind the development that drives the film: superhero registration.
“We thought it would be interesting to take a character who had a fanatical anti-superhero point of view,” says Joe Russo of Ross, who once saw his prospective son-in-law turn big and green and mean. “Now he’s become much savvier and more political and has put himself in a position of power, not unlike a Colin Powell. He’s cornering the Avengers politically now, he’s out-manoeuvring them.”
Here’s the rub. “You’ve operated with unlimited power and no supervision,” says Ross.
“You cannot have a character called Captain America without examining the politics of what that means, especially in this day and age,” says Joe Russo. “The heroes in this universe operate under their own auspices, not under the directive of a government, and that can cause a lot of problems. There’s a certain level of imperialism that we’re examining – what right do those that have power have to use that power, even if it’s to do good? How do you govern that kind of power?”
Ross, as it turns out, has a simple solution to that…
The Biggest Accords This Side Of A Honda Dealership
In the
Ant-Man tag, Steve referred to the ‘accords’ at one point, leading to much feverish speculation about their exact nature. Now we know: the Sokovia Accords are the MCU’s version of the Superhuman Registration Act that powered Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s
Civil War comic back in 2006. “We’re using the essence of what
Civil War was about,” says Joe Russo. “The comic book isn’t applicable to the storytelling that we’ve structured up to this point, but the concept of registration, the notion that heroes need to be either monitored or controlled because their power can be scary, is applicable.”
Here, we can see a copy of the chunky doctrine being slid across a table to, judging from the black nail polish, rings, and uber-goth sleeves, The Scarlet Witch.
But what do the Accords have in store for our heroes? “The Accords are the world jointly trying to govern the Avengers moving forward,” continues Joe Russo. “It has to do with the effects of Ultron and Sokovia [the small city that Ultron tried to drop on the Earth from a great height at the end of
Age Of Ultron], and New York City [roundly trashed at the end of
The Avengers], and Washington D.C. [nearly devastated by falling helicarriers at the end of
Captain America: The Winter Soldier]. Examining the third acts of all the Marvel movies, we’re saying, if you could point to the collateral damage in all those incidents, could you use that against the Avengers to control them?”
“That’s something the world can no longer tolerate,” says Ross, as we see Steve lost deep in thought. What’s he contemplating? In the comic book, his opposition to the idea of registration led him to go rogue. In the movie, he chooses a similar path, but for different reasons. For very personal reasons. “The challenge was, we’re doing the story of
Civil War,” says Anthony Russo. “Which everybody knows is nominally about superhero registration. And in a lot of ways that can be a political issue, and we didn’t want the conflict of the movie to solely exist on that level. We wanted to figure out very personal reasons why everyone’s relationship to this idea of registration is going to become complicated. That’s what the relationship between Steve and Bucky allowed us to do, to get very personal in terms of why people would lean one way or the other.”
Ride, Bucky. Ride Like The Wind
“I know how much Bucky means to you,” says Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, AKA Black Widow, as we see Bucky and his wild, flowing locks ride hard through an underground tunnel. “Stay out of this one.”
The Winter Soldier cemented the relationship between Steve and Natasha – two people who recognised that they were kindred spirits, co-opted by the government and turned into living weapons. Natasha, though, sees the world in shades of grey, and will find the events of
Civil War pit her against Cap.
“We thought it would be interesting to take that relationship that was so strong in
Winter Soldier, and test it,” says Joe Russo. “She sees that they have made mistakes, very public mistakes and she’s trying to convince Steve that it might not be as black and white as he sees it and maybe they have some culpability, and maybe they have to accept that culpability, and then find a way to work within the system so that the Avengers aren’t disbanded.”
To show how deep the schism is between Steve and Natasha, here we see them, as in
Winter Soldier, out in the field, in ‘disguise’ (for Cap, one of the world’s most famous men, that means a baseball cap and sunglasses). This time, though, they’re on opposite sides, with Natasha trying to call Steve back before he can do more damage. “Please,” she says, “you’re only going to make this worse.” But Bucky is Steve’s blind spot – it seems that helping his old friend clear his name is the event that convinces Captain America to go rogue and butt heads with the country that gave him his name.
“The arc we’re tracking for Captain America, the thing we thought would be most interesting with this character when we came on board to direct
Winter Soldier,” explains Anthony Russo, “was to take him from the most ra-ra company man that you could get, this character who was a somewhat willing propagandist, and by the end of the third film he’s an insurgent.”
Which is a pretty big step for a man who still wears the flag on a daily basis. In further shots, we see Steve challenge Natasha, “are you going to arrest me?” Followed by a sequence of shots that indicate that the answer is a big fat ‘yes’.
Captain America Versus The Suits
“You have to pit him against the establishment, only this time it’s even graver consequences and even graver stakes than in
Winter Soldier,” adds Anthony Russo. “In
Winter Soldier, he was on the side of right because the establishment had been corrupted by a very evil organisation. In this movie, it’s just the establishment versus Captain America and he has to make a choice whether or not he can tolerate the establishment any longer.”