I didn't really like Civil War. Like, I just don't think it works.

Summary version: s that it has two themes going on which they work at cross purposes, the tone is all off, it has to shoehorn a villain in there somehow because superhero movie, and it can't really change the status quo all that much because the MCU works by letting you understand what's going on without watching all the movies. So the stakes can't really go all the way and at the end everybody has to be able to get over their differences and get on with more super-punching, but the central drama is only interesting insofar as it does go all the way with the stakes.

Theme one is the whole independence vs. oversight thing, and we're supposed to see that both sides have some reasonable points. This is fine, and there's an interesting question of balancing restricting personal freedom for the public good in there. I'd be totally down for a movie about that. But it really isn't about that in any substantial way, because the MCU heroes are basically a bunch of 17 year olds, and so can't see anything outside of who's besties with whom, and whether Ashley and Todd are hooking up or not, which brings us to theme the second.

Theme two is a bunch of really tedious personal melodrama nonsense. Tony's not really so much in favor of oversight so much as he wants to stop feeling guilty about being a colossal screwup that gets loads of people killed. Steve's not really for independence so much as he's incapable of accepting the possibility that his mind-controlled mass murdering war buddy might actually be a mind controlled mass murderer. And then for extra fan-ficcy BS, naturally said mass murderer killed Tony's mom as proved by the world's most plot convenient random videocamera in the middle of nowhere. So instead of being champions of different ideals of oversight versus individual freedom, we get two people with boring personal drama who are incapable of solving problems in any way that doesn't involve punching.

Which isn't a huge problem even of itself, since you could do a quite good tragedy about two friends who destroy their relationship because they're too prone to violence and lack any ability to compromise. But of course they're the good guys, so they have to be able to get back together, which means the movie can't really go all the way in terms of them really burning that bridge to the waterline. It'd be like making Revenge of the Sith, except that it needed to end so Anakin and Obi-Wan could make up and go punch some purple aliens together in A New Hope, or a version of the Iliad where you need Achilles and Hektor to go stab some purple aliens after this whole silly 'Trojan War' thing blows over*. You just can't go leaving the other person a destroyed ruin or threaten to eat their corpse raw anymore, and where's the fun in that?

So you've got a contrast between two ideas about the good of government oversight that the movie doesn't really focus on, and a bunch of personal drama that the movie can't commit to. Which shows up in the tone of the thing, which is all over the map. The big battle at the airport, which should be the most intense part of the movie as friendships are broken or strained by these new battle lines, and the heroes have to decide which friendship is most important to them, or whether a friendship is more important than their ideology, is played as 99% joke. I mean it's a fun joke, but playing the Benny Hill theme all through Luke and Vadar's conflict in Return of the Jedi would be fun as well; doesn't mean it makes a lick of sense for the tone of the movie. The film sacrifices any hope of thematic or tonal coherence for a big dumb action scene.

And the Captain America and Winter Soldier vs Iron Man fight is played big and serious (and tedious as hell) and... amounts to not a whole lot. The evil scheme we barely learned about, hatched by the villain we don't care about is foiled, but did anybody care? I sure didn't. There was a lot of faces punched, but nobody was actually hurt, and even during the fight it was 100% obvious that nobody was going to get hurt, so that's consequence free. Did Tony get over his mother's death? Hard to see how that helped with that. Bucky's still a broken mess, so that's not resolved, and Steve's still besties with everybody so it's not like that whole 'friend A tried to kill friend B' plot really amounted to a whole awful lot. It's like a love triangle ending with a threeway, except that a love triangle resolving itself via threeway would be different, interesting and possibly make some sort of sense.

Oh, and it turns out that of course it's not even really like this is about contrasting ideologies, or even the character melodrama because we need a dastardly villain to be responsible for playing our heroes off against each other in the first place. So its first theme is undermined by its second, and its second is crippled by the tone and genre constraints. I mean what were the character arcs in this movie even supposed to be? So far as I can tell, Black Panther is the only character who actually grows or changes or resolves anything.

*Incidentally this more or less part of what passes for the plot of Dan Simmons' Ilium novels, except with more post-humanism, third rate Lovecraftian horror and tortured Shakespeare references. It's actually even dumber than that.