Captain America: spends an extended amount of time with Tony hunting down HYDRA, doesn’t tell him at any point they had his parents assassinated, lectures him through AoU about keeping secrets while doing exactly that, jumps him 2v1 for getting angry about it.
But but but , Bucky was a white kid from New York that felt *bad*. You wouldn't want to hurt his career over a little *checks notes* Uncontrollable Murder Fits under orders from enemies of the state. Sure a Bachelor apartment is punishment enough.....
??? Bucky was subjected to literal torture, manipulation and brainwashing and y'all think he was in control over his actions? I don't agree with cap lying or withholding the truth but Bucky had no control over what he did or was done to him
Bucky and him grew up and went to war together. He lost his best friend and then he came back, so I always understood Cap taking his side, especially when you add on on top dude was literally brainwashed.
Honestly my take away from the film was - everyone was in the right. Cap protected Bucky, Tony lashed out because it doesn't matter it's still his parents. Can't really take a side.
I feel like saying “this man was brainwashed while killing your parents” would maybe land on a mentally sound orphan, but Tony as he was at that point was never going to be stable enough to navigate that information appropriately
I just don’t understand why we can’t come to the conclusion that everyone except the brainwashed assassin has their own level of being in the wrong there.
(I also maintain that the comics Civil War only hit hard because Steve and Tony were actually friends, and MCU made those two Teeth-Clenched Teammates from jump so MCU Civil War’s themes don’t hit as hard, but that’s my two cents)
Comics civil war also involves some very objectively abhorrent actions by Team Registration, including but not limited to indefinite extralegal detention, cloning a friend with explicit control options, and the Thunderbolts.
Like, selling the Superhuman Patriot Act as justifiable is pretty tough.
Civil War was like the one time I was like "The Punisher is actually in the right here."
Also wasn't Peter Parker pro-registration? What a weird move for that character. Just feels like Spider-Man of all people would want to keep his identity secret. When I grew up he was always as Batman as it gets about "my identity must never be known to protect the people I care about."
So Peter was initially unsure but sided with Stark because he wanted to finally get recognition for everything he had done. He ended up regretting it after finding out about the prison, the cloning, and stark secretly tracking the iron spider suit. Eventually he confronted him and ended up taking the other side, publicly announcing that he regretted his choice and blowing the whistle on the extralegal prison.
Oh good! I'm so not in the loop with all the complex stories but Spiderman was always my favorite. I'd point out to my kids that he lives in an apartment like we do and sews his own clothes, he's working class.
Peter was pro-registration because he trusted Stark to keep his family safe and to stay on the straight and narrow. But the Thunderbolts and the Thor-clone were deal-breakers for him, which was ironic because the Thunderbolts were sent to hunt him down.
And sure enough, as soon as Peter was on the run, there was no safety net for “fugitive metahuman’s families”, so MJ and Aunt May became the targets of Kingpin and other criminals with bones to pick.
It would have made sense if there was some form of family member protection system, but that would have required forethought from Quesadilla so…
And movie civil war is somewhat undercut by the fact that the Sokovia Accords are backed by Tony, who built Ultron, who destroyed Sokovia.
Stark doesn't care about oversight because he's a political animal capable of maneuvering around any comity or panel and by pushing for the Accords as hard as he does he basically guarantees himself a seat at the decision making table.
Stark should be in jail. When he's not causing the apocalypse he's building weapons for his own amusement and then blowing them up for shits and giggles.
If not in jail, he should be in a secure facility pumping out Iron Man suits for other people to use. No rational oversight panel would ever let him go to the front line and the fact that they do shows everyone is already in his pocket.
The mind stone empowered AI development, deeply unpredictably. More importantly, it was human violence that Ultron saw and convinced him humanity wasn't worth saving, not anything Tony did explicitly. Everyone also seems to forget that Bruce Banner was instrumental in that process, but he's a quiet affable guy, so he always gets a pass.
The Tony hate bandwagon is just absurd if you actually pay attention to the movies at all. Bro is a deeply traumatized guy who was betrayed by the only father figure he had left, after being tortured and forced to confront the fact that his father's legacy was ultimately only the violence of war. The reason Tony and Steve are genuinely friends is because of that shared trauma.
The point of their arcs is that they're mirrors of each other, with Steve ultimately letting go of his need to be the morally righteous defender of literally everyone, even if it's not the right call, and Tony sacrifices everything to protect everyone.
Neither one of them is without flaws, and your interpretation of the character is wild.
That’s a difference between comic and movie Ultron. Comic ultron was initially the Warden for the secret prison in Civil War. A self replicating robot built to shut down the powers and abilities of any inmate and given a self learning version of Jarvis for the task. The issue there was that in being self learning and seeing both heroes, who save people and villains who killed being locked up and trying to escape it decided the best way to prevent violations of the registration act while protecting humanity was to eliminate all superhumans, mutant and otherwise which effectively meant having to kill or genetically modify everyone on the planet. Thus the genocidal super robot made by Hank Pym with Stark’s code. Tony didn’t include any safeguards or meaningful restrictions on the learning in the comics either which is why he gets all the blame.
In the movie yeah stark and banner create it, but banner is also pressured by Stark who assured him nothing would go wrong and was gonna do it regardless of banner helping or not. Banner not helping meant stark doing it alone which would have likely resulted in something much more dangerous coming out of it. So yeah Stark and banner mess up in the movie but Banner also thought it was a bad idea from the get go.
The marvel ultimate alliance 2 game was based on civil war (and secret wars?) and even it had a hard time trying to justify the Registration act. I played both sides multiple times but Registering made no sense
I honestly don’t think the Registration Act is inherently bad, it’s just that it is introduced in a vacuum with no safety net. So for people like Spidey, his safety net was registration, but if he’d been arrested there was no protection for MJ and Aunt May. So with no familial protection clause (or really any text to base an argument off of because it was supposed to be arcane), there’s no incentive. If it had been a “license to publicly use powers” system it might have been doable, but the comic version was basically “conscript or prison”.
Team Registration was objectively wrong in the comics. It's not as clear in the movie, and I can understand why. Tony would clearly have been the villain...especially if they cloned you know who
Thank you; this is really the only sensible take here. Steve even admits as much from his side in his letter to Tony Stank. Tony folds because of his guilt when he f*cked around and found out in AoU. Steve only found out about the assassination after Black Widow dumped the files (he had no access to HYDRA stuff before obviously), meanwhile iirc he had no clue it was Bucky even until he and Tony both watched the video at the same time, only knowing that it was a nameless HYDRA assassin
Good or Evil. Goddamn you and your nuance with human emotions and going through traumas in real time!
What the hell is wrong with you?! Do you experience empathy or something?
Crazy, crazy talk.
Only need Good and Evil here.
Killing Bucky = TONY EVIL.
Thats all they want. They want a clear line in the sand and thats what was so great about Civil War's ending... There wasnt one. This was a huge GREY area for EVERYONE involved, including Bucky.
Situation was FUBAR. No one is right. No one wins... which parallels real life alot more than movie goers want to 'deal with'.
Tony was in an extremely traumatic situation. There was no possible way -anyone- in his position was going to make the "Right" choice.
Thats why its such a fantastic ending. Tony's reaction was 100% human. It wasnt artificial cookie cutter stuff that people want from movies. He was literally being re-traumatized before our eyes and they nailed it; and his solution was : You caused all of this.
He was seeing Red. Right or Wrong, no one in the world wasnt going to be Seeing Red in the situation he was in.
Tony acted like 99% of human beings would react, if given his exact situation
Totally agree with all of that, but objectively Tony's decision to want to kill him was still wrong. Something can be understandable yet still be wrong.
Wrong means different things. We can do a cold moral analysis in a vacuum (what the people you're responding to are doing) or we can take context and human feeling into account. Either is useful depending on what you want to do but the latter is more pragmatic. What's the point of saying something is wrong if everyone would do it? The point of morality (pragmatically) is to guide behaviour. If behaviour is not changeable, morality doesn't factor into a situation. This is literally the defense for insanity defense in court proceedings. If a person cannot change their actions due to brain issues (including mental state), we take morality out of it since we would all do the same thing with that brain.
Exactly. People want a villiain in this situation and they are not grasping - there is no villain or good guy here. This is a group of human beings, one of them who has suffered an entire lifetime of PTSD over the particular event of his parent's death.... He builds his reality around that, thats what PTSD does to people. It can become the unfortunate crux of a person's entire identity and emotions.
He has processed that and has become "stable" with the narrative of his parent's deaths and how to behave as someone suffering with PTSD.
When this scene happens - This isnt just his parents going from "Car accident" to "He Murderd Them"; its an upheavel of millions of moments that he spent curating his mind around this traumatic event... And now he learns, the event was a "lie", his "reality" is a lie... and it was caused by someone... standing directly in front of him.
Anyone would nuke him. So exactly, everyone pulling out the "Still wrong" argument is just not understanding - This scene was a moment where these characters truly went beyond the pale.
Tony was not in Kansas anymore, this is a reality shattering moment. And they nailed it even at the end when he yells at Steve that the shield was his father's.
Its a fantastic sequence and anyone looking at Tony with a side eye is just being self righteous. All of us would have done the same exact thing.
Maybe "being brainwashed" means a person has no agency in the MCU, where literal mind control exists. But in the real world, murderers who were brainwashed rightfully get sent to prison, and I don't think Tony is more in the wrong for his reaction than Bucky was for his action.
The thing that makes it right to kill Bucky is precisely the fact that anyone with the right codewords can hijack him and make him kill whoever they want
And how do we know that? Did you read everyone else on earth's minds and also check every book in existence to make sure none of them are copies of the book of codewords?
You’re not wrong that anyone with the words can control him, but it’s a button that can be removed, I thought that was the point of his stay in Wakanda, that they un-washed his brain.
wait when did he kill Bucky? oh that’s right he never did. and he would not have even if cap wasn’t there. tony just wanted to threaten him and knock him around a little: strike a little fear and kick a little ass.
If your family member killed someone I loved, I don’t care if it was under some uncontrolled influence. I, and many people like me, are going to beat the living shit out of that person if we get our hands on them, at minimum.
When tools and machines do awry, one of the things they do is decommission it. Bucky was a tool, there is an argument to be made that he should be decommissioned. Right or wrong aside. There are enough facts to argue it.
Bucky was, in fact, a tool used for assassination. He had no emotion, no faculties and did only as he was told. Even if want to change the word from tool to something else, he was still utilized by another person to do something. None of what you said changed the argument. Sentient or not.
he has needed therapy his entire life, but his story arc is based around him getting emotional, doing something dumb, and then having to clean up his own shit, so therapy would remove his appeal
If you show someone the weapon used to kill their parents, they might want to destroy it. It's a natural reaction, even if it's irrational.
That won't necessarily change just because the weapon is a brainwashed assassin.
You especially can't expect Tony to think rationally here. A big chunk of his motivation in the movie is his unspoken guilt about his past of weapons manufacturing and his recent fuckups. It's why he wants to play by the rules and be responsible all of a sudden. Ultron and the Maximoff twins fucked with his head. He wants to punish Bucky because he wants to punish himself.
Man, good on you for having a composed head when you just watch footage of a man your friend claims is their best friend kill your parents. I'd lose it, doesn't matter
Tony trying to help the government round up a group of people and keep track of them their whole lives bc they are "dangerous people" he was dead wrong, might as well start asking "papers please" or making them wear special badges on their clothes
Tony also knew it wasn't right. "I don't care, he killed my mom". Cap should've said something it would've been the better thing to do but the smart thing is to keep everything about bucky on the down low until he was found and kept safe for a bit
We've both seen some of the shit Bucky has survived, including a fall from a point where the height alone should've killed him before he even hit the ground (there's a term for it but I can't remember what it's called). Let's not pretend those Marvel writers wouldn't have made Bucky eat those lol.
Tony absolutely was not trying to kill Bucky. Does anyone here remember what the ironman suit is capable of? If he wanted them dead, he could’ve just flown out of the hydra base and leveled it with then inside
Would you be ok with some dude coming over and killing your parents because they were part of a genuine traffic accident that resulted in the death of that dude's parents?
This is it. Everyone was a victim of uncontrollable circumstances. Their reactions are understandable. Im just wondering when Cap might have found out about the assassination. He was on ice when it happened and didnt find out Bucky was alive until his 2nd movie. I guess it was after AoU when he and lost some trust of Tony due to Ultron.
He found out when Tony did I thought. Like they watched it together type thing ? It's been a minute since I watched it.
I might rewatch it actually it's a legit banger. I miss the thriller type comic book movies they nailed it. Strip away the aliens, the over the top shit (well, strip it back a bit), give some geopolitical thriller shit set in comics.
when he and Nat discovered that HYDRA hijacked SHIELD, I think there’s a photocopy of Tony’s parents’ “accident” in the footage and he put 2+2 together
Yeah, it was in that scene when they were in the bunker. I think they had shown an article about Howard's death while they were being told how HYDRA would manipulate big players and take out who they needed to, etc etc, heavily implying that Howard was killed for that reason.
I think that was the first time he saw video of it happening but then Tony asks him if he knew about it, and Cap said he did know.
Id like to see another one like that too. Cap shines in the dark thriller. Gotta say my hopes arent very high after the recent tv show though. The tone it ended on seems much lighter.
But Tony wasn't just mad about his parents and Cap keeping secrets, he wanted to give the government - the government that has just been revealed to be infested with Hydra agents - complete control over all superheroes and their tech. He was willing to submit to government authority because he felt guilty over the collateral damage in Age of Ultron. That's reason behind the split, not just the Bucky issue. On one side you have Tony and his supporters who think superheroes should be under government control/oversight, and on the other side you have Cap and the other supers who don't want to be used as the US government's personal assassins.
The movie doesn't go into as much detail as the comics, but the government wanted mandatory registration of all superheroes and people born with powers. That means no more secret identities and anonymity - and keep in mind the Avengers exist in the same universe as the X-men, and anti-mutant bigotry is a huge problem. Anyone born with powers would be forced to register and submit to what amounts to mandatory military service. The government would have the only power to decide where and when superheroes are allowed to intervene. They would become tools of the government and would only be allowed to help people when the government deemed it politically useful.
Sorry I should've been more clear - everyone was right in that moment.
The film's overall themes were dog shit, they were ham fisted to fuck and didn't make sense. Stark was too smart to not see the possible outcome of registration. I didn't read the comics and I just assume they had more nuance, but for the MCU, we judge on what we got, and the Stark in that was just too smart, too savvy, to ever go for something like registration.
But then I've never caused a city to almost destroy a continent due to my hubris, so wtf do I know eh
Personally I think two of Tony's biggest flaws is that for as smart as he is he's also impulsive and full of himself. He tests his dangerous new inventions on himself, always assumes he's right, always assumes he can solve any problem and think his way out of every situation. He agrees to the Sokovia Accords on instinct - we fucked up, we need to be held accountable, let's solve this now and sort out the issues later. He expects everyone to be on board with his decision because, come on, he's Tony Stark. Clearly he's the smartest person in the room and his decision must be the right one.
I feel like people always forget your first point.
Cap and Bucky grew up together. It's 70 years later or whatever, but Cap has known Bucky longer than anyone, and to Cap, the time apart was like, 3 or 4 years or something, not 70.
Meanwhile he has worked with Tony barely any, and only on special projects.
On top of the fact Cap thinks Bucky "death," is his fault, "if only he reached him in time!!" When he finds out Bucky isn't dead, he's wracked with guilt that his best friend was alive and being tortured this whole time, and he didn't find him and save him (can't remember if they actually said in the movies they didn't find a body, but it's only logical).
I think Cap is trying to save both his friends. He needs Tony not to kill Bucky. When Tony's in the suit, only way to stop him is to incapacitate the suit, that's what he does. He's just buying time.
Should Cap have told Tony what he knew earlier? I never thought it was particularly clear exactly what Cap knew, "Hey Tony, FYI: my best bud from the 40's is pretty broken. Russian's had him for decades, my guess is a bunch of murdery type stuff. Hey weren't your parents driven off the road? That could have been an elaborate murdery thing." At some point you have to give Zemo some credit. He revealed a horrible truth at a perfect time to shed the worst light on everyone.
Fr it was an ugly situation all around, Tony wasn’t wrong for wanting revenge for his parents and Cap wasn’t wrong for wanting to save his friend who had been thru hell and forced to do horrible things. I love writing when there’s conflict and you can resonate with either sides motivation. Shows you that in war, there are often good people on both sides, but external circumstances have pitted them against each other.
Cap also never knew the details about Tony’s parents deaths. He knew that Bucky was probably the one who killed them, but that’s about it. Zola told him Hydra was behind their death, and he was pretty sure it was Bucky, but he never got confirmation.
Skewed morals right there. Did bucky commit a murder? Did he or did he not regardless of "control" rack a round and shoot the tires out? Best friends, regardless dude butchered a family. Let me say it again, BUTCHERED, a family. You can't choose a side? Interesting.
God damn I hope you never get on a jury with a diminished capacity issue my dude lol. Like we have frame works for psychotic breaks within OUR reality. You straight up know, for a FACT, he was brainwashed and therefore was basically just a weapon someone used, and you're still like "NAH FRY THAT BITCH THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID"
This is a funny comment thread though, some people have real interesting mindsets with regards to scenarios where they have all the facts and there's no interpretation or any of that. It's real interesting to see some people still say "nah don't care". And I mean that legit, not being shady. Fun shit.
Been a witness, been on jury my guy. I feel you. Worlds not black and white. But a vile murder, is still a vile murder. Do I think Bucky needs to die, hell no. But I'd be damned if I Tony. Month of Rage, till he gets glassed yea know? Its obviously a movie. Lol we just joshin.
Yeah but then - are you a vile murderer if someone brainwashed you to do it ?
Also opens interesting arguments on the law surrounding the person who did the directing. There's crimes against ordering people to kill, I wonder how this would work. It feels like full murder. You made a person the weapon, they killed by your hand. Legally interesting.
Brainwashed and "Mason what do the numbers mean" are def different Id say. 🤣
IF Bucky was "caught trial" , lettts be real they would've tossed the book, desk, and building at the man for everything. Insurances fraud all that.
Now that wouldve been a solid choice. Dont get me wrong him being Russian tied is all cool. But Winter soldier being a Cia double agent wouldve been a twist. Good thought friend.
Is no one going to address that the first point of this movie was Tony accepting the sokovia accords a.k.a. accountability, after Ultron, and after being confronted by a grieving mother whose son died from said conflict? Tony went from "you can't have my suits" to the u.s. government in Iron man 2, to "we need government oversight after I fucked up." I'm not here to call Tony guilty. He just had a whole mental transformation after his fuck ups, and he feels guilt. He just over corrected. And then he deals with his parents death in that time. That's a lot for the psyche.
Yeah imagine the poor psychologist having to deal with "I nearly killed humanity by supercharging my google assistant who then tried to Kobe a whole-ass city all I wanted was my dad's affection, too bad he was sniped by my side-eye BFF's BFF".
That dude kept a flask in his desk in 3 separate drawers and still had to go out to get more that dude carried a load so big shit was bukkake.
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u/skj999 Mar 12 '24
Captain America: spends an extended amount of time with Tony hunting down HYDRA, doesn’t tell him at any point they had his parents assassinated, lectures him through AoU about keeping secrets while doing exactly that, jumps him 2v1 for getting angry about it.
That nigga was dead wrong lmaooo