Episodes: Captain America: Civil War — complete spoilers
The good people at the Captain America: Civil War screening said "no reviews until Wednesday, April 13," and "you can tweet, but only vague stuff," and "no spoilers." But they don't know about this newsletter, right?
So that's it. I'm going to spoil Captain America: Civil War, in its entirety.
Here are the five things you need to know.
1) Captain America and Iron Man are fighting — but not over what you'd think. See, when the film begins, Captain America has been thinking about the worst possible threats to the world, and he decides that the threat of global climate change is such a huge risk that it must be stopped. The only way he can see to stop global climate change is to abolish all cars.
And, see, that's a problem. Because Tony Stark loves cars. Loves them.
The second Captain America film received great notices for its political subtext. Well, in this one, the subtext is text, baby, and the text is about the unsustainable course of human life.
There's a thrilling sequence where Cap is testifying before a Senate subcommittee on his plan to give everyone in America a horse with money he's recovered from HYDRA, and Tony Stark rides into the Capitol in a Hummer that he's altered so it's always rolling coal. He belches a great, black cloud of diesel smoke in Sen. Chuck Schumer's face (great cameo by Schumer, as you'd expect), then he says, "Take that, democracy!" Really had the crowd rolling.
The most exciting sequence of the film is when Captain America rides through the streets of Washington atop his trusty steed Bucky II, pulling people out of their cars and throwing them onto the backs of the wild stallions he's coerced into the city with millions of buckets of oats. This movie is going to do for the war against climate change what An Inconvenient Truth did for conservative talk radio's war to perfect Al Gore jokes.
2) This soundtrack is to one-hit wonders of the '90s what the Forrest Gump soundtrack was to the music Baby Boomers adored. Wait until you see the sequence where Cap and Bucky, both on horseback, ride silently, parallel to each other, through the Australian outback, never once looking at each other, trusting in the beauty and power of male friendship to catch them should they fall, all set to Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn."
3) Robert DeNiro has never been better as Iron Man. Seriously next level stuff from this guy. We could be looking at another Oscar nomination for the oft-nominated titan of the big screen.
4) Black Widow's lengthy treatise on the collapse of the American labor movement felt a little out of place. The film is two-and-a-half hours long, and while I mostly liked it, it's obvious that something could probably be cut. The most obvious thing, to me, was the half-hour lecture Black Widow gives on the systemic erosion of the labor movement in the United States, but my wife thought that maybe the part where Scarlet Witch can't understand the difference between bubblegum pop and sunshine pop, so she and Ant-Man look it up on Wikipedia and still don't really understand it, could have been left on the cutting room floor.
5) Stick around for the credits! Marvel really got a lot of names in there this time.
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Episodes is published at least three times per week, and more if I feel like it. It is mostly about television, except when it's not. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox Dot Com.
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