16 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About Captain America: Civil War
13. Where Is The Ground-Work?
Ahead of the release of Age Of Ultron, audiences were promised that the MCU wouldn't ever be the same again and that the Avengers would end the movie broken and in a completely different place to Phase 1 and 2. That much was sort of true, but the manner of their fragmentation didn't actually bother to set up Civil War as much as it should have.
Obviously it's somewhat understandable: why should the tentpole at the end of a Phase feed into a stand-alone? That's not how these things work. But now we're faced with a situation where Captain America and Iron Man's great rivalry that bursts into open war in their next meeting has so far only been defined by a bit of a spat that was resolved.
The pair even shared a bit of a mutual respect bromance moment (along with Thor), quipping about the semantics of worthiness.
Unfortunately, because Whedon chose to complete Tony Stark's arc and give him some redemption by the end of Age Of Ultron, he's made the idea of the pair clashing alien, and there's going to have to be a lot of groundwork put in at the start of Civil War to make a feud seem believable again.