Captain America: Civil War Review - 10 Reasons It’s A Near-Perfect Comic Book Movie

2. One Of The Best Blockbuster Scripts Ever

The Captain America films have always been the best stand-alone entries in the MCU, and that's always been down to the work of screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, but they've really outdone themselves here. The dialogue is sharp yet weighty (with lots of nice meta jokes - Spider-Man's origin is a stand-out) and, if all the talk of callbacks and purpose didn't make it clear, it's all focused on telling a great story that plays with expectations (one sub-plot that threatened to derail from afar is in fact one of the movie's smartest twists).

Crucially, we don't have any scenes that could be described as purely "character scenes", stopping the film for five minutes so a few of the heroes can sit down and discuss their feelings (see the drab Age Of Ultron farm sequence). Instead, all of these personality-driven moments are dispersed throughout the constantly moving plot, pauses rather than halts, meaning that all the developments, from cute asides to major arcs, feel tied directly into the plot.

And that narrative is so tightly constructed. From the very first scene, it's laying the seeds for several key character moments, dropping in surreptitious references to everyday things that come together in alternatively joyous and heart-breaking crescendos. And, when all is said and done, they don't bow to convention and spell out the answers to its integral political conflicts, instead leaving it very much open for audience reading.