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

3. Understanding Escalation

The airport scene comes in the middle-ish portion of the film, near the end of the second act (even if, given the runtime, that definition is stretched). Now this could have been ruinous; Civil War is already the escalation of the brief spats between various heroes (but mainly Stark and Rogers) in The Avengers films, and that epic showdown is the escalation of the conflict organically built up in this movie. How do you possibly go bigger from here?

The answer, at least according to the Russos, is that you don't. The final act doesn't try to top what's already come and instead focuses on advancing and concluding the wider plot that got us to Germany in the first place; what the film hungers for afterwards isn't an even more delightful, massive action scene, but a pay-off of the film's central relationships.

So while the six-on-six skirmish is the film's audience-pleasing highlight, it's what follows that carries the most weight. And that's because all of that build-up to the splash panel, with motivations made clear and teams scrappily constructed, was also slowly working towards something bigger on a more internal level...