Rambling a bit about Civil War. (spoilers)
In this particular installment of ramble Iâm going to talk about the Accords, the situation leading up to them, and why I think they were a good idea. Iâve seen the movie once, so forgive me if I get any details wrong.
Since the fall of SHIELD the Avengers have apparently been operating as a completely private organization. (Although, in all fairness, itâs never really made clear if the Avengers ever answered to SHIELD in the first place.) Apparently their current activities involve a lot of traveling to other countries and beating up bad guys there without any sort of authorization from any government.Â
The intro sequence with Crossbones seems to be business as usual. Thereâs no indication that the Avengers had any contact with the regular authorities. Or the labs that Crossbones was targeting. Not even a âHey, we think this guy is coming to Lagos to steal a dangerous biological weapon, maybe beef up your security a bit?â Of course, maybe they didnât know exactly what Crossbones was there to do. But a little communication would have been helpful. Crossbones wasnât superhuman (or âenhancedâ) and neither were his men. The Avengers were not the only people who could have stopped him.
This ties in neatly to the first Avengers movie. The Chitauri, while dangerous opponents, were also falling to perfectly ordinary bullets from perfectly ordinary guns. Thereâs a brief sequence where the local police are talking about calling in the National Guard, which will apparently take about an hour. Why didnât SHIELD call in the National Guard or the army or something before the invasion? Itâs not like they didnât know what was going to happen; they knew about the Chitauri and the invasion plan. Or where; Tony figured out where Loki was headed and still had plenty of time to fly back to New York in malfunctioning armor. Not a lot of advance notice, no, but still enough to get people on the scene and maybe start evacuating civilians, or at least getting them to shelter. SHIELD just...didnât bother.Â
Then the WSC decided to call in a nuclear strike in order to stop an invasion which at the time was being contained by six people, only four of which were âenhanced.â Because clearly, if the Avengers werenât capable of outright stopping the invasion by themselves then it couldnât be stopped. The assumption is that the Avengers are the only ones who can solve these kind of problems, therefore thereâs no reason to get anyone else involved. Even when thatâs obviously not true.
Back to Civil War. The Avengers fight the bad guys and get the vial back. This involves a lot of chasing said bad guys through crowded streets and hoping no civilians get caught in the crossfire. Then Crossbones detonates his bomb, and Wanda tries first to contain the explosion, then to push it away. Unfortunately that results in it exploding by the upper floors of a nearby building, killing a lot of innocent people.Â
Note: this was not Wandaâs fault. She did the best she could under the circumstances, and if she hadnât pushed the bomb away itâs possible even more people would have died, given how crowded that street was. Still, the Avengers were directly involved in the explosion, and the resulting deaths.
Pretty much simultaneously we have a scene where Tony is confronted by a mother whose son died in the attack on Sokovia. She blames the Avengers. Whatâs interesting here, (and in the other scenes where the Avengersâ previous activities are mentioned), is that the Avengers are accused of not caring about collateral damage because they donât have to deal with it afterwards. They just go home and leave the proper authorities, (who are apparently left completely out of the loop until the screaming starts), to take care of the mess.
Now, that isnât fair to the Avengers. They obviously care about the collateral damage after it happens. (Seriously, Wanda and Steveâs reactions to the explosion are heartbreaking.) Being good at punching things doesnât necessarily add up to being good at search and rescue, if they donât visibly take part in the relief efforts afterwards thatâs not a sign they donât care. The problem is that they donât seem to consider collateral damage before it happens. It never once occurs to them to temporarily let Crossbones go then track him down once heâs out of the city, rather than risk all those civilian lives. Would that have been the better answer? I donât know. Maybe the risk of him escaping completely was too great, but they never even considered it. The thought that civilians might die if they chased him down right then never seemed to cross their minds.
Given the Avengersâ rather dangerous tendency to do whatever they want and damn the consequences, some oversight seems like a reasonable idea. Enter the Accords. Now, the first thing Iâll note about the Accords is that the way they were presented was an absolute dick move. The Accords had to have been in the works for months at least, and yet the Avengers find out about them for the first time three days before theyâre ratified? Yeah, no. If Steve had objected to the Accords saying, âHey, Iâm not signing anything until Iâve read it, also I want to get a lawyer to take a look, itâs going to take more than three days, sorry not sorry,â that would have been more than reasonable. Even Tony, the biggest advocate for the Accords, should have gone along with that. He runs a major company, he knows the danger of signing things you havenât read. Boom, mutual understanding and likely no Civil War.Â
The problem is that Steve didnât object on those grounds. He objected on the grounds that the Avengers should continue acting as a private organization without any oversight. Which is great...if the Avengers are always right and always understand the full implications of their actions and are always fully aware of how their presence will affect whatever country they happen to be in and always help more than they harm.
That being said, this is an understandable stance for Steve to take. The last organization he worked for turned out to be Hydra. Heâs worried about that happening again, and I canât blame him. Heâs worried about not being able to help the people who need help, or being forced to serve an agenda he doesnât agree with. I get why he feels that the safest hands are his own.
The problem is that he never once considers that his own hands might not be the safest. That maybe he should pay attention to why 117 countries decided that having the Avengers running loose was a bad thing. 117 countries. Thatâs a lot of people deciding they donât like the way the Avengers are currently handling things. Steve Rogers rejects the Accords on the grounds that he personally knows better how to handle situations in 117 other countries than the U.N. panel chosen by said countriesâ own governments.Â
âDangerously arrogantâ indeed.
Itâs important to note that most of what went down for the rest of the movie had nothing to do with the Accords. Bucky being framed had nothing to do with the Accords. Steve going rogue to save him had nothing to do with the Accords. The airport fight was about apprehending a dangerous criminal (Bucky) and his accomplices. Nothing to do with the Accords. The Raft most likely had nothing to do with the Accords, unless somewhere on page 312 the U.N. randomly decided to give the U.S. Secretary of State the right to hold âenhancedâ people there without a trial regardless of their citizenship. The final showdown between Steve, Bucky, and Tony had nothing to do with the Accords.
Tony was wrong about Bucky. But that doesnât mean he was wrong about the Accords. As far as I could tell, nothing bad that happened in Civil War was a result of the Accords themselves, and very little that happened was the result of peopleâs reactions to the Accords. The Avengers who signed the Accords didnât seem to be under any real restrictions as to what they were allowed to do. It was business as usual.
Except for one thing. The airport fight, after the Avengers signed the Accords, was literally the only time in any movie that the Avengers have ever tried to evacuate civilians before shit went down. There werenât any evacuation attempts in New York. Or DC. Or Sokovia. Or Lagos.Â
Coincidence? Probably. Iâm sure thereâs all sorts of reasons why evacuating civilians wasnât an option before. But the timing is definitely interesting.
Maybe the Accords were horrible after all and there was really nasty stuff hidden in the fine print. We donât know, we canât read them. But as presented in the movie, the Accords were a good idea.Â
The Avengers do not in fact have the ârightâ to do whatever they want without any consequences.Â
