'Civil War'

The MCU has, of course, made many changes to the storylines adapted for the screen. The act of changing a story from one format to another can not be without challenges and of course changes, especially when condensing a Universe-wide series to a single movie.

At the start of the Civil War series in the comics the “accords,” or in the comics the Super-Human Registration Act the Avengers worked with the X-Men and proposed that they self-regulated. However, Cyclops thought is absurd that Professor X name himself the spokesperson for mutant kind (which I find kind of ridiculous because of so many reasons I won’t get into right now) but this does cause Jean Grey to break up with Cyclops and marry Wolverine.

Small side note, I like to call the movie Civil War, the one where everyone wanted to be Steve’s boyfriend and this title is further supported by comic book evidence. I would like to remind everyone that in Earth 3490, Mister Fantastic found, while researching alternate realities that the Civil War was avoided because a female version of Tony Stark, Natasha Stark, was married to Steve Rogers.

At the beginning of the comic book Civil War, Stark was joined by two of the other smartest men in the Marvel Universe, Hank Pym and Reed Richards to oppose the act (The small detail that everyone seems to forget is that Stark previously tried to halt the act). Cap, Falcon, and Luke Cage argued that a level of secrecy was necessary to maintain a normal life and protect their families and loved ones.

These tensions were escalated when Captain America led the Secret Avengers in an ambush against the pro-registration heroes. Seeing that they would no win this particular battle the Secret Avengers were forced to retreat. It is revealed that Richards and Stark’s Project 42 is a prison in the Negative Zone. After finding out that any Hero who opposes the registration act will be locked up Spiderman joins Cap’s cause.

After the final battle, Cap is thrown in jail and shot outside the courthouse, apparently pronounced “dead.”

Now let’s talk about the movie for a minute, I always say if you watched the movie and came out the other side team Iron Man, you watched it wrong. I stand by that statement and here’s why;

The biggest argument I hear for team Iron Man is that Cap was acting selfishly in trying to protect Bucky (which is already a flawed argument because he was anti-accords BEFORE he found Bucky) in regards to the direct accords the real selfish party here was Tony. In his own words, “I never stopped. Cause the truth is I don’t wanna stop. I don’t wanna lose her. I thought the Accords could split the difference”, Tony was only for the Accords because he wanted to get Pepper back, he put his romantic relationship ahead of his relationships with his fellow Avengers.

Natasha was for the Accords for the obvious reason, she was raised and trained to be a criminal, she wanted to be on the right side of the law for once. She wanted to be a hero, not an assassin. Upon seeing what the division was doing to her team members and what the right thing to do really was, she switched sides.

T’challa was never really meant to team Iron Man, he just wanted to avenge his father. He went after Bucky with a vengeance, giving him no time to explain or defend himself. Yet upon hearing who was really behind his father's death, T’challa then not only sided with Barnes but protected him and helped him heal.

So how, when members of team Iron Man couldn’t even make it through the whole movie being team Iron Man, could any viewer possibly still think that is the right side?