As 2016 rolled around, the lines between the ‘solo’ adventures of our various (for now, Earthbound) heroes and the team up events of the Avengers entries was getting increasingly blurred. In a shared universe setting that was now into double digits entries, it was no longer really feasible to keep everyone completely separate in-between Avengers movies, and so rather than avoid the issue, the studio, and the Russo Brothers decided to grasp the nettle firmly with the third entry in the Captain America saga. As Greg D. Smith explains, in the aftermath of an Avengers mission that leaves catastrophic (and very public) collateral damage and casualties, our heroes are faced with a choice that will split them down the middle. But a larger agenda may be at work to make that split more permanent in nature.

There’s no escaping the fact that this third entry in the Captain America saga is a different beast. Up until this point we’d had cameos in end credits scenes or supporting characters popping up a la Black Widow in Winter Soldier, but this was the first time that an entry in a ‘solo’ series just gave up and had everyone turn up for the ride. The obvious question was how the Russos would stop this feeling like just another Avengers movie, especially a mere year after the box office-destroying juggernaut of Age of Ultron. The answer, as these things so often are, was deceptively simple: have the movie centre on a storyline encapsulating (almost) the entire team (Thor being wisely benched to retain the same grounded feel the Russos had established with Winter Soldier, Hulk being in places unknown after the events of Ultron), but make sure that you focus the point of view firmly on Cap’s (and his allies’) view of how things play out.

That’s still not necessarily as easy as it sounds. You’ve still got the ever-present spectre of Downey Jnr, ready in the wrong hands to overshadow every other character on screen or at the very least make everyone his snarky equal. The Russos had taken Black Widow along for the ride in their debut, but they suddenly had a whole cast of well-loved characters to throw into the sandpit.

The decisions the movie takes to mitigate this are as fascinating as they were brave. Tony himself isn’t actually present for the opening. He said that he was taking a step back at the end of Ultron and by God he meant it. While the team are engaged in a dangerous mission to take down Brock Rumlow in Lagos before he can steal a deadly chemical weapon, Tony is busy giving speeches at universities and handing out money. He’s therefore not there for when things go epically sideways and a large number of civilian casualties are incurred by Rumlow’s bomb which Wanda manages to deflect to save Cap but not far enough to miss an apartment block.

Tony is however able to be accosted by the mother of Charles Spencer, a victim of the catastrophe in Sokovia. This encounter, together with the blowback from the Lagos mission, has led Tony to throw his support fully behind General Ross’ and the UN’s Sokovia Accords – a set of rules that will bind the Avengers to be overseen and controlled by the UN rather than being allowed to continue to take care of themselves.

On the other side of the debate, Steve is uneasy. This feels too much like SHIELD and HYDRA to him, and he feels certain that he’d rather the team made its own decisions rather than be under the aegis of a group that might send them somewhere they shouldn’t be, or refuse to send them somewhere they need to go.

Though at first pass this might seem an odd stance for a soldier to take, in light of Steve’s personal history it makes perfect sense – all he wanted as a kid was to serve, but the Army kept telling him no. When he did enlist and became Captain America, the army and the government refused to send him out to fight, preferring that he be a curiosity performer selling war bonds. When he went on his first mission, in which he rescued many men including Bucky, and gained valuable intelligence that helped the allies beat HYDRA and end the war sooner, it was only because he’d defied orders not to go. Steve is an upstanding man with a very strict moral compass – he may well be ‘dangerously arrogant’ as Rhodey comments, but he is always unwavering. When he says that the accords merely ‘shift the blame’, he means it. His refusal to sign isn’t an abdication of responsibility for what happened in Lagos, it’s him absolutely taking that responsibility and refusing to allow it to be swept under the rug for political convenience.

At any rate, given that from Avengers Assemble onwards, the whole idea of the team has been one which is constantly fractious, it should be no surprise that the issue of the accords is one that threatens to split people again, but not to the extent of the Civil War the title promises us. What’s needed there is a bit more of a push – enter Helmut Zemo, ex-Sokovian special military operative nursing an enormous grudge against the Avengers for what he sees as their role in the destruction of his country and the deaths of his family.

When ‘Bucky’ turns up and blows up the UN building where the Accords are being signed, causing the death of several people including King T’Chaka of Wakanda, it’s the real spark that will set off the Civil War in earnest. Cap isn’t about to let his best friend get killed, especially when he’s just buried his only other link to the life he once knew as Peggy succumbs (off screen) to her Alzheimer’s at last. This is the real crux here that is often missed in surface level readings of the movie: Steve isn’t being obstinate for the sake of it – he knows that Bucky may well be responsible for the bombing of the UN, but Bucky represents the last remaining link he has to being a person. In the modern era, Steve is a superhero, an Avenger, a soldier with one single purpose. Bucky is the last person left in the world who knew Steve the person, and he finds it hard to let go of that.

Of course Bucky is no happier to see Steve than he was last time – the fight sequence as they clash with one another as well as with the police arriving to take Bucky in by any means necessary is a masterclass in stunt work and scripting, and the three way tension combines with the excellent physical work to make a lengthy fight scene thoroughly enjoyable. The subsequent chase through the streets, with Black Panther also in pursuit, is stunning and breathless, but the eventual capture leads to something even better.

For all that MCU movies (this one included) get praised for the big visual FX shots, where they really live is in the interactions between the characters. The quieter moments when big conversations get had. The conversation between Steve and Tony as the latter tries to persuade the former to sign the accords finally is a masterpiece. The interaction is a showcase of exactly who the two men are, from Tony’s flourish of producing the pens used to sign the Lend/Lease Bill of 1941, to Steve’s genuine concern at the news of Tony and Pepper’s split. It isn’t just two characters spouting dialogue at one another. It’s two men, two brothers, speaking to one another not just with love and respect but resentment, anger, and spite. It’s two people who know that they will never truly see eye to eye, but also know how much they each need the other. And it goes the only way that it can, Tony letting slip the one detail too much that prevents Steve from relenting.

After that, the action heats up again with Bucky’s reactivation by Zemo and escape. This then, would seem like a decent time to speak about Zemo’s plan, and why we have yet another example of the Christopher Nolan’s Joker Plan trope occurring in a comic book movie. So Zemo hates the Avengers. He has an understandable motivation to do so, having lost everything he loved in the destruction that occurred in Sokovia. He’s also smart enough to know that – ex special forces or not – he doesn’t have the ability to take them on directly. So he settles on prising them apart from within, setting them against one another so that they will be destroyed beyond repair.

But here’s the issue – Zemo’s plan not only relies on a Rube Goldberg level of convergence of various events and decisions, many of which he has no direct influence over (Steve capturing Bucky after he’s ‘activated’ and taking him away, both Steve and Tony heading separately and for different reasons to Siberia, and so on) but also on levels of knowledge he has no reason to have. Fine, he knew about the Winter Soldier after Black Widow released the files at the end of Winter Soldier, but how did he know specifically about the mission to kill Howard and Maria Stark? How could he know for certain that Tony was not aware of it? These and many more minor niggles add up to a plan that wants to seem extremely clever, but ultimately falls down under the briefest examination. It’s to the credit of the direction, the performances and the heart of the movie, that these inconsistencies don’t fatally wound it.

Of course before we get to Siberia, there’s the big face off. Both Tony and Steve have picked up their own teams and they meet at an airport to have the epic showdown the film has promised. Does it live up to the promise? Well, how can it not? The addition of Tom Holland as the newly repatriated to the MCU Spider-Man injects a welcome burst of fresh energy to proceedings, the character endearingly excited to just be there and chatting as much to the people he’s fighting against as to the people he’s fighting alongside. As an introduction of the character to the franchise, it’s lovely, not overdone, not overused and handled with just the right touch. We also get Ant-Man returning and his big party trick of turning enormous is likely the most memorable sequence of a whole immense action scene that lasts a good ten minutes but never runs the risk of dropping into repetition or the sort of dull, joyless explosions and clunking noise of Man of Steel’s final act.

Heroes clash, explosions happen, and it’s all going pretty much as you’d expect when the Russos throw us several curveballs at once to round things off. Black Widow suddenly letting Steve go isn’t perhaps surprising given her their history and her character, but it still throws a spanner in the works. Vision’s accidental shooting of Rhodey and the subsequent crash as Tony and Sam both race desperately to try to save him is a low note to end such an ambitious sequence on and underlines why these movies do serious comic book stories with stakes and emotion way better than the DC movies have managed for the most part. It’s genuinely heart-wrenching to watch Rhodey fall, and the first (and only) words of Sam before Tony blasts him off his feet underline the real tragedy here – for all that they’ve been fighting, these are comrades in arms, and Sam is genuinely sorry to see Rhodey hurt.

And so it proceeds to the final big showdown. Bucky and Steve arrive in Siberia, thinking they’re about to stop Zemo putting Bucky’s fellow super soldier assassins to use. Tony arrives shortly after, with the same idea, everyone’s back on the same side, and then… the revelation. Regardless of the holes in the plan used to get there, this is the real point at which the hostilities between Tony and Steve escalate beyond an argument between brothers and into actual war. Some opine that Tony has every right to be aggrieved. I argue that it’s a lot more complicated than that. In fact, there’s a case to be made that the Civil War of the title refers to the battle within Steve’s own soul.

I’ve noted that Steve is clinging to Bucky as the last remnant of his old life. Tony however, isn’t just a part of Steve’s new life – he’s a reminder of a good friend. From a shaky start, Steve came to respect Howard Stark, and they became good friends. When he’s unfrozen in the twenty-first century, he has to start that process all over again as he meets another Stark who’s every bit as obnoxious as his father was. But the two have become close – they’ve become brothers in arms, and each has earned the other’s respect, while still annoying the other. Steve finds out the truth about Tony’s parents from the HYDRA files in Zola’s bunker, and it becomes a weight on his soul. Not only because he has to deal with the knowledge that his best friend murdered Tony’s parents, but also because he has to deal with the knowledge that his best friend killed his other friend. He doesn’t blame Bucky, but he is confronted with a truth that’s painful to acknowledge. He doesn’t tell Tony because he wants to protect his friend from that pain, as much as because he doesn’t want Tony killing Bucky. Steve is a man who will literally die for the safety of others – from the ‘grenade’ he throws himself on at boot camp before he even becomes Captain America, to guiding the plane into the ice, allowing Bucky to batter him senseless and even allowing Tony to do the same. It isn’t that he’s insensible to the upset that Tony has on finding out, but going back to the initial conversation on the accords, he’s just willing to take responsibility for the call he made.

Civil War had the potential to be a disaster. One year after the ridiculously commercially successful Age of Ultron, and starring much of the same cast, it had all the makings of being a disaster in which Cap was overshadowed out of his own movie. Instead, the Russo Brothers took an even larger cast and made them and the titular throwdown between them a (very entertaining and visually stunning) backdrop to a story about one man and his determination to do the right thing, even when everyone around him disagrees.

In adding so many characters to his third solo film, they cleaved as closely to the truth behind the character as it was ever possible to get. As Sharon says at Peggy’s funeral (adapting one of Cap’s most famous and beloved phrases from the comics), even as the whole world tells him ‘move’, he plants his feet firmly and says ‘No, you move.’