…and it deserves a looong reaction post dissecting my thoughts on it. I have a lot of opinions, but this got long enough when I was only talking about Steve and Tony and Natasha, and not even touching on the plot, or the Maximoff twins or anything. It is also very rambling. There will be spoilers under the cut, so click no further unless you want them.
So it starts out well - everything is super dramatic, Natasha’s driving a Jeep, Steve’s on a motorbike, there are a lot of dramatic over-the-top comic-book-esque slow motion shot.
Aaaaaand then it goes downhill from here.
Tony swears. Steve says, “Language, Tony.” Keep this in mind. I will come back to it later on to discuss how badly they missed the point on Captain America. But that’s not the point right now. The point right now is that we get a scene where Natasha uses some pretty nifty animal whispering powers to calm the Hulk down and get him back to being Bruce. That’s pretty nifty, right up until it leads on into a Natasha/Bruce romance.
Okay - I do headcanon Natasha aromantic, personally - but I am totally willing to understand that that’s my headcanon, and other people (the ones who work on the film, for example) are going to have different ideas. And that’s fine. Except that you can’t go straight from “love is for children” a couple of movies ago - to flirting and pursuing a relationship without showing me what happened in between to make her think romance was worth pursuing after all. I mean, these were both your movies, Joss. Is a little consistency too much to ask?
I can’t exactly articulate why Natasha/Bruce specifically, felt so wrong to me. Maybe it was just that we’ve not really seen them interact much before - like, time and effort went into developing her friendship with Steve in Cap 2, and her friendship and history with Clint in Avengers - and then they threw a romance with Bruce at us without showing any kind of build up at all. It honestly felt so forced to me that I assumed when they were flirting at the bar that it was some kind of cover, or a code, or silly banter.
And then there’s this weird moment at Clint’s farm, where they talk about sharing a shower, and then Bruce is saying, I can’t go out with you, I’m a threat, and suddenly Natasha is getting emotional about how she can’t have children. This rings false for me for two reasons: one - Natasha, on past things we’ve seen, doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would want to bring a child into this world, or at least, not until it’s a less dangerous and fucked-up place to be in; two - you guys are talking sort of half-jokingly about sharing a shower, and suddenly it’s don’t be with me I’m sterile? That seems like a massive jump in the tone of this potential relationship. Slow down… I mean, okay, the first reason is open to interpretation, and I totally understand Natasha being upset about that violation of her body when she was young - but still, this didn’t really seem like the right time or place to bring up having children.
I just feel like the rationale behind this realtionship was, “Well, it has to be Nat, because otherwise no het romance. We can’t use Thor, because Jane. We can’t use Tony, because Pepper. We can’t use Clint, because he’s the only one with space in his MCU backstory for the All-American family trope, and we want that. Can’t use Steve - he’s got too much going on, and besides, Peggy? So that leaves Bruce. Brilliant! Bam! Relationship sorted.”
Okay, let’s leave Nat and Bruce behind for a minute. I have many other characterisation problems with this movie I feel like they totally dropped the ball on Tony Stark, too. I mean, after all that exploration in IM3 of Tony’s anxiety and trauma and how doing superhero things doesn’t just involve doing the job - it continues to affect you forever, and you have to learn to cope with all the things you’ve done and have happened to you…or of course, your PTSD could last for exactly one movie, after which it never comes up again.
I didn’t like Tony, in the first Iron Man movie. I couldn’t get behind his snark and self-entitlement, and his sense that he is better than everyone around him. But in the following movies, he learnt, and he changed, and he became more sensitive about his friendships, and his relationships, and the effect he had on the people around him, and by the third movie, I was deeply invested in Tony’s emotional arc. And I feel like all the things that made me finally care about Tony were lost in this movie.
Okay - missing the point about Captain America. I promised you I’d get back to that, and I will. There’s this moment at the start, like I mentioned, where Steve calls Tony out on his language, and then at the end of that fight scene, Tony asks whether anyone’s going to acknowlege that Steve called him out on language. Which would’ve been fine - because I assumed that the joke here was that Steve, former WWII soldier and working class kid, probably has some pretty foul language himself, and if not, he’s definitely heard some pretty foul language. But instead, of course, the joke turned out to be that Steve is so adorably old-fashioned and all-American - look at his quaint self-censorship, aww.
So then there’s that in-Steve’s-head scene where Peggy is talking to him. I found it very weird that Peggy was the only one there. I mean, Peggy’s great - and definitely important to Steve - but it honestly seemed weird and lacking that Bucky - childhood friend and comrade - didn’t feature in there at all. I feel like a Steve memory without Bucky is not really a Steve memory?
As someone non-American and generally uncomfortable with flag-waving patriotism myself, I really liked the way the Captain America movies portrayed Steve: he believes in his country and cares about his country and wants to do good for his country, but he isn’t too keen on being a symbol of American Values, and basically he’s a lesson in not othering the past, and I find it very disappointing when he’s turned into a joke about how repressed they were in the 1940s
I have many other thoughts, and they may someday appear on my blog, but these are what were the most egregious character sins to my mind.