Writing one of the more bizarre movie reviews one will read for Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte whined in a Friday afternoon post that the latest Marvel film morphed the “New Deal Democrat” Captain America into “a douchey libertarian” “who believe[s] it’s cool to belong to a secretive paramilitary that rejects oversight and accountability to the public.”
Marcotte aired her grievances in a nearly 850-word piece that ruled she enjoyed the movie but “was sorely disappointed” in having Team Captain America thumb its noses at the idea of superhero accountability in an age of “the Black Lives Matter movement” and “questions over the military’s drone program.”
Explaining that much of disappointment stems from her interpretation of Steve Rogers as a liberal champion, she notes that she celebrated the first two films because they didn’t “cave into the temptation to make the character some kind of generic, apolitical “patriot,” abandoning the comic tradition that has painted him as a New Deal Democrat standing up consistently for liberal values.”
Instead, this installment that more or less functions as Avengers 2.5 didn’t paint the story she wanted:
A mercenary group who has resisted even the most basic oversight from democratic governments, oversight that would allow the people that the Avengers are supposed to be protecting some say in what this militaristic police force is allowed to do.
She then outlined the basic plot of Civil War and how critics of the Avengers have called for them to face oversight and sign treaties to be reined in by the United Nations because such groups could help stave off civilians being killed like in the first two Avengers films in New York and Eastern Europe.
Giving some love to the U.N. as a faithful lefty would, Marcotte emphasized to readers that “[t]he demands being made by various governments and the United Nations in “Civil War” are more than reasonable” as “[t]hey want the Avengers to stop being a privately run paramilitary organization that answers to no one.”
“They want them to sign a treaty agreeing to transparency and some government oversight. This is common sense and what we would expect the standard liberal position to be in a world where superheroes exist,” she added.
To her chagrin, she closes by again lamenting the supposed betrayal of a superhero who, in her mind, was a devout leftist: “But now, in this movie, Steve is singing a different tune. He seems to believe that because he knows the Avengers mean well, that’s good enough. He doesn’t want to have justify his behavior or include democratic governments in the decision-making process.”
