Captain America: Civil WarSave

Siberia, December 1991. A black sedan moves down an empty mountain road. The driver is Howard Stark — yes, that Howard Stark — and Maria Stark is in the passenger seat. Howard is carrying five vials of recreated super-soldier serum in a briefcase in the trunk. A motorcycle drops out of the trees. The rider is in goggles and a black mask and a Soviet leather jacket and his left arm is metal. He runs the sedan off the road. He walks up to Howard, recognizes him, and beats him to death with the metal arm. He shoots Maria. He retrieves the briefcase, plants the wreck to look like an accident, and rides into the night. The film opens by showing you the murder Tony Stark spends the next twenty-five years not knowing about.

Cut to Lagos, Nigeria. A year after Age of Ultron (2015). Crossbones — Brock Rumlow, the STRIKE commander Cap left burning in the Triskelion — is back, scarred but still breathing, and he's stealing a biological weapon out of the IFID Institute. Steve leads a four-person op: himself, Natasha, Sam, Wanda. They run it tight, they recover the weapon, they corner Rumlow in a marketplace. Rumlow tells Steve that Bucky remembered him. Then he pulls his dead-man's switch. Wanda catches the explosion with telekinesis on instinct — saves Steve's life — but she can't hold it and she has to push it somewhere, so she lobs it up and away. Up and away turns out to be into the eleventh floor of an office building full of Wakandan humanitarian aid workers. Eleven dead, including a young woman named Aisha. The world watches it on cable news for a week.

Back at the Avengers compound, Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross — the same general who hunted Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk (2008), now in a tailored suit instead of fatigues — drops a 117-country document called the Sokovia Accords onto the conference table. The Avengers will be folded into a UN panel. Missions only when authorized. Sign the Accords by the end of the week or retire. Tony — wrecked by guilt over Ultron and just torched in the lobby that morning by the mother of a kid who died in Sokovia — signs. Steve doesn't. Vision sides with Tony on the math. Rhodey backs Tony out of loyalty. Wanda is too shaken from Lagos to argue. Natasha, of all people, sides with Tony — "if we have one hand on the wheel, we can still steer" — though she'll change her mind by reel four. Sam stands with Steve. The team is split before anybody throws a punch.

London. Peggy Carter has died at 95. Steve is a pallbearer. He hears Sharon Carter — Peggy's niece, the cute nurse from The Winter Soldier (2014) — give the eulogy and quote a line of Peggy's about planting your feet and saying No, you move. It's the thesis statement of the entire movie. Natasha shows up at the church and tries one more time to bring Steve in. He won't sign. Then they get a news alert: the Vienna UN building, where the Accords are being signed, has just been hit by a bomb. King T'Chaka of Wakanda is dead. Eleven more bodies. The security footage shows the bomber, and the bomber is the Winter Soldier.

Bucharest. Steve traces Bucky to a fifth-floor walkup above a market. He's been hiding in Eastern Europe for two years working construction jobs and reading the journal he kept of every man Cap is here to bring him in before the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center's strike team kills him on sight. They have about ninety seconds. Bucky reads them right and tries to bolt. The strike team breaches. So does T'Challa — in a sealed black bodysuit with vibranium claws, a panther helmet that retracts on cue, and reflexes that match Bucky's. The four-way chase tears down a stairwell, through an apartment block, into a tunnel, and onto a highway through bumper-to-bumper traffic at sixty miles an hour. Bucky on a motorcycle. Cap on foot through cars. Sam from above with the wings. T'Challa on the roof of a moving van leaping between vehicles like an actual panther. Rhodey closes the box from the air. Everyone gets arrested.

Berlin. Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. Bucky is locked in a glass-walled vault that runs on its own power. Tony arrives to broker peace — get Steve to sign, save the band. Then a man impersonating a UN-appointed shrink slips into the vault holding a small red leather notebook with a black star embossed on the cover. This is Helmut Zemo. He doesn't have powers. He doesn't want money. He's a former Sokovian black-ops colonel whose wife, son, and father died under a falling Sokovian city in the Ultron event. He opens the book. He reads ten words aloud in Russian. "Желание. Ржавый. Семнадцать. Рассвет. Печь. Девять. Доброкачественный. Возвращение домой. Один. Грузовой вагон." Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car. Bucky's eyes glaze. He's the Winter Soldier again. He breaks the vault. He destroys half the building on the way out. Zemo walks out the other door wearing the shrink's badge.

Steve and Sam pull a brainwashed Bucky out of the building before he can kill anyone. They knock him out and stash him in an abandoned industrial warehouse. When he comes back, he's Bucky again, raw and confused. He tells them what Zemo wanted: there are five more Winter Soldiers — the rest of the program, prototypes from 1991, frozen in cryo tubes inside a HYDRA base in Siberia. Zemo wants the codes to wake them up and command them. Five enhanced super-soldiers under the control of a man who has nothing left to lose. Steve can't take that to the UN; they'll shoot Bucky on the way in. He'll need a team. Off the books.

Tony assembles his side first. Natasha. Rhodey. Vision. T'Challa, in suit form now, riding along to put hands on Bucky himself. He needs a sixth and goes hunting in Queens, New York, where a high-school kid named Peter Parker has been catching cars on YouTube. Tony's introduction scene with Peter is six minutes of pure character — Aunt May, the walnut date loaves, the homemade suit in a footlocker under the bed, the line about "when you can do the things that I can but you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you." Tony hands him a Stark-engineered Spider-Man suit and tells him there's a plane leaving in six hours. Peter doesn't even know what the fight is about.

Steve assembles his side too. Sam, Bucky, Wanda — broken out of house arrest at the compound by Steve himself in a vent-shaft sequence that's half Mission Impossible, half college-dorm rescue. Clint Barton, retired since Ultron, comes out of his Iowa farmhouse for Wanda. Sam recommends a guy he met in San Francisco who shrinks down — Scott Lang flies in on Sam's word and meets Cap on a German tarmac and visibly loses his mind. "Captain America. I know you. You're great." Six versus six. The Leipzig-Halle Airport opens its evacuated tarmac to them at sunset and the Russos give you the single best superhero fight ever filmed: every pairing, every power set, every line, every gag earned. Spider-Man taking Cap's shield. Ant-Man on a Hawkeye arrow. Vision drawing a line in the concrete with a beam from his forehead. Black Panther vs. Bucky around a forklift. Wanda burying Tony under cars. "I could do this all day." "I know, I know. That's why I quit." And then Scott Lang says "I've been working on something" and goes Giant-Man — three stories tall, ripping the wing off a Boeing 747 — and the audience screams in a way Marvel films rarely earn anymore.

The fight has consequences. Vision aims a beam at Sam, Sam dodges, the beam hits the back of Rhodey's War Machine reactor instead, and Rhodey falls eight thousand feet to a tarmac his suit cannot autopilot him out of. Tony catches him too late. Rhodey's spine is shattered. He'll walk again only in braces of Tony's making. While Tony is on his knees over his oldest friend, Natasha — who's been on Tony's side this whole movie — turns and stuns T'Challa so Steve and Bucky can reach the quinjet. "Of course you let me down," Tony tells her over comms. She's done. So is everyone. Sam, Wanda, Clint, Scott — captured at the airport — go straight to a deep-sea floating supermax called the Raft. T'Challa takes off the suit and follows in his own jet.

Tony reads the report on Bucky's pursuer in Berlin and realizes the shrink was Zemo. He goes to the Raft, gets the truth out of Sam, and flies after Steve to Siberia alone — no team, no Accords briefing, no backup. Inside the HYDRA bunker the three of them — Tony, Cap, Bucky — find the cryo tubes. The other five Winter Soldiers. Every one of them dead. Headshot at point-blank range. Zemo never wanted to lead an army. Zemo wanted Tony, Cap, and Bucky in this room together. He's on a balcony in a Plexiglas booth and he hits play on a video file from a CCTV camera mounted on a Siberian tree in December 1991. Tony watches the Winter Soldier kill his mother. Tony watches the Winter Soldier kill his father. Tony turns to the Winter Soldier in the room with him and says, very quietly, "Did you know?" Steve says "I didn't know it was him." Tony says "Don't bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?" Steve says "yes."

What follows is not a fight. It's a grief tantrum from the richest man in the world inside a $300 million suit. Tony goes at Bucky. Cap pulls Tony off. Tony goes at both. The three of them tear through the concrete bunker for ten straight minutes — no quips, no scoring, just metal and bone and breathing. Tony fires a missile that blows Bucky's metal arm clean off at the shoulder. Bucky goes down. Cap pins Tony, raises the shield, and brings it down — but not on the head. On the arc reactor. He hammers it until it shorts out. Tony lays on the bunker floor, suit dead, eyes wet, watching Cap haul Bucky up under his shoulder. "That shield doesn't belong to you. My father made that shield." Cap drops it. The shield clangs on the concrete and rocks back and forth. Howard Stark's shield, dropped at Tony Stark's feet by Captain America, in front of the man who killed his parents. The frame holds on it for a long beat.

T'Challa, who's been tailing Zemo this whole time and has heard every word from a vent above the bunker, climbs up to the balcony and stops Zemo from putting a bullet in his own mouth. He turns the colonel over to the German authorities and tells him his hatred consumed him. Wakanda absorbs Bucky — T'Challa offers him sanctuary in a country no one will follow him into. Tony, walking again with a brace under his pants, builds Rhodey a set of leg exos. The Raft sits in the Atlantic with Wanda, Clint, Sam, and Scott in separate cells. Steve breaks them out, off-screen, in the final montage — a quinjet flies into the Raft's open dock. Steve sends Tony a flip phone in a hand-addressed package along with a letter that ends "I'll be there." Mid-credits: Bucky goes back into cryo in a vibranium-lined ice chamber under the Wakandan royal palace until they can pull Zemo's words out of his head. Post-credits: a kid in Queens in his bedroom hits a button on a Stark-issued web-shooter and a red-and-black Spider-Man logo lights up on the wall.