It's amazing how many local user reviews have concentrated on the lack of action sequences throughout the first act as a weakness when it is this very restraint that effectively gives weight to all the action of the third act. Make no mistake, the set pieces are spectacular and the action incessantly inventive but the more fascinating conflict at play here is in the ideological clash of these heroes. The dialogue is superb and while the script could have been perfect (difficult to admit but, while crowd-pleasing, the sub-plots to insert Spider-man and Black Panther into the narrative are somewhat an after-thought) there are elements that are extraneous (such as that recurring mystery of *minor spoiler* incubated super soldiers that anti-climactically amounted to nothing). Oddly the film works better thematically as a sequel to Age of Ultron than it does as a sequel to The Winter Soldier. The construct of the film does require a certain familiarity or investment in these characters provided by the previous MCU films but what Civil War introduces are new motivations that emerged organically for each of these heroes and served the emotional center of this particular story. Fan service can often come with disastrous sacrifices to tone and storytelling but Civil War managed to give the outright spectacle that casual fans were paying to see without abandoning its implications on story and atmosphere. I will defend Civil War as the film BvS admirably tried to be but (by virtue of being conceptually flawed to begin with) couldn't in spite of the good (yet hollow) aesthetics. I will happily eat crow if I'm proven wrong (by a logical film opinion and not a judgment made on who's more powerful than who as superheroes).