Not really a Civil War, but a great Superhero-Fight nonetheless!

Rating: 8/10 (10 May 2016)

By a civil war, I understand a brutal conflict between several parties in an urban surrounding over a longer period of time, and this was rather a street fight between a bunch of superhero-friends, who once confronted with the political and moral consequences of their actions, realized that they disagree on certain basic issues and therefore argued it out using their fists and abilities, which was so much fun to watch that I will condone the misleading tag-line.
Especially for a martial arts fan like me, the fantastically choreographed fist fights were the highlight of the movie and the reason why I would like to watch it again on Blu Ray as I found that the 3D technology wasn't developed enough to capture the fast velocity of their movements making them appear slightly jittery. The action scenes were really amazing and didn't seem overlong or bloated.
What I liked about the story is that although it dealt with a lot of characters who all by themselves aspired to be in the spotlight as most of them would ultimately get their own movies like Black Panther for instance, it nevertheless kept a very good balance and followed a clear central theme so that it never felt over-fraught with unnecessary sidelines or was embarrassingly chaotic like "The Amazon Spider-Man 2" for instance which was a catastrophe. So I will excuse certain weaknesses that all Marvel movies seem to have which I will describe as a certain immaturity and incompleteness of the plot without giving away any spoilers. After watching it I always feel like I should read the comics in order to get the full picture. With the very popular German actor Daniel Brühl they also introduced a rather unusual villain who brought a new kind of stereotype into the genre, a very quiet manipulator with a tragic human side. It's also interesting to compare the many parallels of the story to the recent "Batman v. Superman" movie sharing some main ideas concerning the public control of superheroes placing them under the command of a specific political authority which is all inspired by A. Moore's legendary "Watchmen" and in retrospect I find "Captain America 3" executed this ideas far better than Singer managed to do with "Batman v. Superman".
Another great plus are definitely the new recruits of the Avengers team starting with Spiderman and Antman, who are just marvelous and also the Black Panther and The Vision and Scarletwitch are superb and a rather personal compliment goes to - hot, hotter, - Scarlett Johansson who as Black Widow demonstrated her best performance so far.
All in All I find "The First Avenger: Civil War" surpassed it's prequels and also marked a new great highlight of the Marvel cinematic universe.