What You Need To Know Before Going to See Captain America: Civil War
The Marvel community has been eagerly awaiting the new Captain America film, Captain America: Civil War, which hit cinemas on 29th April. The beloved character has been featured in numerous movies up until this point, his face is on every conceivable piece of merchandising with him even featuring in online marvel slots, so we thought we’d share a catch-up guide so you know exactly where you stand before watching this latest offering.
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
This is the fifth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is the final prelude to the crossover film, The Avengers. It centres on the origins of Captain America, also known as Steve Rogers. Steve (Chris Evans) fails to join the military during the Second World War, but his desire catches the attention of Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who is the U.S. government’s Strategic Scientific Reserve. He recruits him to a squad of soldiers, where one will be chosen as the first in a ‘super soldier’ experiment. Steve is chosen, brains and bravery winning out over brawn. Steve is given injections of a secret serum and doused with ‘vita-rays’. He emerges far taller and muscular than before. This is where the fight begins against the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) and HYDRA. At the end of the film, he finds himself in a modern day Times Square, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tells him that he’s been asleep for nearly 70 years after the battle.
The Avengers (2012)
S.H.I.E.L.D. – Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division – is an international peace-keeping agency directed by Nick Fury. It brings the biggest names in Marvel together with Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) and, of course, Captain America. In this all-encompassing film, global security is threatened by Loki and his cohorts – Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is the adoptive brother and archenemy of Thor, and is the core villain in this flick. Nick Fury and his team require all of their powers to save the world from disaster.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
In this 2014 film, Steve Rogers is struggling to embrace his role in the modern world. He teams up with a fellow Avenger and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, the Black Widow, to battle a new threat from history: an assassin known as the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), who has killed Nick Fury. Before his death, the director warned Steve that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been subverted by its enemies. He trusted no one, and was branded a traitor by the organisation. With the Black Widow and his new friend The Falcon (Anthony Mackie) in tow, he finds enemies where he least expects them and learns that the Winter Soldier looks disturbingly familiar – it turns out, he was Steve’s best friend, Bucky, who supposedly died at the hands of HYDRA in The First Avenger and is now a brainwashed assassin.
