Tear Jerker / Captain America: Civil War

And then her show was canceled.

Pre-Release

• This line from the first trailer:
  Steve: Sorry, Tony. You know I wouldn't do this if I had any other choice. But he's my friend.
  Tony: [with a betrayed expression] ...So was I.
  • This is immediately followed by Steve and Bucky beating the hell out of Tony.
  • This line in the trailer just sticks a fork in it: "I was wrong about you. The whole world was wrong about you."
  • Just the fact that, with every trailer, Tony appears more and more angry and disillusioned with Steve. Seeing Iron Man, a hero looked up to by God knows how many fans and children, appearing so antagonistic is sure to break some hearts.
• Tony gets another one. This time, it's him holding what appears to be Rhodey's seemingly unconscious body. And when Rhodey is shown being shot out of the sky in the second trailer, likely due to his arc reactor taking a direct hit, Tony immediately races after him while screaming his name in terror. Also, his face while he's holding Rhodey is filled with hurt, anger, and betrayal.
  • Tony's look when he grabs Bucky's pistol with his gauntlet as it fires is just heartbreaking. On one hand, Bucky just gave him all the reasons in the world for war. On the other, Bucky might not be in control of his actions or be seriously unstable due to decades of brainwashing and abuse.
• Given how close the two have been shown to be in the previous movies, the fact that Black Widow and Hawkeye are on opposite sides of the conflict.
• Steve's face when Bucky says he remembers him, looking like he's on the verge of Manly Tears.
• In the second trailer, Wanda's reaction to the footage of Sokovia's destruction is pretty heartbreaking, leading one to only guess at the amount of regret she feels. Add to this the likely grief she feels, not just for her city but also for her brother and the terrible choices they made.
• The whole purpose behind the Sokovia Accords and the events that led up to it. No matter what the Avengers did to save lives and help people (even going out of their way to evacuate people during the incidents in New York and Sokovia), a lot of people blame them more for the destruction and death than the ones who directly caused these incidents (Loki, HYDRA, Ultron). These are people who want to use their gifts to help people and make a difference. Not only are people ungrateful, they see the Avengers just as dangerous as the people they fight, and all the work the Avengers do just blows up in their faces by the next film, only to have it come to a head here. Then again, the Marvel Universe (comics and films) has had plenty of moments that show all the heroes that no good deed goes unpunished.
  • It's made even worse when it's revealed the mastermind behind the Avengers' internal struggles is Helmut Zemo, a Sokovian survivor seeking vengeance. At that point, you begin to wonder if the Avengers offended fate in some way.
• Tony introducing the story of Charlie Spencer, the young man whose grieving mother he met after his speech on the campus, to his fellow Avengers.
• In the second trailer, Steve pleads with Tony and tries to tell him that they don't have to fight. Tony's response is to give him a Death Glare filled with pent-up rage, pain, and betrayal before tossing him across the room and officially declaring war on the man he and his father used to look up to.
  Tony: YOU JUST STARTED A WAR!
  • It's safe to say through the whole of Civil War, neither Steve nor Tony like nor want to fight each other, but events, ideologies, and friendships just end up making it hard for them not to.
• Sebastian Stan's answer to "What does Bucky have in his backpack?"
  Sebastian Stan: In his backpack, there are a dozen notebooks that compose the scattered memories dating back to as far as he can remember which somewhat piece together a scattered life. In a similar way to Alzheimer's, he's written things down, for fear of losing his memory again. He was prepared, were something to happen, to walk away with nothing but that backpack, which is why it's the only thing he takes and knowing full well that not everything those pages contain is pretty.

The Movie

• Wanda's reaction when she accidentally kills a bunch of innocent bystanders by trying to redirect Crossbones's suicide bomb. Her utter horror and shock are pure tear-jerker, especially when you remember that "blown up by someone else's bomb" is what killed her parents.
• The heroes of the MCU, the ones who have fought together on multiple occasions, are fighting each other. We thought they were a tight-knit group of friends, or an extremely conflicted but amazing family. Now they're out for blood. Making it even worse is the fact that they are all aware of how awful this is, and none of them are happy about it.
• The revelation that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, murdered Howard and Maria Stark, and Tony's entire reaction to the video footage:
  • Howard's final moment is utterly heartbreaking. His first action when getting out of the crashed car is to plead for help for his wife repeatedly and just before Bucky punches him to death, the man recognizes his assassin as his wartime friend.
    Howard: Sergeant Barnes?
    • Pay attention to Bucky at that moment. He clearly hesitates and even lowers his fist for a second. Really makes you believe him when he says that he remembers the Winter Soldier's victims.
  • It's made worse by the fact that Steve knew that HYDRA was behind the Starks' deaths and didn't tell Tony, but also, he never knew that they sent Bucky to do it. While he likely suspected it, he's clearly blindsided by the brutality of the act.
  • Tony hissing through his teeth, "Don't bullshit me, Rogers! Did you know?"
  • When Steve admits it, Tony takes a big, reflexive step back, like Steve's the one to have killed his parents, and has a cold look of absolute disgust.
    • Not to mention the look on Steve's face when he admits to knowing. He's on the verge of tears and can't speak above a whisper. He was Howard's friend, too, and seeing how he died must have shaken him badly, even without the weight of keeping the secret from Tony.
  • This scene, like Peggy's funeral, is only made more impactful if you've seen Agent Carter. The lovable genius playboy you once knew, contented in his new life, beaten to death by an old friend.
  • Maria calls out for her husband and when she sees Bucky drag his corpse back into the driver's seat, she is so despondent that she doesn't even react when Bucky strangles her. She just lays back into her seat, weeping, and stares into space as she gets killed.
• The death of Peggy Carter. While it's comforting to know that she died peacefully of old age in her sleep, having avoided assassination, her funeral is still extremely poignant for Steve as well as viewers who are fans of her TV series.
  • Steve was clearly aware that Peggy was close to death since he didn't seem surprised to receive the text that she had passed. Still, watching him react to the news and seeing him cry while carrying her casket is absolutely gut-wrenching.
  • Of all the coffin bearers, Steve is undoubtedly the strongest, but it looks like he's the one with the hardest time holding it up.
  • Peggy must have had many family and friends throughout her lifetime, but Steve was still one of the people given the honor of carrying her casket. Clearly, Steve was still always one of the most important people in her life, even after all those years.
  • Peggy's death also hammers the nail to the coffin (no pun intended) that three main characters of Agent Carter^note Peggy, Howard, and Jarvis have finally died.
  • The scene is even sadder given that less than a week after Civil War hit theaters, ABC announced the cancellation of Agent Carter.
• A subtle moment, but after Steve and Sam are taken into custody in Berlin, their equipment is confiscated. Steve looks at his shield and simply asks, "I'm not getting that shield back, am I?" Natasha's teasing "Technically it's not yours; it's the government's" is meant to be funny, but it still hits him like a punch in the gut. Apart from Bucky himself, the shield is Steve's last real link to his life in the 1940s.
  • Afterward, Tony begs Steve to sign the Accords. At one point his voice breaks, because he's so scared of losing his friend. The big brother he never had, the legend he could never live up to, his father's best friend.
• Seeing the entirety of Cap's team beaten, despondent, and locked up in a high-security prison is one of the lower points in the Avengers' history on its own, but Wanda, especially with past and recent events in mind, is a particularly awful sight: She's collared and tied up in a straitjacket, mute, glassy-eyed, and dejected to the point of complete apathy, just staring into space.
  • An even more unpleasant thought is the possibility that prison personnel weren't taking any chances and drugged her into insensibility as well.
  • Tony looks upset while viewing Wanda in her cell from a monitor. Previously, he did the best he could by keeping her under house arrest and Vision's watch in the Avengers Compound, because he believed that was the best thing for her at the time. It's understandable why he's upset seeing her in an actual prison cell, even if they're on opposing sides.
• The final fight between Steve and Tony. At this point, there's no diplomacy, no reasoning, just two former friends doing whatever it takes. Even if he's angry at Steve for being kept in the dark about the death of his parents, Tony still initially directs his rage only towards Bucky; he tries to cuff Steve's legs, then causes a ceiling to collapse, so to keep him out. Except Steve keeps coming back, causing Tony to use increasingly deadly force. Even then, Tony warns Steve at least twice to stay out of the way and, later, to just stay down after Tony floors him. When Steve ends the fight and goes for a hit with his shield, Tony tries to guard his face at the last second, genuinely thinking Steve was going to bash him in the head and kill him, but Steve instead breaks Tony's arc reactor with his shield. By then, the look on both men's faces is one of defeat. The worst part? Tony had several opportunities to kill or severely maim Steve but chose not to, which was the reason he lost the fight. This line just seals it:
  Tony: That shield doesn't belong to you! You don't deserve it! My father made that shield!
  • The above line really drives home how broken Tony is over what's just happened. Not only does Tony see Steve not telling him about HYDRA killing his parents and then defending the man who killed them as a personal betrayal, but he also sees it as Steve betraying his father. The fact that, as Tony pointed out to Bruce in The Avengers (2012), Howard apparently never stopped talking about Steve and how great he was makes it ten times worse for Tony.
  • Heck, just the fact that Captain America leaves his shield behind as his response. The shield has been his iconic weapon for so long, but after everything that happened, Steve decides he's no longer worthy of carrying that shield. It's as bad as seeing the shield itself break.
    • Plus, right after Steve breaks the arc reactor, he's openly crying, unlike his earlier face-covered reaction to Peggy's death.
    • At the end of the fight, all three characters lose their iconic superhero accessories. Tony has his arc reactor broken, Steve leaves his shield behind, and Bucky's cybernetic arm is blasted off.
    • Tony even looks taken aback that Steve actually tossed the shield aside as well.
  • Adding from above, it's the second time Steve willingly drops his shield, the first time being back in the finale of The Winter Soldier where he drops his shield into the river below and refuses to hurt his old friend. This time, he drops his shield, not because he doesn't want to hurt his other friend, but because he knows that he already did.
  • As mentioned above, Tony shields his face from Steve's shield when he thinks he's about to kill him. Tony has lost so much faith in Steve in the span of a few seconds that he can't even trust that Steve won't kill him.
  • Before then, Steve is still defending Bucky. He blatantly says to Tony's face, "He's my friend." You can almost see Tony's heart snap in two when he says this. Steve is prioritizing the guy who killed his parents over everything he and Tony had been through.
  • Tony's response? "So was I".
  • A short and cutting line: "I don't care. He killed my mom." This line is particularly tragic because it shows that Tony has never been able to reconcile with the memory of his father. In previous films, Tony had been very open about how he didn't really like his father and tried to bury it with black humor, but it looked as if the events of Iron Man 2 might have helped him get some closure. The fact that Tony, in a moment when his guard is completely down and he's saying exactly what's on his mind, is in an Unstoppable Rage to avenge his "mom" instead of "parents" suggests that, deep down, he has never forgiven his father.
    • It's also a reminder that, unlike Howard, Maria's death couldn't even be attributed to the grim exigencies of the shadow war between HYDRA and SHIELD. Howard was a legitimate threat to HYDRA, but Maria was neither a crack technical asset nor a SHIELD member; she was a completely innocent bystander who just happened to be married to one. HYDRA could have spared her without any cost to itself, and Tony could have finished growing up with a loving parent. But the Winter Soldier had been programmed not to leave any proof of his presence... including any witnesses.
  • A key contextual bit to this scene that comes well after the airport fight. It's well-known that "superhero vs superhero" fights are loved because everyone wants to see their favorite characters brawl to see what will happen. The airport fight is a blast, albeit with a tragic end. This fight? It's all tragedy. The audience had its kicks, it wanted to go back to the good guys beating up on the bad guys... and the movie said "Sorry, that's not how this story goes".
  • The visual metaphor that is of Steve plunging his shield into Tony's arc reactor. Both of these characters' running arcs have been about their "hearts" and how they compare with each other. At this moment, both of them are, in different ways, "heartless".
    • While not as iconic as his shield, Steve's Chest Insignia is burned by Tony's repulsor blasts, just like he destroys Tony's arc reactor.
  • And to think—all of this could've been avoided if Steve had just told Tony beforehand that Bucky (under brainwashing from HYDRA) had killed his parents.
    • Which would have been impossible, since it is confirmed by Word of God that Steve never knew Bucky was the killer. What he did know was that Howard had (inadvertent) ties to HYDRA and was killed by them. He simply chose to spare his troubled friend a further instance of Broken Pedestal by finding out what his father did.
• One from Bucky's perspective. The fact that he remembers every single atrocity that he committed as the Winter Soldier.
  Tony: [whispering] Do you even remember them?
  Bucky: I remember all of them.
  • Perhaps made worse with Sebastian Stan's interpretation: Bucky is lying and merely telling Tony what he wants to hear to make his own death as painless as possible.
  • Alternately, if Bucky was telling the truth, it just serves as a reminder that assassinating targets that were a threat to HYDRA was all Bucky has ever been doing since his "death"; their faces and profiles are literally all he has and was allowed to remember.
    • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier confirms that he wasn't lying: He does remember every last one of them and is still plagued by nightmares about his previous missions.
  • In a small moment, when Bucky uses Cap's shield briefly during the fight, some viewers might have a flashback of the last time Bucky picked up Cap's shield: Just moments before he was hurtled from the train to his "death" in The First Avenger.
• Bucky willingly chooses to go back into stasis until a way can be found to free him from HYDRA's control permanently. Even more, it is T'Challa who helps him, after spending most of the movie trying to kill him.
• Tony, in general. Remember the fun-loving adrenaline junkie who would gloriously flip off the US government, tell a Norse god to his face that he is going down while serving him a drink, and poke Bruce Banner with a cattle prod? Yeah, well, that man isn't there anymore. Early on, it's shown that Tony is a broken shell of himself to the point that his idea of opening a conference telling young graduates how the future is going to be awesome thanks to science is to tell and show them the last words he would have liked to say to his father before his death. Throughout the story, he alternates between being passive and utterly antagonistic. Tony Stark is being passive—that alone shows he's bordering on full-on depression or melancholia. Plus, it's later revealed that Tony and Pepper are no longer an item (despite the events of Iron Man 3), and it's implied they don't even work together anymore. All he has left is the Avengers as the only family he has now, and his support of the Accords is partially motivated by a desire to keep that family together. By the time the movie ends, that family has been broken due in part to Tony's own actions.
  Tony: Binarily augmented retro-framing, or "B.A.R.F."—God, I gotta work on that acronym. An extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to clear... traumatic memories. It doesn't change the fact that they never made it to the airport or all the things I did to avoid processing my grief. Plus, six hundred and eleven million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment? No one in their right mind would've ever funded it.
  • Made even worse considering the fact that he used another person's invention (more specifically Quentin Beck's invention), renamed it into something stupid, and ended up firing said inventor, yet again inadvertently creating another villain.
• Tony's dialogue with Miriam, the grieving mother who lost her son Charlie in Sokovia. It really hammers down Tony's Guilt Complex about the whole debacle.
  • A subtle one, but when Miriam reaches into her purse to pull out her son's picture, Tony grabs her wrist. He brushes it off as an "occupational hazard," but he was totally on-edge and thought this woman might be trying to kill him. Tony's PTSD is only getting worse, and he's started seeing threats everywhere. Or perhaps this isn't the first relative of a victim to try and kill him.
• T'Challa cradling his dead father in his arms. At this point, you don't know the guy, but his brief scene earlier with his father is enough to show us the depth of their bond.
• Zemo's true motivation for why he did what he did is sad in its own way, even if it doesn't justify his actions. He lost his father, wife, and son during the Battle of Sokovia, and is vengeful towards the Avengers, whom he holds responsible. The cellphone message he had been listening to throughout the movie is revealed as the last message he received from his family, right before their death. When he finally accomplishes his goal of driving the Avengers apart, he listens to it one last time before deleting it and, believing he has nothing left to live for, prepares to commit suicide. Listening to his story makes T'Challa have a Heel Realization that the whole Civil War conflict happened because of the endless Cycle of Revenge between several characters, from Zemo's family being accidentally killed by the Avengers, T'Challa's father being killed by Zemo which he mistakenly believed to be the work of the Winter Soldier, to the brainwashed Winter Soldier killing Tony's parents. When T'Challa confronts him over the death of his father, he wasn't the most angry about the fact that Zemo killed his father, but the fact that Zemo nearly caused him to kill an innocent man. Even before hearing Zemo's story, he realized that his desire for revenge was destroying him and likely would go against anything his father would have wanted. Eventually, T'Challa overcomes his thirst to avenge his father's death and saves Zemo from killing himself, and he seeks to atone for his mistakes by harboring Bucky in Wakanda at the end.
  • When Zemo is finally confronted by the heroes and they discover he's a Sokovian.
    Steve: You lost someone.
    Zemo: I lost everyone.
• Bucky isn't sure he's worth Steve going against Tony and the others. Steve responds by assuring Bucky that all the bad things he did as the Winter Soldier are not his fault because he didn't have a choice. What makes this scene is Bucky still refusing to absolve himself of the blame and Steve being at a loss for words.
  Steve: What you did all those years, it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice.
  Bucky: I know. [pause] But I did it.
• When Tony is talking to Peter Parker, Peter conveys exactly why he's fighting crime by saying that he considers it being your fault if bad things happen because you didn't use your powers. He's clearly talking about the death of his Uncle Ben and anyone watching can tell that it affected him greatly.
  Peter: 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 then looks away because he knows exactly what Peter is talking about. And then you remember that Peter has only had his powers for six months and the pain of losing his uncle is still very fresh.
  • It's not outright stated (probably because of licensing issues), but it's implied here that the circumstances surrounding Ben's death aren't much different and were perhaps identical to the familiar one portrayed in the other two recent movie continuities. And this becomes even more of a bummer when one considers that this is not only a somewhat younger Peter than portrayed in either of those two films but (if his Aunt May's age is anything to go by) Uncle Ben was likely significantly younger than his other portrayals as well. He died with what one must only assume was several decades of life still ahead of him, which makes it all the more tragic.
  • His name is never said out loud, but you can clearly hear Peter, when asked why he does what he does, immediately stammer three syllables: "Uh-kuh-buh", the three syllables for "Uncle Ben."
• What happens to Rhodey is another event that hits Tony really hard. Rhodey crashes down in his War Machine suit and suffers a severe spinal injury; he may never be able to walk again without the harness Tony makes for him at the end. What's worse is that Rhodey was accidentally hit by one of their allies, Vision, who originally was J.A.R.V.I.S., one of Tony's creations. All of this probably furthers Tony's sense of guilt and self-loathing.
  • Later, we see Tony blaming Falcon for Rhodey's fall, even though Sam gave up his chance to escape to try and save him. Tony was previously the poster child for It's All My Fault due to his ego and control issues, but now he's starting to slip into Never My Fault.
  • We never see Sam blame Tony for lashing out. He clearly feels responsible for Rhodey. Even after Rhodey is confirmed alive by F.R.I.D.A.Y., Falcon sticks around long enough to say "sorry".
  • To add a further layer of sadness, despite what has happened to him, Rhodey is serene because he's still convinced he was in the right. It's also heartwarming, but with Tony and Vision certainly dubious whether their choices during the movie were worth the outcome, it may be a further twisting of the knife. Furthermore, we don't know if Rhodey is sincere, or if it's just a facade to make Tony not feel guilty.
  • It's a tearjerker for Sam as well when one remembers how in Winter Soldier, he described the traumatizing event that contributed to him leaving active duty and drove him to become a counselor to other vets with PTSD: How he was helpless to save his close friend Riley who was shot out of the sky. "Nothing I could do. It's like I was up there just to watch." The fact that Sam was the intended target of the blast that took out Rhodes makes it even worse.
  • When Tony later visits him after he's put behind bars, the first thing Sam says is "How's Rhodey?"
  • Though Sam shares the blame with Tony for what happens, Clint is not too happy about it. When Stark walks away after their conversation, Clint slams the bars and snarks "you better watch your back with this guy. There's a chance he's gonna break it!"
    • Clint unfortunately has only too good a reason for his outburst - Tony has just casually revealed the existence of his family (till then a secret kept even from SHIELD) to anyone listening, giving Ross further leverage to use against Team Cap and possibly putting them in lethal danger if any of Clint's many enemies found out. Worse, Tony doesn't even seem to have realized what he has just done, throwing out the reference to a family as a casual taunt.
• The ending in general. Despite the uplifting tone, Steve and the other New Avengers are now fugitives, his friendship with Tony is severed (although his message at the end leaves hope for reconciliation), Bucky feels compelled to go back into stasis until a cure can be found for his brainwashing and, believing himself no longer worthy of the mantle of Captain America, Steve decides to leave his shield behind. For the time being, the Avengers as we've known them for the past several years are no more.
  • Driven home by Everett Ross's dialogue with Zemo at the end:
    Everett Ross: So how does it feel? To spend all that time, all that effort, and to see it fail so spectacularly?
    Zemo: Did it?
  • If you really think about it, since Steve admitted Tony was the only one suited to lead the Avengers, that technically means that Tony, Rhodey, and Vision are the only real Avengers left on Earth as Steve's side are vigilantes, T'Challa is currently caring for one of them, and Natasha allowed Steve and Bucky to escape, technically making her a vigilante as well. The other member of Team Iron Man, Peter Parker, isn't even an Avenger yet, Thor has his own issues on Asgard, and the Hulk at this point is lord knows where. For the longest while, three Avengers remained and all of them had to do with Tony in some way. Really makes you think, doesn't it?
• The first time we see Tony in the film, he's showing a virtual recreation of a scene from his own memories — the last time he saw his parents before they died. It shows that Tony greatly regrets how distant his relationship with his parents was and that he never told them he loved them before they left. In previous films, Tony has been rather flippant about his bad relationship with his father, but here we get to see that it had a lasting impact on him.
  • Right after this, Tony encounters a woman near the elevator, who then angrily (and partially misguidedly) blames him for the death of her son in Sokovia. It's short, but Tony's expression shows that the guilt will never leave him.
• The Happy Ending Override that's ensued for several of the heroes as a result of the events of the film.
  • Hawkeye at the end of Age of Ultron had finally managed to retire and gain a chance to live a peaceful life with his family, until he leaves retirement to help Cap. He even mentions when he shows up first that he disappointed his kids by calling off a water skiing trip to help Cap. He ends up in jail before the day is over, and ends the film as an international fugitive and likely cut off or unable to contact his family in case they get put in danger as well. When Tony arrives at the prison, Hawkeye is the only one of the inmates to loudly mock and chastise him for what he's done, and the effect of watching that is brutal.
  • Wanda got a second chance after Age of Ultron by becoming an Avenger and even getting a Relationship Upgrade of sorts with Vision. The incident in Lagos ends up making her a pariah due to her powers, her relationship with Vision has suffered blows due to the conflict and like Clint, she is forced to go on the run after Cap breaks his teammates out. To add to this, when you look at the events, she genuinely had no choice that wouldn't have ended badly. Had she not thrown Crossbones into the air, he'd have exploded with her, Cap, and an entire crowd of innocent civilians in the blast zone when her shield failed. No matter what she did at that point, people would have died, and she did the only thing she could think of at the time.
  • Scott at the end of Ant-Man had managed to put his life of crime behind him, reconcile with his ex-wife and her husband while getting together with Hope, prove himself a hero to his beloved daughter, and was practically giddy at getting to join the Avengers. Like the other members of Team Cap, he is now a fugitive once again and cut off from his friends and family after breaking out of the Raft. There are seemingly no strings Paxton, Luis or, Hank can pull to help him.
  • At the end of The Avengers, Tony was the most emotionally stable and optimistic that we'd ever seen him. 4 years later, his best friend is paralyzed, his other best friend is estranged and on the run, his science bro is nowhere to be found, the family he worked so hard to protect and keep together is fractured, and Pepper, his emotional cornerstone throughout the past 8 years, is gone too. Most of it was caused indirectly by his own decisions.
  • At the end of Age of Ultron, Vision had been accepted by the Avengers and had a new friendship with Wanda that had the chance to evolve into something else. By the end of the film, his relationship with Wanda is badly damaged, she is on the run so he doesn't know where she is or if she's safe, he's dealing with the aftermath of having accidentally crippled Rhodey, and he and Tony are the only active Avengers left, and Tony's emotional health is in serious question. Worst of all, what Vision doesn't know is that there is an alien warlord coming to rip out the thing that gave him life, and Vision is essentially on his own.
  • The ending of Age Of Ultron was explicitly about the Avengers proving themselves heroes and avoiding civilian casualties in the final battle and were apparently successful while evacuating Sokovia on the helicarrier. This film shows that they failed and there was massive collateral damage going on just off-screen.
• When Zemo starts brainwashing Bucky, Bucky screaming and pleading at him to stop as Zemo recites Bucky's string of trigger words shows just how much Bucky wants to leave his bloody past behind him. Sadly, Zemo turns Bucky into a killing machine once again. Afterwards, he doesn't even remember what he did. He just resigns himself to the fact that he hurt people and just sees himself as a monster.
  • The string of words themselves. Some of the words are seemingly random code, but the final phrase in the sequence is "freight car". One can't help but think that a freight car was where Bucky "died" (when he was thrown from it into the ravine) and where the Winter Soldier was born.
  • All the words could have meaning, depending on your interpretation: Longing, for peace or for the past Bucky had with Steve. Rusted, for his old identity, especially considering that his new one sports a metal arm — or possibly for his combat skills, which are supernaturally perfect even after being frozen when they should have degraded some. Seventeen, as Bucky was born in 1917. Daybreak, which was when Captain America returned to camp with the prisoners of war, among them Bucky. Furnace, which could allude to World War II as a whole, where thousands of prisoners of the Nazis were cremated after being gassed. Nine, part of Bucky's birth year. Benign, what Bucky is when his Winter Soldier programming isn't active, or when he's frozen. Homecoming, the memory of when Captain America saved Bucky and brought him back to safety. One, part of Bucky's birth year, and also how (like how Captain America was the first Avenger) Bucky became the first Winter Soldier. Freight car, where Bucky "died" and the Winter Soldier was born. By saying the "magic words", a person is effectively erasing Bucky's past from his mind and making room only for the blank slate of the Winter Soldier.
  • Also, take a look at Bucky's face when Zemo first pulls out the book containing the trigger words. You can see the moment he recognises what that book is and realises what's about to happen.
• If you pay attention to the scene in Wanda's room, you can see that she has a shrine to her dead brother by her bedside, including pictures of him as a kid. Despite becoming an Avenger and finding solace over the experiments done to her and the destruction of her homeland, Wanda still mourns the loss of her twin brother in battle.
• As the third Captain America film, Civil War brings the Trauma Conga Line that is the life of Steve Rogers full circle. He becomes the perfect soldier, meets the woman of his dreams, and fights alongside boon companions in the fight against evil. Then he ends up hurled forward in time to a world he barely recognizes and in which everyone he's ever known and cared for is dead or haunted and senile. He joins S.H.I.E.L.D., the creation of his lost love Peggy Carter and his friend Howard Stark, only to find HYDRA has corrupted it from within, leaving him no choice but to destroy his friends' legacy. On top of that, he finds out his best friend has become a mindless automaton in the service of HYDRA. On top of that, the Avengers, the only thing resembling a family he has left, is torn apart both by Tony's guilt in conjunction with Steve's own inability to compromise(then again, how can one expect a WWII soldier to agree to a law that allows a certain group of people to be denied their human rights - which, we see, is exactly what happens on the Raft) and his Undying Loyalty to his best friend, the only person he has left with ties to the world he once knew. He saves his old friend, but only after placing his new ones in jeopardy and making the majority of them criminals. Even after saving Bucky, Bucky chooses to go back into cryogenic suspension in Wakanda until the HYDRA conditioning can be removed from his mind, and while Steve has freed those who aided him, they're still on the run from justice due to the lengths he went to. And to think, there's still Avengers: Infinity War to think about...
• At first glance, Bucky's first non-flashback scene in the movie — buying plums — is both funny and tender. Do a quick Google search, however, and discover that one of the apparent health benefits of plums is to help with memory loss.
  • The scene also establishes that the metal arm has feeling - he uses it to check the plums gently - which means he must have been in agony when Tony blasted it off.
  • Also, up until now, Bucky's metal arm has mostly been used for violence and death. Now though, he's gently checking plums with it, showing that both it and he are capable of good things, rather than violence.
• Think about what is going on from Peter's point of view, Tony Stark, a billionaire genius, who you idolize, approaches you and asks you to join him in his battle against Captain America. He tells you that Captain America is wrong, but thinks he's right, about a problem Peter has never heard of. He is fighting in a war against people he probably idolizes, for a cause he doesn't know about.
  • At the end of the fight, when Peter's on the ground and Tony comes to check on him, Peter swings out at Tony twice even though Tony's unmasked because he's expecting an attack.
  • Tony approaching Peter after the battle. It's clear he had a lot of confidence in the young teen and that's why he sought him out, but then the fight is over and Peter's not moving. He springs up when Tony approaches, but for just a moment, you can see the fear in Tony's face that the kid has been very hurt, if not dead. It's easy to understand where his reluctance to enlist Peter in Homecoming comes from.
• At first glance, people may think that Cap was selfish in putting together a team to fight at the airport and then letting them get captured; people also find it hard to understand why the heroes would follow Cap so blindly. But if you think about it, none of them knew that would happen. Cap contacted them because of the potential threat of the other Winter Soldiers, especially when he heard (and misinterpreted) Zemo's plan to "see an empire fall". Team Cap was willing to go against the law all so that such a threat could be stopped, yet they were thrown in jail for simply trying to protect the world from devastation.
  • We also see one of the main failures of the Accords - Ross makes no attempt to confirm or disprove the Winter Soldier threat, so if Zemo had actually intended to carry out his threat and Team Cap were all arrested, the world might well have been doomed.
• When Tony is stumblingly trying to tell Steve that he and Pepper have broken up, Steve incorrectly guesses that they're expecting a baby. What makes this hurt is that the movie pauses just long enough for the audience to realize how much sense this makes and that this explains everything — Pepper's public absences, Tony being preoccupied and worried, etc. One may have even guessed the truth early on and then be misled just long enough that Tony's confession still catches you off-guard. What Mood Whiplash.
  • Made worse by just how happy for Tony Steve looks at the prospect of he and Pepper expecting.
• When Steve finds Bucky in Bucharest and almost everything Bucky says is about how completely resigned he is to being treated like a monster, and that he thinks this is perfectly reasonable. Steve tells him the encroaching UN forces have orders to shoot him on sight? A matter-of-fact nod, and "That's smart. Good strategy." Steve trying to convince him it doesn't have to end in a fight? "It always ends in a fight." Whatever happened in the last two years, it made him not just decide but totally accept that this is how his life is going to be, forever, to the point where he doesn't see any point in trying to clear his name or let the public know about the brainwashing or even contact his friend. And judging by the way first T'Challa goes ballistic over a crime with a single piece of blurry evidence against him, and then Tony goes ballistic over a crime he knows he didn't choose to commit, he's probably not wrong. He looks downright happy at the end to be spending at least the next few years effectively dead.
  • Additional Word of God details make this worse. The art book explains that Bucky chose his apartment in Bucharest because it was easily defensible and offered a lot of opportunities for escape. Sebastian Stan, meanwhile, described Bucky's notebooks as being a way of coping with his isolation and recording recovered memories, just in case something happened to make him forget again. Imagine spending two years constantly on the alert and on the run from people who either want you dead or want to use you as a weapon, all while slowly recovering over seventy years of lost memories (most of which involve doing horrible things to people against your will) that you're not entirely sure you can trust and could lose again at any time. Some have theorized that Bucky's decision to go back under at the end of the movie is just as much about wanting to rest and be safe as it is about not wanting to hurt anyone else.
• Midway through the film's second act, Tony seems to have finally talked Steve around to his way of thinking. Steve is literally seconds away from signing the Accords, the audience thinks there might finally be some reconciliation... and then Tony lets slip that he has Wanda under house arrest. It all goes downhill from there until Tony and Steve are shouting and nearly to the point of trading blows before Steve throws his pen (one of a historic pair that Tony brought for the occasion) on the table and walks out in disgust. The Dramatic Irony of Steve's last line on his way out the door just makes it worse.
  Steve: Wouldn't want to break up the set.
• According to the audio commentary, to make the final fight even more tragic, the filmmakers revealed that Tony wasn't just trying to kill Bucky to avenge his parents' murder but also to hurt Steve for keeping the truth from him. Tony knew how much Bucky's death would hurt him, but he also wanted to do so with his hands, which is why Tony makes little effort to use his weapons to kill Bucky later in the fight and tries to beat him to death. Imagine if Tony had managed to incapacitate Steve and Steve was helpless as Tony killed Bucky with his hands. Steve no doubt would've flashed back to his failure to save Bucky in the Alps back in 1945. Imagine what that would've done to him.
  • That puts an extremely disturbing twist on Tony's character. Wanting to kill your parents' murderer - even if he wasn't responsible for his actions - might be understood. Wanting to murder your friend's best friend - the only person he really has left from the world that was taken from him - just because he chose to keep a secret?
• The look on Wanda's face when Tony describes how Charlie Spencer died in Sokovia. To her, his death is just as much her fault as Tony's.Plus, her own brother - another kid who just wanted to make the world a better place - died there too. She might well have been flashing back to it.

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