Both have come a long way, and after over a dozen films have reached a crossroads. How did we get here?
First, let's look at The Star Spangled Man with The Plan, and go to the very beginning, with Captain America: The First Avenger. When we first meet Steve Rogers, he's scrawny, insignificant, and desperate to join the war effort. When Dr. Abraham Erksine (Stanley Tucci) asks him why he's so set on becoming a solider, he tells him, "I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from." He tells his best friend Bucky (Sebastian Stan), "There are men laying down their lives. I got no right to do any less than them."
Steve Rogers, right from the get-go, is presented to us as selfless, virtuous man. He is good because it's the right thing to do. Now, Captain America is my favorite superhero, but if I may, let's scratch beneath the surface here.
He's not just looking to do what's right for his country...he's looking for a sense of belonging, of purpose. There are subtle hints throughout the MCU, that Steve is a bit of a tragic character. As Loki calls him in The Avengers, "A man out of time." A deleted scene showcases Steve struggling adjust to modern times. However, Steve's lack of belonging begins long before the events of The Avengers.
In The First Avenger, Steve tells Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) that not many women are lining up to dance with a guy like him. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he tells Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) that "even when I had nothing I had Bucky." This is a lonely guy, with, no romantic prospects, and only one real friend. Both his parents are dead, as we learn in flashbacks in Winter Soldier, so he has no family either. Holy cow, someone give this guy a hug.
When Steve is given his super-soldier makeover in The First Avenger, he's given an opportunity to find all these things. He finds romance with Peggy Carter. He gains friends, brother-in-arms, not just with Bucky, but with his Howling Commandos. More so, he has a purpose...and just like that, he loses it all. Steve makes the grand sacrifice, crash lands his plane into the sea, and wakes up 70 years later. Everything he desperately wanted in life is now gone.
It's lightly touched on The Avengers, and more so in The Winter Soldier, that Steve is trying to reclaim what he's lost when he went in the ice. As Peggy tells him though, the world has changed, "and the best that we can do, is to start over." So, he starts over. He joins with SHIELD, The Avengers, and jumps back onto the battlefield. But where Steve is a selfless soldier, conforming to a regime, there's someone else who's the complete opposite.
Yes that individual is Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man, who we'll talk about more in part 2, but for now I'll suggest that Steve sees Tony as a threat to everything he believes in as a soldier, and a person. Steve is humble and honest. Tony is selfish and self-absorbed. Steve calls him out on his behavior several times in The Avengers, and here is the start of their conflict which will boil over for many films to come.
There's one sequence in The Avengers I do want to touch on. Tony suspects Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is hiding something within SHIELD, and starts to dig through encrypted files. Steve tells him to stop being such a rebel and follow orders. After a brief confrontation, Steve decides to investigate for himself, which is when he discovers Phase Two (No not Iron Man 3 through Ant Man), SHIELD's plan to use the Tesseract to make weapons to combat threats from other worlds. Confirming his polar opposite's suspicions, this is where Steve's distrust of Fury & SHIELD begin, which will grow further in The Winter Soldier.
The battlefield is not what Steve remembers it, and I'm not just talking about the difference between Nazis and the Chiutari. Everything isn't in black and white anymore. The lines of good and bad are blurred, which he learns working with Black Widow and Nick Fury in SHIELD. He constantly disagrees with their actions, claiming they are not what make an army or a team. It doesn't take long for him to realize that the likes of Widow & Fury are the least of his troubles, when Hydra is revealed to have secretly infiltrated SHIELD, years after his disappearance.
So after that doozy of a revelation, Steve has a change of heart. He no longer wants to blindly report to faceless government regimes with hidden agendas, which is when The Avengers become an organization independent of SHIELD, as we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron, with both him and Tony as co-leaders (Yeah. That'll go over well.)
Well it doesn't take long for Steve to realize that Tony has hidden agendas all his own, when his secret plans with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to create Ultron (James Spader) backfire horribly, and come to the light of the rest of The Avengers. Steve's naturally not pleased at all by this, and claims Tony's actions would hurt the team. Tony counters that his actions would end the team, asking Steve, "isn't that the why we fight? So we can end the fight, and go home??"
Steve counters with, "Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts innocent people die. Every time." The line implies that Steve believes their fight is not yet finished, or on a personal level, that his fight is not yet finished.
Earlier in the film, in his illusion created by Scarlet Witch, Steve is back in the days of World War II. It's a celebration, supposedly after the Allies have won. Peggy appears to him, saying "The war is over Steve. We can go home." Suddenly, Steve is alone in the empty dance hall. He can't go home. Not the home he knows. It's gone, a remnant of a time period long ago.
Peggy's words echo in his mind. After Thor (Chris Hemsworth) leaves the Hawkeye Family Barn. He turns to go back inside, and you hear her "We can go home" replay...and Steve stands there, staring through the doorway. Almost as if he can't cross the threshold...as if he can't go home.
So it's no surprise that when Tony says "so we can go home?" Steve snaps both on the inside, and on the outside tearing a block of wood in half. Home for Tony is a nice house in Malibu with Pepper. Home for Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is the farm with his wife and kids. What's home for Steve now? He has none of that. The fight can't end, because once the mission is accomplished, he'll have nothing.
By the end of Age of Ultron, that may not matter anymore. He tells Tony that the version of himself that wanted a stable family life may not exist anymore. He glances over the new Avengers Headquarters, with new recruits (or "soldiers" we'll call them for sense of parallels) running about, and tells Tony, "He's home." Steve has found home, by making his life as a solider, a hero, his home life. Steve's position as an Avenger suddenly carries a lot more personal weight.
In a deleted scene from Age of Ultron, Steve tells Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) that if Ultron was doing what he's supposed to, he'd hang up his shield. Hill questions his words, to which Steve has no response. He know he can't give up his position as an Avenger, because it's all he's got, and by the end of the film, he's going to make the most of it.
Which finally brings us to Civil War, where everything Steve has worked so hard to achieve is being threatened once more. Government agendas poise to overtake him once more, and take everything away from him, including literally the last bit of his old life, Bucky. Captain America once again must fight to preserve his purpose and his identity, which will bring him into direct conflict with Iron Man.
For a look at Tony Stark's side of the coin, stay tuned for part 2.
