There’s a civil war coming….

to the movies….

Marvel films has another well-deserved smash with Avengers: Age of Ultron, the squeal to 2012’s Avengers. While the film does not contain the explicit libertarian message of last year’s Captain America Winter Soldier, it does touch on some issues of interest to Ron Paul supporters.

Ultron, the film’s title character and villain,is a powerful artificial intelligence system created by Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) and Bruce Banner (a.k.a. The Hulk) to put a “suit of armor around the world,” thus guaranteeing world peace. The plan backfires as Ultron decides that the only way to achieve world peace is to destroy humanity…..in other words Ultron is a neocon.

As stated above the move mostly stays away from directly addressing  larger philosophical or political questions raised by Ultron’s creation. One exception is an  exchange between Tony Stark and Steve ‘Captain America” Rogers. Stark tries to justify his creation of  Ultron  as fulfilling the team’s mission to   “…. end the fight, so we can go home.” Rogers (channeling Ron Paul) responds by pointing out that “Every time someone tries to win a war  before it start, innocent people die.”

That scene may be setting up the next year’s Captain America 3: Civil War, a movie that will definitely be of interest to libertarians. Civil War was a popular comic series in 2006. In the comics, a group of amateur  super heroes/realty TV star’s incompetence  cause a school bus to explode. The resulting backlash leads to the passage of a “Superhero Registration Act.”  As the name suggests, this act requires all superheroes to register with the government, revel their secret identities, and only operate under government supervision.

Tony Stark uses his wealth and influence to help pass the bill, and he assists in is implementation. Steve Rogers leads the opposition to this bill as he sees it as opposed to everything he has dedicated his life to fighting. So the Superhero Registration Act is literally anti (Captain) America.

When Civil War was first released it was seen an analogy about the then-growing surveillance state.  It can also be seen as reflecting the debates over gun registration and the military draft. Today, the Civil War plot line may also reflect the proposal to nationalize local police forces in order to deal with the problems of police militarization which were created by excessive federal involvement in local law enforcement. If that strikes you as a stupid, dangerous and unconstitutional idea you are on the right side.