Will Captain America: Civil War just be more men making sad puppy faces at each other?

So. The first trailer for Captain America: Civil War is here. Allegiances are being declared: lines drawn between Team Captain and Team Stark. The word Bucky is trending which, as someone from Devon, gives me the nagging feeling we should be talking about a tonic wine sent in weaponised quantities to Scotland, to pacify Glaswegians. The Marvel hype engine is whirring to life again, although it's barely had time to be idle.

Civil War is the first in the next big fleet of Marvel films known collectively as Phase Three, almost as if they don't care that easy comparisons can be made to supervillain plots – Phases Four and Five will presumably involve crushing our spirits under the terrible weight of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and taking over the world's unresisting governments (Robert Downey, Jr.'s face booming totalitarian orders from the ad boards in Piccadilly Circus and Times Square). It's the thirteenth film accepted as part of the MCU, and the third outing for good ol' Captain America. I like Marvel. I should be excited.

Before we continue I'd like to underscore what you just read: I like Marvel. I did my university dissertation on the use of cinematic realism in the first Captain America and Thor films (there wasn't much; it was a shit dissertation). I've read the comics, and seen all the films at the cinema – I even saw some of them in 3D, much like a fool would – and you can believe me when I say that I have come to the following conclusion earnestly:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier wasn't good. I'm not saying it was an unrelentingly terrible film, it was just a bit bollocks (and I believe a case can be made that a lot of the recent MCU films were. Even Avengers: Age of Ultron had a bit of a teenage boy's unwashed pants smell about it). The biggest takeaway from it is that there's only so much mileage in a pair of men making sad puppy faces whilst shellacking each other.

You can almost see the hands of executives lazily clicking pieces into place over the course of the film, readying everything for Phase 3 to begin: "Yes, let's increase Cap's mistrust of his own side by, say, 30%, make Bucky a more sympathetic character and push government agencies towards knee jerk reactionism... Wendy! Bring us more cuban cigars and cocaine; we're on a fucking roll here!" The Winter Soldier doesn't stand on its own, it's propping up more of the MCU, which is starting to look like a house of cards that's wider at the top than it is at the bottom, and is a cautionary tale about all your film titles needing colons.

I'd have probably gotten over it if the tonal shift hadn't been so dramatic.The Winter Soldier felt like someone had decided the MCU needed repositioning from 'heroes and villains and powers, oh my!' closer to 'gritty thriller suffused with realism', but the MCU film immediately preceding The Winter Soldier was Thor: The Dark World, featuring alien albino elves and Stellan Skarsgård's bare arse. That's not even taking into account Captain America's own origin story, an unapologetically bombastic film from the same director that brought us that masterpiece of awful The Wolfman in 2010. (Hugo Weaving, who always knows exactly what type of film he's in, gives wonderful performances in both, his characters existing on a diet of scenery alone.)

You might already be forming the argument that it's unfair to judge The Winter Soldier in the context of other completely different films, and not on its own merit, but the point of the MCU's very existence is to link all the films together so they have a shared continuity, and so idiots like me will buy tickets to all of them and wear a fucking Christmas t-shirt featuring a tree made out of small Hulk heads. It really does exist.

Not that The Winter Soldier performs particularly well by itself anyway. It strives to be a grown up film – a tense spy thriller, almost – but the balance is off. It can't afford to make the choices that go with that in case Kevin Feige loses his shit, so it still has to have some superhero stuff and the result is neither one thing nor the other. It's a spy thriller with no high stakes because we know Captain America will make it through his own film; a superhero movie where the hero spends most of his time out of uniform. It's complex but lacking substance, dramatic but not memorable, and it's over two hours long. Two fucking hours!

Now Civil War is getting closer, and I'm worried. In the comics Civil War is a huge event – a world changing event, in fact. The battles are fought in the open. At one point heroes literally fall from the sky, raining down on a city in a precipitation even weirder than anything The Weather Girls imagined. Buildings are levelled, villains are drafted in and both sides become morally ambiguous. There are deaths, betrayals, and double-crossings, but it's thrilling rather than a thriller. There's an an exploration of what heroism should be, sure, but still superheroism, with all the bright colours and pseudo-science-magic-bullshit that comes with that.

Captain America: Civil War needs that too. It needs to go back to the bombast, a regretful lover that tried something new but realised they weren't cut out for the darker stuff yet. It's obvious that the film can't follow the comic exactly, but it can capture the same spirit if it tries.

It needs to leave out the grittiness. If you ordered a big sundae and it came with grit delicately sprinkled on top of the squirty cream what would you do? You'd spit at the waiter and send it back, because it's neither the time nor place for grit. Captain Steve Rogers can't be something he's not, so let him be the tower of apple pie flavoured ice cream he is: over the top, enjoyable, and, if we're honest, uncomplicated. Let Phase Three open with a bang, not a whimper.

But the first trailer looks like a pair of men making sad puppy faces whilst shellacking each other. We already know how that goes.