![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOr, Return of the First Avenger, as it's called in my part of the world. In English, I kid you not. At a guess, the change of title is caused by the raging popularity the US currently enjoys over here and the assumptions people tend to make about superheroes called "Captain America". Which is a shame, in a way, because this film happens to be the first addressing the decade-and-more trade off between liberty and "safety", the instrumentalization of fear, the way the various secrent agencies have run completely amuck in their megalomania head on. That's right. This comic hero block buster is a spy thriller worthy of the 1970s classics of the genre, pitch black in its view of what has become of us - and I'm saying "us" because that trade off wasn't limited to the US (while Germany doesn't have a camp in Guantanomo, we outsourced people to be tortured by the CIA; shame on us, and all the power to the one who is currently sueing because of that) - and yet also not cynical; it has a belief in the capacity of humans (and not just those who are in the title credits) for decency that fits its main character, even and especially under pressure. Oh, and it also happens to change the status quo of the cinematic Marvelverse in more than one instance, and in one particular regard breathtakingly so. It's definitely the best of the Phase II films so far (and I'm saying this as someone who loved Iron Man 3 and enjoyed Thor II, and who also thought that Captain America, while enjoyable in its own right, was the weakest of the Phase I origin movies).
Now, considering that it is a thriller with twists and turns (some predictable if you know the genre, some not), I would advise you to watch it unspoiled. Everything below the cut will be spoilery in the extreme because I do want to talk about details. Above cut, let me just add one more thing: pre-movie, one reason why I was looking forward to the film was that the later trailers made it look as if Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff would be an important supporting character. In fact, as it turns out, she's basically the second lead, and until we finally get a Black Widow movie, this is the next best thing, and a very fine thing it is, too. If you're familiar with her comicverse connection to the person mentioned in the original title, this is actually not what her role is about in the movie and not why she's so important in it. The film also settles something fans have been wondering, i.e. whether or not movieverse Natasha would, like her comicverse counterpart, herself be a relic of the Cold War, kept young via serums etc.; we get a definite year of birth for her (1984 - of course it was!), which means her biological age is just what it looks like, which is useful fanfiction information to have. :)
Having read Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier comic arc ages ago (and not since then, so my memories are a bit vague), here's what I expected this movie to be about: Steve meeting his brainwashed bff of yesteryear, Bucky, early in the film, and spending the rest of the movie chasing after him to deprogram him. Which turned out not to be the case. Steve doesn't clue into the fact that the Winter Soldier is Bucky until the last third of the film, and while Steve's attempt to keep Bucky alive make for a part of the emotional punch of the big showdown, Bucky Barnes is actually not as important a character in this particular story as his presence in the title would let one assume. (Also, with the exception of a new flashback to ye olde pre serum days, he spends most of his screentime in brainwashed!assassin mode, which means Stebastian Stan doesn't do the teary eyed stare he's famous for, he does the obsessed blank stare instead. He's a formidable weapon for the villains, but he's not yet a character who does things on his own, with one obvious exception in the finale.) With more accuracy, this film could be called: Captain America: SHIELD.
I started to sit straighter in the scene early in the movie where Nick Fury shows the superdrones (that's what they are, with some fancy fantasy explanations) to Steve and Steve points out this means "we" are putting guns to everyone's heads and that this is not liberty, this is rule by fear. It's important that he says this to Nick Fury, because Nick Fury is not a villain in this movie. He remains a marvellously ambiguous character. (Btw, the only thing I was spoiled for re: this film because of one stupid review was that he'd die, and I'm happy to report he "dies" the way Nick Fury in all his incarnations tends to in the Marvelverse, to wit, he fakes his death, and no, this isn't just revealed at the end but much earlier; Nick Fury is an important supporting character.) But the point made here isn't that bad guys shouldn't have that power, but that no one should have. The big, big twist of this film - the revelation that SHIELD has been infiltrated by Hydra from practically the get go, manufacturing both crisis and solutions through the decades and that way taking more and more power - is a Marvelverse event, yes, but it's also a razorsharp comment on post 9/11 politics until the present day. While walking home from the cinema, it occured to me that basically the revelation was "SHIELD is SD-6 but Fury doesn't know he's Sloane until he almost gets assassinated when starting to figure it out", but this Alias comparison also shows a key difference. Alias, which in its pilot let its heroine learn that the ruthless branch of the CIA she's working for, SD-6, isn't actually CIA but a part of a villainous network, though only some of the employees are aware of this while the rest thinks they are actually CIA, portrayed the "real" CIA as a virtuous organiation, with the occasional bad apple. By contrast, Captain America II doesn't let Steve Rogers and friends save the day via deactivating the evil weapons du jour, which is what I had expected, but lets Steve Rogers insist to Fury that SHIELD, as a whole, has to go. It's as hardcore a rejection as I can imagine of the "just a few bad apples" mantra we in real life have been hearing about a great deal of organizations whenever some news about their awful practices made it into the headlines. And the film goes through with this. It differentiates between individuals - Natasha, Fury, Maria Hill as well as new character Sharon Carter/Agent 13 and an unnamed guy who is the star of my favourite moment in the film, more about that in a second - who are sympathetic and have positive goals - and the fact that the organization per se has been so thoroughly corrupted that you can't keep it going by just expelling a few bad guys. And so by the end of the movie, there is no more SHIELD. Also, there has been the whistleblowing to end all whisteblowing this side of Edward Snowden, as not solely the Hydra stuff but EVERYTHING is put online and revealed to the public at large as a part of the big showdown, the goal of which, as mentioned, isn't just "stop the bad guys-deactivate the weapons" but "end the ruthlessly data collecting and individual rights disregarding super organisation, no matter who heads it". Wow.
Did I mention this entire movie is set in Washington, D.C.?
That moment: comes after Steve has first made the "you've all been infiltrated, look what you're doing" news in the Washington SHIELD building public, and a nameless extra agent is ordered to proceed with launching the start of the super drones. Which this guy, visibly afraid and not with the protection of being a comicverse character, refuses to do, at gun point. I love it when movies offer moments of what we call Zivilcourage in German and gives them to non-main characters, and the cinematic Marvelverse does this now and then (the old man in Stuttgart comes to mind); that it happens here is also thematically important, because as opposed to, say, a great deal of movies in any genre (including btw Cap I), where members of an organization if they aren't leads or important supporting folk tend to be portrayed as just blindly following orders, this movie offers breathing room for individual reactions. And as I said: this means it's not just tell but also show about its main character's belief in people.
Another thing, re: Steve Rogers: he himself of course is a counterpoint to the idea that being a good soldier means blindly following orders. He's comfortable working within the frame work of a team or organization, but he also never stops thinking about what he's doing, and why. The three dynamics the film explores with Steve are: with Natasha, with Nick Fury, and with Sam/Falcon. Sam, introduced in the MCU via this film, is a fellow veteran (if from another war) and part of a group of PTSD suffering veterans, and Steve relates to him on that level before they become comrades; with Nick Fury, it's an uneasy if fascinating relationship of respect and distrust (that Fury both has Steve's apartment bugged and sees him as the ultimate in trustworthiness is typical for that); but to me, the heart of the film is the partnership that develops between Steve and Natasha, which is one of those rare examples of a key m & f relationship in a blockbuster movie which isn't treated as a romantic storyline or written differently than it would have been if instead of Natasha a male character would be in her place. (Well, other than her doing that trusty stalwart of spy movies, a surprise kiss to hide her and Steve's face during a chase scene.) Natasha has the role of wry teasing cynic versus Steve's idealist early on, but first the faked death of Nick Fury (which she takes for the real thing, and btw, the way Natasha relates to Fury in general hasn't been anticipated in most/any of the fanfics I read - there isn't just standard respect-for-boss but a great deal of personal respect and emotion there) and then the SHIELD-has-been-corrupt-since-decades news are heavy blows, and her reaction to the later is a great callback to her red-in-my-ledger conversations in Avengers. Being part of SHIELD meant something to her, and if there is no difference between it and her earlier life, what was the point? And Steve's response, which isn't lecturing or anything like that but just very human, is lovely. As is their comraderie throughout.
Comicverse Natasha had a backstory with the Winter Soldier which was possible because she's decades older than she looks and a romance with him in present day until it got ended by editorial fiat and another brainwashing. Movieverse Natasha has fought him before this film on one occasion but shares no history with him, and other than fight scenes, no scenes in the present. Which I think was a good choice because Natasha already had the "a man I'm close to got brainwashed by villains" story in Avengers. Giving her here another one wouldn't have been nearly as compelling as the "what's really going on with the organization I'm part of, and what do I do now?" storyline she does get. (Not to mention that Steve's "Bucky?!?" recognition and then theYellow Crayon "I won't kill you, I'd rather have you kill me" scene were more effective than it would have been had they doubled this with Natasha.)
Speaking of comicverse liasons and their movieverse counterparts: Peggy Cartner - in her 90s - has a moving scene with Steve who comes to visit her, another thing I hadn't expected but which offers closure for their relationship in the previous movie. (It also confirms that she and Howard Stark together with a third party did co-found SHIELD post WWII; speaking of Howard, there's a blink-or-you-miss it revelation that the accident which killed him and his wife wasn't really an accident but engineered once Howard started to suspect what was up in a later scene.) If movieverse Sharon is related to her as comicverse Sharon was, this doesn't get mentioned, which is a relief, because dating daughters and granddaughters of your beloved never struck me as a good idea, frankly. There is no hint that she is. Movieverse Sharon has a minor part in this film but comes across as an amiable and competent agent who is also able to think for herself; she's the one who saves the earlier mentioned courageous order refusing agent from getting shot. Steve tries to flirt with her a bit when she's still undercover (btw, so much for the idea that the man can't talk to a woman without blushing which you can find in some fanfiction), but not after the reveal that she's SHIELD, and the film doesn't try to jumpstart a romance between them in addition to everything else going on, which, again, good choice. (And leaves the option for future developments in another movie.)
Our villains du jour (beyond organizations): Toby Jones makes a voiceover come back, but if one guy has claim to the chief baddie title, it's Alexander Pierce. His comicverse counterpart is Alexander Lushenko (Lushenko is the last name, right? It really HAS been ages since I read those comics), and again, making the movieverse version not Russian but American, and letting him be played by Robert Redford, makes for a very pointed updating. Spy thrillers and comicbook movies access current day paranoias, and Vladimir Putin not withstanding, no one is Cold War era like afraid of a Russian general. An American government official, on the other hand... and the Redford casting also works on two levels. He's played in two of the classic 1970s paranoid spy thrillers - "The Parallax Connection" and of course "All the President's Men" - and he started his acting career as the embodiment of wholesome all-American-ness. No moustache twirling here. Pierce's face-off with Nick Fury near the movie's climax also involves one of those "you made me and I made you" scenes Le Carré type of spy stories excel at, with Pierce pointing out that he couldn't have wished for a better head of SHIELD than Nick Fury "the most ruthless and unscrupulous man I know", who always gets the job done.
Lastly: the obligatory post-credit scene seems to be a lead into Avengers II: Age of Ultron, introduces a new villain (cue me rolling my eyes at the monocle, though I'm glad Thomas Kretschman has a Marvelverse job)... and Pietra and Wanda: Avengers Edition. We got our first look at the twins and as soon as I saw Wanda, looking very much like River Tam, it belatedly downed on me why Joss was so insistent on having the twins in the second Avengers movie despite the fact X-Men: Days of Future Past also wanted them. Of course he can't resist a superpowered madwoman with a brother who is obsessed with her.
Now, considering that it is a thriller with twists and turns (some predictable if you know the genre, some not), I would advise you to watch it unspoiled. Everything below the cut will be spoilery in the extreme because I do want to talk about details. Above cut, let me just add one more thing: pre-movie, one reason why I was looking forward to the film was that the later trailers made it look as if Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff would be an important supporting character. In fact, as it turns out, she's basically the second lead, and until we finally get a Black Widow movie, this is the next best thing, and a very fine thing it is, too. If you're familiar with her comicverse connection to the person mentioned in the original title, this is actually not what her role is about in the movie and not why she's so important in it. The film also settles something fans have been wondering, i.e. whether or not movieverse Natasha would, like her comicverse counterpart, herself be a relic of the Cold War, kept young via serums etc.; we get a definite year of birth for her (1984 - of course it was!), which means her biological age is just what it looks like, which is useful fanfiction information to have. :)
Having read Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier comic arc ages ago (and not since then, so my memories are a bit vague), here's what I expected this movie to be about: Steve meeting his brainwashed bff of yesteryear, Bucky, early in the film, and spending the rest of the movie chasing after him to deprogram him. Which turned out not to be the case. Steve doesn't clue into the fact that the Winter Soldier is Bucky until the last third of the film, and while Steve's attempt to keep Bucky alive make for a part of the emotional punch of the big showdown, Bucky Barnes is actually not as important a character in this particular story as his presence in the title would let one assume. (Also, with the exception of a new flashback to ye olde pre serum days, he spends most of his screentime in brainwashed!assassin mode, which means Stebastian Stan doesn't do the teary eyed stare he's famous for, he does the obsessed blank stare instead. He's a formidable weapon for the villains, but he's not yet a character who does things on his own, with one obvious exception in the finale.) With more accuracy, this film could be called: Captain America: SHIELD.
I started to sit straighter in the scene early in the movie where Nick Fury shows the superdrones (that's what they are, with some fancy fantasy explanations) to Steve and Steve points out this means "we" are putting guns to everyone's heads and that this is not liberty, this is rule by fear. It's important that he says this to Nick Fury, because Nick Fury is not a villain in this movie. He remains a marvellously ambiguous character. (Btw, the only thing I was spoiled for re: this film because of one stupid review was that he'd die, and I'm happy to report he "dies" the way Nick Fury in all his incarnations tends to in the Marvelverse, to wit, he fakes his death, and no, this isn't just revealed at the end but much earlier; Nick Fury is an important supporting character.) But the point made here isn't that bad guys shouldn't have that power, but that no one should have. The big, big twist of this film - the revelation that SHIELD has been infiltrated by Hydra from practically the get go, manufacturing both crisis and solutions through the decades and that way taking more and more power - is a Marvelverse event, yes, but it's also a razorsharp comment on post 9/11 politics until the present day. While walking home from the cinema, it occured to me that basically the revelation was "SHIELD is SD-6 but Fury doesn't know he's Sloane until he almost gets assassinated when starting to figure it out", but this Alias comparison also shows a key difference. Alias, which in its pilot let its heroine learn that the ruthless branch of the CIA she's working for, SD-6, isn't actually CIA but a part of a villainous network, though only some of the employees are aware of this while the rest thinks they are actually CIA, portrayed the "real" CIA as a virtuous organiation, with the occasional bad apple. By contrast, Captain America II doesn't let Steve Rogers and friends save the day via deactivating the evil weapons du jour, which is what I had expected, but lets Steve Rogers insist to Fury that SHIELD, as a whole, has to go. It's as hardcore a rejection as I can imagine of the "just a few bad apples" mantra we in real life have been hearing about a great deal of organizations whenever some news about their awful practices made it into the headlines. And the film goes through with this. It differentiates between individuals - Natasha, Fury, Maria Hill as well as new character Sharon Carter/Agent 13 and an unnamed guy who is the star of my favourite moment in the film, more about that in a second - who are sympathetic and have positive goals - and the fact that the organization per se has been so thoroughly corrupted that you can't keep it going by just expelling a few bad guys. And so by the end of the movie, there is no more SHIELD. Also, there has been the whistleblowing to end all whisteblowing this side of Edward Snowden, as not solely the Hydra stuff but EVERYTHING is put online and revealed to the public at large as a part of the big showdown, the goal of which, as mentioned, isn't just "stop the bad guys-deactivate the weapons" but "end the ruthlessly data collecting and individual rights disregarding super organisation, no matter who heads it". Wow.
Did I mention this entire movie is set in Washington, D.C.?
That moment: comes after Steve has first made the "you've all been infiltrated, look what you're doing" news in the Washington SHIELD building public, and a nameless extra agent is ordered to proceed with launching the start of the super drones. Which this guy, visibly afraid and not with the protection of being a comicverse character, refuses to do, at gun point. I love it when movies offer moments of what we call Zivilcourage in German and gives them to non-main characters, and the cinematic Marvelverse does this now and then (the old man in Stuttgart comes to mind); that it happens here is also thematically important, because as opposed to, say, a great deal of movies in any genre (including btw Cap I), where members of an organization if they aren't leads or important supporting folk tend to be portrayed as just blindly following orders, this movie offers breathing room for individual reactions. And as I said: this means it's not just tell but also show about its main character's belief in people.
Another thing, re: Steve Rogers: he himself of course is a counterpoint to the idea that being a good soldier means blindly following orders. He's comfortable working within the frame work of a team or organization, but he also never stops thinking about what he's doing, and why. The three dynamics the film explores with Steve are: with Natasha, with Nick Fury, and with Sam/Falcon. Sam, introduced in the MCU via this film, is a fellow veteran (if from another war) and part of a group of PTSD suffering veterans, and Steve relates to him on that level before they become comrades; with Nick Fury, it's an uneasy if fascinating relationship of respect and distrust (that Fury both has Steve's apartment bugged and sees him as the ultimate in trustworthiness is typical for that); but to me, the heart of the film is the partnership that develops between Steve and Natasha, which is one of those rare examples of a key m & f relationship in a blockbuster movie which isn't treated as a romantic storyline or written differently than it would have been if instead of Natasha a male character would be in her place. (Well, other than her doing that trusty stalwart of spy movies, a surprise kiss to hide her and Steve's face during a chase scene.) Natasha has the role of wry teasing cynic versus Steve's idealist early on, but first the faked death of Nick Fury (which she takes for the real thing, and btw, the way Natasha relates to Fury in general hasn't been anticipated in most/any of the fanfics I read - there isn't just standard respect-for-boss but a great deal of personal respect and emotion there) and then the SHIELD-has-been-corrupt-since-decades news are heavy blows, and her reaction to the later is a great callback to her red-in-my-ledger conversations in Avengers. Being part of SHIELD meant something to her, and if there is no difference between it and her earlier life, what was the point? And Steve's response, which isn't lecturing or anything like that but just very human, is lovely. As is their comraderie throughout.
Comicverse Natasha had a backstory with the Winter Soldier which was possible because she's decades older than she looks and a romance with him in present day until it got ended by editorial fiat and another brainwashing. Movieverse Natasha has fought him before this film on one occasion but shares no history with him, and other than fight scenes, no scenes in the present. Which I think was a good choice because Natasha already had the "a man I'm close to got brainwashed by villains" story in Avengers. Giving her here another one wouldn't have been nearly as compelling as the "what's really going on with the organization I'm part of, and what do I do now?" storyline she does get. (Not to mention that Steve's "Bucky?!?" recognition and then the
Speaking of comicverse liasons and their movieverse counterparts: Peggy Cartner - in her 90s - has a moving scene with Steve who comes to visit her, another thing I hadn't expected but which offers closure for their relationship in the previous movie. (It also confirms that she and Howard Stark together with a third party did co-found SHIELD post WWII; speaking of Howard, there's a blink-or-you-miss it revelation that the accident which killed him and his wife wasn't really an accident but engineered once Howard started to suspect what was up in a later scene.) If movieverse Sharon is related to her as comicverse Sharon was, this doesn't get mentioned, which is a relief, because dating daughters and granddaughters of your beloved never struck me as a good idea, frankly. There is no hint that she is. Movieverse Sharon has a minor part in this film but comes across as an amiable and competent agent who is also able to think for herself; she's the one who saves the earlier mentioned courageous order refusing agent from getting shot. Steve tries to flirt with her a bit when she's still undercover (btw, so much for the idea that the man can't talk to a woman without blushing which you can find in some fanfiction), but not after the reveal that she's SHIELD, and the film doesn't try to jumpstart a romance between them in addition to everything else going on, which, again, good choice. (And leaves the option for future developments in another movie.)
Our villains du jour (beyond organizations): Toby Jones makes a voiceover come back, but if one guy has claim to the chief baddie title, it's Alexander Pierce. His comicverse counterpart is Alexander Lushenko (Lushenko is the last name, right? It really HAS been ages since I read those comics), and again, making the movieverse version not Russian but American, and letting him be played by Robert Redford, makes for a very pointed updating. Spy thrillers and comicbook movies access current day paranoias, and Vladimir Putin not withstanding, no one is Cold War era like afraid of a Russian general. An American government official, on the other hand... and the Redford casting also works on two levels. He's played in two of the classic 1970s paranoid spy thrillers - "The Parallax Connection" and of course "All the President's Men" - and he started his acting career as the embodiment of wholesome all-American-ness. No moustache twirling here. Pierce's face-off with Nick Fury near the movie's climax also involves one of those "you made me and I made you" scenes Le Carré type of spy stories excel at, with Pierce pointing out that he couldn't have wished for a better head of SHIELD than Nick Fury "the most ruthless and unscrupulous man I know", who always gets the job done.
Lastly: the obligatory post-credit scene seems to be a lead into Avengers II: Age of Ultron, introduces a new villain (cue me rolling my eyes at the monocle, though I'm glad Thomas Kretschman has a Marvelverse job)... and Pietra and Wanda: Avengers Edition. We got our first look at the twins and as soon as I saw Wanda, looking very much like River Tam, it belatedly downed on me why Joss was so insistent on having the twins in the second Avengers movie despite the fact X-Men: Days of Future Past also wanted them. Of course he can't resist a superpowered madwoman with a brother who is obsessed with her.
