The Winter Soldier

This review contains politics. It's a review of Captain Jingoism: Edward Snowden Saves The Day, for f*ck's sake, what did you expect?

Well, let's start with the low-hanging fruit. It doesn't run for half an hour after its main character arc is concluded, so it starts with one up on The First Avenger. 

The film is more than two hours long, but unlike either The First Avenger or The Avengers, it doesn't really feel it. Maybe that's because it's juggling two villains and three heroes, all with ample to do, even if nothing ever quite comes to fruition.

It definitely has a political allegory... and a lot of shakycam... and some character threads to tie up from previous films. Quite a bit like Quantum of Solace, but better. Also, just because of some plot elements, quite a bit like GoldenEye.  And there's an oblique visual reference to The Third Man during the climax.  And, per TvTropes, apparently ran with some elements from the novel version of Moonraker.

Okay, I really appreciate that you don't need to see the first film - or The Avengers - to see this one, because everything you need to know is fed to you.  Once again there's absolutely no mercy when it comes to absorbing key plot elements, but this works as a standalone film in a way that The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World don't. It also has a lot less of the obvious CGI that plagued The First Avenger.

The spoiler-free bottom line is that I liked enough of it to consider it the third-best MCU film (after Thor and Iron Man).  But that's mainly because the rest of the competition kinda sucks.

It was only after I posted my review of The First Avenger that I realized the most basic problem with the Captain America character: the man is not allowed to have a character arc. The entire point of him is that he's the same guy before and after the super serum, he just has muscles now. So you would think that the logical thing to do is to send him up against a bona fide government conspiracy, force him to choose whether to be lawful or to be good, and watch his character unravel.

(Spoilers from here on out.)


Problem is, Hollywood refuses to do a film with a bona fide government conspiracy so long as a Democrat occupies the White House - the entire HYDRA line about getting people to accept a kind and gentle tyranny would hit too close to home - so naturally the bad guys have to literally be Nazis, in the whole "it can't possibly happen here" mold.  So that was disappointing.

I'm not saying go all Marvel Civil War on us, but I don't think it would have been a terrible idea with Fury and Cap pissed off at each other because Cap dismantled SHIELD while Fury thought it could still be salvaged.

So if Alexander Pierce and the whole HYDRA thing was ultimately a bit of a disappointment (handled much better on Agents of SHIELD, just sayin'), what about the Winter Soldier?  Well, this was better. The Winter Soldier is the perfect example of a Nemesis - of which more in a later post. The scenes with him are the high points of the film - The Winter Soldier's attempts to be edgy, political and topical don't work quite as well.

One final thing. That HYDRA logo looks awfully familiar. They kinda stole the idea from another all-caps evil organization, didn't they?