Winter Soldiering

Photo attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bagogames/ / CC BY 2.0

 

I had the pleasure, at 10:10 PM on a Sunday, no less, to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier with a friend at the always lovely Regal Cinemas Battery Park City.  Both I, a long-time superhero genre fan, and my movie-going compatriot, who has little-to-no knowledge of the genre, had a fantastic time, stumbling out of the theater at close to 1:00 AM with goofy grins on our faces, chattering about the plot twists and character turns we had just seen, always the hallmark of a good film-going experience.  The short version?  This is a very good movie, probably one of the best superhero films ever made, though not quite on the “total perfection” level of The Dark Knight or The Avengers.  It’s definitely the best film, so far, in “Phase 2” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The long version?

I am, obviously, a fan of superhero movies of nearly any stripe, even though I dread with all the angst of a Denver Broncos fan during Super Bowl XLVIII the eventual arrival of Batman Vs. Superman.  I was very excited for this film to come out.  I greatly enjoy giant, complicated shared continuities, and what Marvel (and Disney) have pulled off over the course of nine movies, one television show, and a series of shorts, is nothing short of amazing.  To a raging nerd like myself, who gets a tingly sensation when an off-hand reference is made to a character five years before they actually show up, this stuff is pure gold.  Sure, there have been some less than superb elements in there, but pretty much everything they’ve done in this shared continuity has been, at the very least, entertaining.

The first Captain America movie, The First Avenger, was a solid entry in the Marvel canon, but certainly not my favorite, covering, I thought, too much territory in a single story, going from set piece to set piece a bit too fast, and towards the end feeling more like an extended advertisement for The Avengers than a proper ending to its own tale.  That being said, Chris Evans made a fantastic Captain America, and, after The Avengers, I was excited for a second entry, as a lot of Cap’s best stories in the comics came after he got away from his World War II origins.  Being familiar with the comics, I was already spoiled for who the titular “Winter Soldier” was, but other than some of the subtle hints in ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I really had no idea where this film would be going with its narrative.  I was in for one hell of a surprise.

 

PUNY HUMANS, SPOILERS FOR THIS MOVIE ARE LOCATED BELOW!  DO NOT TURN YOUR GAZE TO THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE FILM, OR I WILL DESTROY YOU!!

 

…

 

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!  GRAAAAAAAAAGH!!

 

Marvel has giant, hairy balls of adamantium.  No, seriously.  They had established a perfect winning formula with these films, as evidenced by the absolutely ridiculous box office takes of The Avengers and Iron Man 3.  It would have been very easy for them to rest on their laurels and let the status quo rule at least through the third Avengers movie in 2018 or 2019.  Instead, they took pretty much all of the pieces they had carefully assembled on the board, and like a kid about to land on Boardwalk with a hotel on it, upended the whole thing, using this film to violently and viciously rearrange their entire fictional universe.  By the end of this film, SHIELD is gone, HYDRA is running rampant with the keys to several SHIELD facilities, Nick Fury is in hiding and presumed dead, every secret SHIELD was holding onto, including everything about all of the members of the Avengers, is out in the open, and it has been revealed that a huge portion of what our heroes had been doing at SHIELD’s behest in all of the previous films (and pretty much everything all the characters in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have been doing since episode 1 of their series) has been at least partially to further the goals of what amounts to a super science-fueled undercover Neo-Nazi faction.  And they did this, not in Avengers 2: Everything Goes to Hell, but in a freaking Captain America sequel.  Yow.

And the amazing thing is how good it is.  It works, and it works really, really well, which it has no right to.  This could have easily been too much too fast for one film, turning into an overwrought mess, but the directing team of brothers Anthony Russo and Joe Russo deftly made an exciting, excellently paced, and shockingly easy-to-follow film.  This is a superhero film that has been crossbred with a taut espionage thriller (another favorite genre of mine), and the mix really does just work together like chocolate and peanut butter.  All of the action scenes were exciting and well shot (with a glorious lack of goddamned shaky cam), as well as easy to follow, particularly the car chase scene with Nick Fury (though I couldn’t stop noticing that it was shot in Downtown Cleveland, not where it was set, in DC, complete with in-place US 6 and US 322 signs).

The script is extremely tight, with little in the way of useless dialogue or pointless exposition.  Oh, yes, there’s exposition, most amusingly in the form of a straight-up Metal Gear Solid-style dramatic grainy footage infodump, but it never feels forced or artificial.  I never thought “why is he monologuing?” because A, the monologues were really interesting, and B, the reason the character was doing it always made perfect sense!  How often does that happen?

The acting is polished and compelling throughout, especially Scarlett Johansson‘s turn as Black Widow, easily the best of her three MCU appearances to date.  Samuel L. Jackson is…  Well, he’s Samuel L. Jackson.  You can’t go wrong.  Nor can you with a wonderfully, creepily icy Robert Redford, for God’s sake!  And Chris Evans is pitch perfect as Captain America, a superhero I’ve heard the same arguments against that I’ve heard about Superman.  Both are basically Boy Scouts, paragons of perfect virtue that can do no wrong.  People claim this makes them “boring,” and they certainly can be.  But what the two MCU Captain America films have gotten right, and Man of Steel got so very, very wrong, is that these characters are at their best when they own how upstanding and perfect they are.  That’s why they’re our heroes!  And that’s why it makes for compelling storytelling to see them pushed to their limits and challenged to violate their high standards.  That’s kind of the main thrust of this film, really.  That in the darkest of times, the old axiom that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” rings especially true, particularly as a counter for the dark and cynical Roman axiom of “inter arma enim silent leges.”  The law doesn’t have to fall silent, and where Cap shines in this film is not in that he’s an arrogant saint, asking everyone why they aren’t as pure as he is, but in that he’s saying “we still have to do the right thing, even if it’s harder.”  It’s a simple kind of heroism, in the midst of all of the bombast.  And it’s just perfect.

If there’s a weak spot in the film, it’s the fact that it’s titled The Winter Soldier, when the character himself is barely important to the plot, serving more as a “dragon” character here, and as a MacGuffin for the third Captain America film in 2016.  “The Winter Soldier” comic story is a great tale, and I kind of wish we’d seen more of it here, even if a lot of it wouldn’t make sense in the context of the more compact Marvel Cinematic Universe.  I suppose we will see more of that plot in that future third film.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a fun and fantastic superhero and espionage film, and a kind of perfect intense thriller.  It’s highly, highly recommended, even if you haven’t followed the Marvel films to date, and a very brave move by Marvel.  Bring on Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron!

P.S. – If you gave up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. early on because you thought it was too “safe,” man did they fool you.  Go back and check it out now.  They’ll probably have to re-title the thing next season.

 

New York, NY
April 10, 2014