Film Review: Captain America: Winter Soldier

I won’t even bother with a long drawn out intro for this. Here it is, the Captain America: Winter Soldier review.

For a basic idea of the plot, the title says it all. It’s a Captain America film with the antagonist of the week being a “legendary” Soviet Assassin known as the Winter Soldier. There’s more to the film than that, but going too far with it is spoiler territory. And given that CA:WS takes a nosedive into the “spy-n-espionage” genre, that’s not really surprising. If there weren’t secrets, twists, and surprises, then it wouldn’t be a really boring spy movie. But to see Marvel pull off this darker and different genre of story is a sight to behold. 

We’ve got big action pieces (Avengers). We’ve got action-comedy (Iron Man). We’ve got fantasy (Thor). We’ll get sci-fi later this year (Guardians of the Galaxy). Captain America takes a step in a darker direction with the “spy” genre and it pays off well. Yes dips into the same waters as Dark Knight and Man of Steel. But where Man of Steel failed is where Winter Soldier shows off proper execution. You can have a dark story with a boy-scout character like Captain America or Superman, but Captain America is still Captain America. The world around him is darker and full of secrets, lies, and backstabbing. But, ultimately, he’s still the perfect American and fighting for his noble ideals, which Superman in Man of Steel kind of didn’t.

This movie also ramps up the action in ways that it very much needed. The first Captain America was a fine movie, but it was slow, boring at times, and was another origin story in which we knew the results of it. Winter Soldier allows us to enjoy a film with the same hero in modern times with a faster pace, better action sequences, and a story that has a fair number of twists that even I was kind of impressed with them. Yes, I knew about the big reveal involving the Winter Soldier character, but I’ve read the comics, so that was expected. But there’s more that happens that I’m still surprised by at the time of writing. I’ll get into that in a moment but let me finish the review first. 

Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) is back. And, unlike Avengers, is kicking a lot more ass and being a hell of a lot more interesting. All of that makes me even more excited for her solo super hero movie… as a hero that isn’t Black Widow or even a Marvel hero. Yeah. Regardless, it’s still fun to see the sexy but incredibly deadly Widow get some amazing scene stealing moments. On top of that, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) gets plenty of great moments in here as well, which is a nice change of pace from simple cameos and exposition.

But the two new characters to mention (other than Winter Soldier) are Senator Piece and Sam Wilson. The former is alongside Nick Fury as the brains of SHIELD. I never felt like anything he does in here was that much of a surprise, but he was still performed well and carried out his character quite well. Sam Wilson was a surprise for me in a lot of ways. First, we finally have a hero with ethnicity on the Avengers. Second, the actor was good and not only fit the role but made me want to see more of the character. Lastly, the flying suit (in the trailers, not a spoiler) he uses to help Cap in act three is impressive and I’m excited to see more of that in future films. Yes, Iron Man can already fly with a suit, but the jet-pack/wings still has a cool unique look and Sam (aka Falcon) is a trained soldier so he isn’t just a guy in a suit. 

While this movie is leagues better than the predecessor and is likely the best film in the Marvel franchise OTHER than Avengers, it still has some bugs that are to be expected. It still drives me nuts that the bad guys always shoot at Captain America’s shield, and not his legs or the ground below him to maybe make him lose his footing. That or the bullets are magnetized to the shield somehow. Cap’s plan to hide the plot device early the movie (while cute) was pretty stupid, even for him. This is another film that exemplifies the idea of “Bad guys causing trouble. Let’s not assemble the Avengers to make this easier” situation. Though I’d say Thor 2 is still the bigger offender of the two on that one.

Outside of that, the camera work was sloppy at times. Sure, the scenes (overall) were cool. But moments during some fight sequences had the camera too close and jostling around too much to really get a clear idea of what Captain America or Black Widow were doing. And then we had some weird shots during the car chase that I just don’t understand the logic behind them. Made the look feel a tad choppy due to the number of jump-cuts to awkward camera positions (and boy do I know about awkward positions). 

This also suffers from the same cliché of most action films. One guy versus a group or an army, the one guy wins. One guy vs. one guy, then the fight suddenly becomes and even fight. This doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film. But now that we’ve seen these Marvel movies for something like seven years now, you’d think we’d try to stay clear of those a bit more consciously. Or maybe I’m just getting more picky because I’m getting older and seen this kind of nonsense for years now.

Regardless of some of the logic problems, camera work, or heavy use of cliché, Winter Soldier is still a really good film. Better than the first Captain America in just about every way and probably the best solo-hero film in the series thus far. It’s pretty clear that Avengers money went into drastically improving the work of these solo films and I’m excited to see where things go from here. Especially since what happens in this film will ripple effect into the SHIELD TV show and other Marvel films, without question. But for that… we enter spoiler territory. From this point forward, if you want to keep reading, you do so at your own risk. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want ANYTHING spoiled, stop here and now.

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Let’s start with the one the comic fans will know. Yes, Winter Soldier is really Bucky Barnes. Captain America’s war-time best friend and partner during the fight against Hydra. In the comics, Bucky was really dead for 40 years and it wasn’t until the 80’s or 90’s that Marvel brought him back. But, unlike say, Under the Red Hood, where bringing back Jason Todd (Robin) from the dead involved a lot of convoluted reality bending, Bucky was brought back through Hydra/the Soviets for the most part. Though, sometimes, this is aided by the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract (if you’ve seen Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, you know what I’m getting at). 

Admittedly, I was expecting Captain America to die in this film, especially during that last fight scene since, in the comics, Winter Soldier IS responsible for the death of Captain America during the events of the Civil War. But I’m glad they didn’t yet because I think the Winter Soldier character needs to get a little more weight and significance in the films before we can let him off and replace a central pillar of the Avengers franchise. That said, I’m fully expecting Captain America to be killed by this man in the not too distant future. Possibly in Avengers 3, but we’ll see how that plays out.

Now for the twists that the comic fans may not have expected. First, by the end of the film, SHIELD is gone. Turns out, the entire time since the end of WWII, in the beginning when SHIELD was first formed, Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD with spies of their own in order to gain control and manipulate events of the world to eventually bring everything under their control. Really good twist for Hydra to pull that off. And even more impressive that even the downfall of SHIELD doesn’t stop Hydra (more on that in a moment).

But SHIELD is brought to a crashing and explosive end. Cap, Fury, Widow, Falcon, and Maria Hill (who gets some screen time here) work together to stop the plan Hydra has put in place to pretty much begin their purge of large populations of the human race to assert their dominance of the world. With the plan in ruins and SHIELD disassembled, this leaves a lot of questions in the air for me (and I imagine other fans who have been following the series up until now). 

Before I get too sidetracked, let me talk about the Credits-scenes really quick. The first one reveals that Hydra is still very much alive. And their leader looks to be Baron Strucker. A powerful leader of Hydra who some of you might remember from Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. We don’t see much other than him talking about how his plans haven’t fully derailed, especially thanks to the twins. And then we get to see two imprisoned super-humans (Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch). Long story short, they are mutants in the Marvel comics (specifically, Magneto’s kids), but due to copyright problems, they won’t be mutants or related to Magneto in the Marvel movies. Speculation is they are Strucker’s kids that have been experimented on, but we’ll have to wait for Avengers 2 to know for sure. And the post credits scene isn’t anything you’ll kick yourself if you miss, but I felt it was pretty good. I think I’ll leave that one as a surprise though.

But on to the questions I had previously mentioned… what will now happen to the show Agents of SHIELD if SHIELD is gone? Will Coulson be out of a job? More importantly, what about the big parts of SHIELD that we don’t see like the various detention centers for super criminals like Abomination (from Incredible Hulk) or Graviton (which was saw in Agents of SHIELD). What about the various dangerous objects SHIELD has collected? What will happen to those or will they continue to have someone guarding them? You see, the problem here is much like if our government collapsed. Yes, the Whitehouse has fallen and, say, the CIA was compromised. But what about the other branches of the government and other agencies within? The smaller parts that operated almost independently, but still require the main part of the system to function? 

I imagine many of these questions will be answered in the rest of the Agents of SHIELD TV series, but I still feel the need to ask, given that we won’t have our answers for a while. But that’s another example of just how much better Marvel is at this than DC/Warner Bros. DC refuses to let the worlds of their Arrow and Flash TV shows merge into the worlds of the films (Man of Steel and so on). And there’s not really a good reason WHY you wouldn’t if you have faith in the products to maintain their quality. It allows the TV shows to be an extension to the films and they serve to make each other more interesting and fun.

By making them separate things, you not only make things confusing for non-fans (we’ll have a movie Flash and a TV Flash, for example). But you also make things needlessly disconnected and limit what you can do. Thanks to Agents of SHIELD we  get a window into the Marvel universe on a weekly basis that the movies can’t offer us and we’re seeing some interesting stuff now that the show has found its footing and figured out what it intends to do. But if Arrow and Flash aren’t connected to the movies, then what’s the point? That’s just more lore I have to remember and keep track of in addition to the movie lore for the same characters, but with different actors and stories because reasons. Plus the connected TV-to-movies idea allows smaller heroes to get their time on the screen for lower budget (like what we’re going to see with a few Marvel heroes on Netflix in the next year). 

But now I’m on a new tangent. The point I’m getting at is that with the crash and dismantling of SHIELD, the Marvel Universe is in for a lot of big changes and I really have no idea what to expect from this point forward. I have some assumptions about what’s been happening in Agents of SHIELD, now that I know Hydra has been secretly behind the scenes the whole time, but that’s for another post. I’ll leave with this: Captain America: Winter Soldier is probably the best film the series largely because it takes big risks and leaves us with so many questions and speculations as to what to expect from here on out. I can’t imagine where it will go from here now, but I’m looking forward to the adventure. See ya next time.