I went to see Winter Soldier again last weekend...
The pacing worked a lot better for me this time, knowing that the movie was in no sense about *Bucky* as the Winter Soldier, but Steve. So instead of feeling like there was kind of a weird emotional compression at the end, I could see the Winter Soldier reveal as the final betrayal, for Steve - the personal one to go with the bigger-scale horror he was already aware of. I think the title is problematic in that sense - gives the wrong impression of what the movie is going to be about, even though it's easy enough to apply the real-world Winter Soldier definition to Steve if you're aware of it - but oh well.
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Natasha. Oh, Natasha. She wants Steve to like her so much. Not that you can't cast that as Natasha wanting control, to feel like she has a handle on him - and I'm sure there's some of that - but her reaction when Steve snaps at her during the fight on the Lemurian Star looks personal to me. And people have said, oh, it's sad that Steve literally has no one in DC he can trust other than Dude He Met In A Park That Time, but apparently Natasha doesn't either, and she's been working with SHIELD since, what, at least 2009? She felt close to Nick, who it turns out didn't trust her enough to bring her in on his survival; per Avengers, she feels close to Clint, who isn't there; and apparently other than that there's no one of all the people she works with, all the people she must know, who she's willing to trust with her life in this situation. Except for Steve, sort of.
So that's kind of heartbreaking, but what really gets me is after Zola, when she talks about the fact that it turns out she's still working for the bad guys. According to what she tells Bruce, she's been in the spy business since she was a little girl - she literally grew up there. She tells Steve she'll be whoever he wants her to be - that's pretty clearly how she lives her life most of the time with regards to interpersonal relationships. And yet she saw her decision to join SHIELD as "going straight." Natasha is comfortable with anything, Fury says - but Natasha doesn't say that she works for SHIELD because it was expedient, or because she feels personal loyalty to Clint and/or Nick, or because she thinks they're the winning team. She's upset because she thought she was working for the "right side". Whatever her flexibility about methods, she managed to build a self who cared about doing the right thing - and was capable of defining for herself what that right thing was - out of what must have been an absolute wreck of an upbringing. She deserves a lot of credit for that. (Granted she did at least somewhat substitute SHIELD and/or Nick's judgment for her own, but that's got to be at least partly insecurity - I want to be good, I guess this organization is good, their goals seem mostly good, so I guess I'll do what they do. But these things take time. She's getting there.)
She is so brave, and at least some of the time I think she is so scared - I keep thinking about that scene with Clint in Avengers, where she finds the idea of even implying that she's feeling inspired to take action partly because she's upset at what happened to him so difficult that she can't even look at him. It takes a lot of heart to try to get past that.
A few other things about Natasha:
1) I've seen people wishing that there was a "Natasha saves Steve" scene to balance the ones where she's saved by him. There's the thing right after "who the hell is Bucky," depending on your definition of save, but I also think you pretty much have to give her getting Steve out of that mall without being recognized. It's not a physical save, but that doesn't make it less real. (Also hilarious. "Displays of physical affection make people uncomfortable." "Yes, they do!" Oh, Steve, ilu. You are legitimately terrible at undercover and at lying.)
2) So the question RE her background, given that they say she was born in 1984 and then left the KGB - dissolved 1991 - for SHIELD: Clue or screenwriters not doing their research? WHO KNOWS. I like your work, Marvel, but I do not trust your factchecking. On that note, oh my God, it's "deprivation," you spent how many millions of dollars on this movie and no one caught that?
3) She is so unsexualized in this movie. I mean, she's an attractive woman who wears tight tactical clothing which is, in one case (at the end in the helicopter) unzipped a bit more than seems really likely. But there's nothing even close to that pan up of Thor in The Dark World. Even in that scene in the helicopter, the camera isn't particularly interested in her cleavage; it spends no more time going "hey, so, Natasha: QUITE ATTRACTIVE" than it does with Steve (so, some - my God, that man's eyelashes). She spends at least half and probably more of her screentime completely covered in baggy clothes or wearing genuinely unflattering business suits. I cannot believe that reviewers are still on about the damn catsuit. What do they have to do, dress her in a full-coverage moose costume?
4) Interesting that the first tag scene refers to Wanda and Pietro as "volunteers," and we've been told that we'll get more about Natasha's backstory in Age of Ultron. If that's true, I wonder if there will be a thematic connection there? Or a direct one, I suppose, if Natasha was lying to Steve about her background, but I'd rather think she was being basically truthful there - if she was working for HYDRA before joining SHIELD, she didn't know it.
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As other people have mentioned, the fact that Bucky's family apparently had a car is interesting. I mean, we're talking late 1930s, it wouldn't have been unusual in and of itself, but would a poor family in Brooklyn have had one? I think the logical implication is that the Barneses were not really scrabbling at the bottom of the barrel, which is definitely counter to the Steve-and-Bucky-before-the-war fanon, and if true gives pre-war Bucky yet another leg up on Steve status-wise.
That flashback scene… Steve trying to play it off, and Bucky pushing. Same as during their farewell scene in New York in the first movie. Same as Sam in the park. Steve's not in good shape emotionally in CA2, but honestly he's obviously always been really emotionally reserved, quick to deflect. You see the opposite turn up in Steve/Bucky fic sometimes - Steve wants to talk about feelings! Bucky is too macho! - but that's so clearly backwards, and I'm willing to bet that's how most of his close relationships have worked. Steve pulls up the drawbridge, and the other person swims the moat.
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I'll be interested to see what they do with Sam in the sequel. In this version of the character, he's spent much of his adult life working to bring wounded soldiers home, one way or another. Steve shows up at his door as a wanted fugitive and Sam volunteers to participate in an armed insurrection against the US Government. (Yeah yeah HYDRA whatever.) Sam's a rescuer, is my point, and while he obviously has no personal connection to Bucky I think he's likely to have more of an emotional investment in that search than one might think. Don't know that they'll go there in canon, mind you, but I don't think you're stuck with "Sam is the impartial voice of reason," either.
Always depending on who he thinks he's saving, I suppose.
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I've decided that if they do bring Sharon in as a bigger part of CA3, I want it to be as a participant in the longest, most stressful first date ever. Like, she and Steve both happen to be in Paris! They finally go to get that coffee! And then events overtake them and eight days later Sharon finds herself stealing some guy's pants off of a clothesline in the backwoods of Moldova. Because she should know what she's getting into, that's why. It was on fire when you laid down on it, Sharon!
(It would probably be creepy for her to get ongoing calls from Peggy throughout - I'm not inherently disturbed by the idea of Steve dating one of Peggy's relatives, but having Peggy facilitate would be kind of icky and probably unhealthy. That said, I'd still laugh. "Aunt Peggy, he jumped out of a plane when I suggested we should go to a Yankees game sometime!" "That's perfectly normal for him, dear. Get used to it. Also don't mention the Yankees, he has issues.")
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So HYDRA has been part of SHIELD all along, and has had considerable pull, albeit presumably not total control - by which I mean that SHIELD was also trundling along as a legitimate intelligence organization doing things other than what HYDRA specifically wanted. I'm 99% certain that no one knew this was the case for the first Captain America movie, but I am still kind of fascinated by the idea that Steve was found and thawed out - saved - by an organization run by his arch-enemies. It's amazing luck that some nurse wasn't all "hey, he's alive! Whoops, my scalpel slipped. NEVER MIND." And how irritated must Pierce have been, like, really? We're three years out from deployment and we find Captain Frickin' America alive? We should definitely spend some time trying to get him accidentally killed.
They didn't, though. So what were they thinking? Zola's the only person left with any direct experience of him. Are they thinking, c'mon, he's one guy, plus potentially extremely useful for day-to-day operations, so let's run with it until Insight deploys? Are they hoping to co-opt him, either willingly or via the creation of a second Winter Soldier? (WHERE IS THE NEW STEVE IS THE WINTER SOLDIER FIC I WANT IT.) Do they just think it's not worth the risk of exposure? Because if you're sending him out with strike teams on a regular basis it seems like it'd be really easy to kill him in a friendly fire incident.
To be fair to them, they are unaware that they are living in a superhero-focused universe. But still. His whole raison d'etre is to bring you down, guys! Maybe don't keep him around.
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I do continue to feel that HYDRA really should have re-branded. I mean, how do you make that pitch? "Hey, remember all that stuff about how SHIELD, the organization that you have gone to great trouble to join, was founded on an organization devoted to defeating HYDRA? FUNNY STORY." What did they use over in Arrow, "The Undertaking," right? See, that's kind of ominous while not giving you that problem of people suddenly looking up and saying "wait a minute, I'm working on a project called The Death Star." You could find out it was really HYDRA once you go to a top level. Kind of like Scientology or something! Except you get paid instead of the other way around.
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What is the deal with Bucky and the serum? He can match Steve, so whatever's going on in his body it's comparable at least in terms of physical capabilities. But that can't have been the case during WWII, because, you know, someone would have noticed. I'm willing to roll with the idea that Bucky might have hidden small changes, but not something of that magnitude. That implies that Zola was able to complete whatever he'd been doing to Bucky before, as could his dialogue about the procedure already having been started in Bucky's flashback.
So fine, HYDRA can make Steve-level supersoldiers and ensure at least their short-term obedience. Why aren't they doing more of that? Zola survived until 1972! They just kept trying and Bucky was the only one who ever survived, maybe?
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The question of collateral damage is one of those things that I feel like I should care about but don't, particularly. (I did notice this time around that they portrayed the Insight helicarriers as being run by really minimal crews - like, ten people - and they evacuated the Triskelion on-screen. Still, they blew up three aircraft carriers hovering over the Potomac, don't even try to tell me a whole bunch of civilians weren't caught in that.)
Anyway, what does bother me a little is what feels like an under-reaction to what happens. Kind of like with Burn Notice, where Michael et al. were running around blowing up warehouses or whatever every other week and you start thinking, damn, the Miami police are really not as excited about this behavior as you would expect. With the initial car chase with Fury, I've got to assume that HYDRA-affiliated parts of SHIELD must have been telling the ninety-seven law enforcement agencies of Washington DC to keep their distance, SHIELD has got this, but there's no sign of uproar afterwards, or after the fight scene on the causeway the next day - I mean, seriously, how many officers would converge on that scene over the course of the, like, ten minutes of wild gunfire and explosions? How insane would the security on the streets of DC be after two incidents like that in two days? Extremely. The answer is extremely insane.
Maybe that's a Buffy-gets-her-passport scene, I don't know, but it bugs me, especially in a movie that's focusing on the security state, albeit the surveillance end rather than the street-level stuff. I would've liked a mention, just to feel some rootedness in the real world.
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I'm more sympathetic to the argument that having HYDRA portrayed as the source of the rot in SHIELD is a cop-out now - Zola certainly claims the manipulations that have led to a world that they think is ready for Project Insight for HYDRA. I think the reason I fundamentally don't buy it on a Watsonian level is just that it's nonsensical, honestly. Well, and Steve, who is the Moral Voice, is pretty clear about his feelings about SHIELD. But mostly it's just that it's nonsensical. Fury wasn't picturing Project Insight as something that was going to kill twenty million people right off the top, including a bunch of Americans, but he was sure picturing and okay with a smaller-scale version. All those things that HYDRA did through SHIELD, they cannot have been done just by HYDRA members; they had to be supported by other SHIELD personnel, by members of Congress, etc. I just can't picture a scenario where, well, everything would have been totally fine! Except, you know, HYDRA, and everyone else was completely unable to resist their eeeeeevil actions. Oh my God, I just started a war in southeast Asia! That was not my intention at all! I am totally against these wicked deeds that I am being forced to participate in! Yeah, no.
That said, thingswithwings had a really interesting post about this that helped me understand the whole conversation better, in that it became clear to me that I was conflating the question "is the movie saying that SHIELD would have been clean if not for HYDRA?" with the question "is the movie backing off of its real-world critique by blaming HYDRA in-universe?" The latter I think is a fair accusation. I mean, Cap doesn't go on to bring down the NSA or whatever; SHIELD is portrayed as especially problematic, and it's not unreasonable to see that as being a way to softpedal the whole thing. I still think they went pretty darn far for a superhero movie in a shared universe, but I see why people might think they didn't go far enough.
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Favorite unfortunate bit in a post-Winter Soldier fic summary so far: "I went with the comics version because I kind of forget how the movie ended." It's been out for TWO WEEKS. If you didn't see it and you're working off of tumblr gif sets, fine - I mean, I may not read your story, but fine - but if you saw it and have already FORGOTTEN HOW IT ENDED either you should go to the movies somewhat more sober or there is something really off about your memory. Also you should feel free to look it up. There's a whole big Internet out there.