Scattered Thoughts on Captain America: The Winter Soldier
For the spoiler-phobic, here are some spoilers!
I was going to do a light-hearted, before-the-cut thing about the drinks I’d pair with this movie (since I went to a 21+ showing), but then I realized that even my drink choices were spoiler-rific: an Old Fashioned for Cap, a White Russian for Natasha, and a Zombie for Nick Fury. I’m still working on one for Falcon, and for the Winter Soldier himself, it would have to involve dry ice. As it was, the theater didn’t have anything themed (I could tell the bartender had been asked this question more than a few times and was well on his way to getting tired of it), so I settled for a Captain (Morgan) and Coke, and Yebisu had a whiskey.
Anyway, on to the movie itself: I think it’s my favorite of all the Marvel movies so far, and I was so focused on it from beginning to end that I forgot about the macarons in my purse that I’d bought at Whole Foods earlier in the day. The stakes felt really, realistically high, so much so that I got pretty stressed out at a lot of the violence, and one scene nearly had me in tears (if it had gone on a second more, I probably would have actually cried.) But it wasn’t a bad experience, and higher stakes simply meant that I was more invested in everything that happened, and the characters seemed real and meaningful in a lot of important ways that other superhero movies don’t usually manage to do for me.
Let’s start with Natasha, who was so amazing and brave and layered that I mentally decided that I’d start lobbying for Natasha over Fionna as a name of my fictional daughter. (Sorry, Fionna Glenanne.) I loved how much of her banter with Steve/Cap was relaxed and friendly, and that there was never insinuation of "she can't hack it because of [x ridiculous lady problem]". She was sexy, but not hyper-sexualized, and at no point in the movie did I feel like I'd wandered into the Wrong Part of the Comic Book Store Where I was Not Welcome. It was so matter-of-fact: yes, she's beautiful but she will kick your ass if you cross her. I'm still a bit annoyed over the persistent long hair style, given all the fighting she does, but OK, fine, whatever. Given that there was no gratuitous unzipping of the jump suit until almost the bitter end, I'm going to take this as a win.
Speaking of taking this as a win, I also really enjoyed the whole narrative the film centered around; the political spy game between Fury and Pearce, although a little unclear at times, made more sense when the Big Plot Revelation of Plot-tastic Doom was revealed, and I liked that Pearce was not the vaudeville villain that Red Skull was. Project Insight was a pretty good doomsday device, and the moment when it acquired 700,000+ targets was pretty chilling. I liked how the problems in this story were small (what's really going ON with Nick Fury?) and epically large (kill 20,000 people to save the other 6.8 billion?), but nowhere was there preachy nonsense about what was more important.
But most of all, this movie made me like Captain America MORE, which still surprises me. There's not a lot about him in the old comics that I remember liking, other than being a relatively two-dimensional do-gooder. This version of Cap is far more interesting because the script is not afraid to show that he's lonely and doubtful about his course of action, a decision that makes him and his conflicts very accessible. Even though I knew that Bucky Barnes was the Winter Soldier, the look on Chris Evans' face when the big reveal came along was just heart-breaking, and that heartbreak informed the second half of the film so well. The fight between Bucky and Cap on the Insight ship was just awful to watch. Seeing Cap reach out like that, with the knowledge that if it didn't have to work, he'd have to kill his friend... damn. The longer that scene went on, the sicker I felt. It was devastating. The cost of human life was pretty cheap in this movie, too, another sign that the stakes were high, of course. Still, it was a good thing that Captain America was such a compelling hero, and that I was rooting for all the heroes, or it would have been tough to make it to the end.
And can I just say, damn Falcon's wings were COOL and Anthony Mackie was so good? Completely believable and so well acted. He and Natasha didn't feel like sidekicks; they were more like colleagues.
Stray thoughts:
* Somewhere after the fight on the Insight ship ended, I thought to myself, "this movie would make a pretty awesome opera and give some tenors a real chance to show off!" When I shared this opinion with Yebisu, he just shook his head and said, "that does sound like something you'd be into."
* Best Stan Lee cameo ever!
* The set dressing in this was so good. Did anyone else notice that Pearce had Newman's Own Sockarooni spaghetti sauce in his fridge? :D (But then Pearce shot the poor cleaning lady and I felt bad for getting all happy over a tidy domestic detail. Damn you script!) Natasha's arrow necklace!
* The USB drive hidden in the vending machine was great, mostly because when I saw that the vending machine was being refilled, I thought, "seriously, casting people, that's who you think would be in the hospital next to Nick Fury's room?" But then it made plot sense!
* I was a bit confused about HYDRA's plot with the Winter Soldier: defrost him every few years or so, reboot his brainwashing, send him out on a job, and then freeze him again? What? Wouldn't it have been simpler to just hire regular assassins when they were needed? Oh, wait, I'd better not ascribe logic to this part of the story. ;p
* What would I add to Cap's list of things to check out while he'd been asleep? I'm assuming from the list he'd amassed that he'd taken a crash course in social studies via Wikipedia or something similar, and the list represented the gaps. With that in mind, I suppose I'd add Mad Men and the movies of Alfred Hitchcock.
Tl;dr version: It was so engrossing that I completely forgot to eat the packet of fancy cookies I’d smuggled into the theater in my purse. It’s the best movie in the MCU to date, at least in my humblest of opinions.
I was going to do a light-hearted, before-the-cut thing about the drinks I’d pair with this movie (since I went to a 21+ showing), but then I realized that even my drink choices were spoiler-rific: an Old Fashioned for Cap, a White Russian for Natasha, and a Zombie for Nick Fury. I’m still working on one for Falcon, and for the Winter Soldier himself, it would have to involve dry ice. As it was, the theater didn’t have anything themed (I could tell the bartender had been asked this question more than a few times and was well on his way to getting tired of it), so I settled for a Captain (Morgan) and Coke, and Yebisu had a whiskey.
Anyway, on to the movie itself: I think it’s my favorite of all the Marvel movies so far, and I was so focused on it from beginning to end that I forgot about the macarons in my purse that I’d bought at Whole Foods earlier in the day. The stakes felt really, realistically high, so much so that I got pretty stressed out at a lot of the violence, and one scene nearly had me in tears (if it had gone on a second more, I probably would have actually cried.) But it wasn’t a bad experience, and higher stakes simply meant that I was more invested in everything that happened, and the characters seemed real and meaningful in a lot of important ways that other superhero movies don’t usually manage to do for me.
Let’s start with Natasha, who was so amazing and brave and layered that I mentally decided that I’d start lobbying for Natasha over Fionna as a name of my fictional daughter. (Sorry, Fionna Glenanne.) I loved how much of her banter with Steve/Cap was relaxed and friendly, and that there was never insinuation of "she can't hack it because of [x ridiculous lady problem]". She was sexy, but not hyper-sexualized, and at no point in the movie did I feel like I'd wandered into the Wrong Part of the Comic Book Store Where I was Not Welcome. It was so matter-of-fact: yes, she's beautiful but she will kick your ass if you cross her. I'm still a bit annoyed over the persistent long hair style, given all the fighting she does, but OK, fine, whatever. Given that there was no gratuitous unzipping of the jump suit until almost the bitter end, I'm going to take this as a win.
Speaking of taking this as a win, I also really enjoyed the whole narrative the film centered around; the political spy game between Fury and Pearce, although a little unclear at times, made more sense when the Big Plot Revelation of Plot-tastic Doom was revealed, and I liked that Pearce was not the vaudeville villain that Red Skull was. Project Insight was a pretty good doomsday device, and the moment when it acquired 700,000+ targets was pretty chilling. I liked how the problems in this story were small (what's really going ON with Nick Fury?) and epically large (kill 20,000 people to save the other 6.8 billion?), but nowhere was there preachy nonsense about what was more important.
But most of all, this movie made me like Captain America MORE, which still surprises me. There's not a lot about him in the old comics that I remember liking, other than being a relatively two-dimensional do-gooder. This version of Cap is far more interesting because the script is not afraid to show that he's lonely and doubtful about his course of action, a decision that makes him and his conflicts very accessible. Even though I knew that Bucky Barnes was the Winter Soldier, the look on Chris Evans' face when the big reveal came along was just heart-breaking, and that heartbreak informed the second half of the film so well. The fight between Bucky and Cap on the Insight ship was just awful to watch. Seeing Cap reach out like that, with the knowledge that if it didn't have to work, he'd have to kill his friend... damn. The longer that scene went on, the sicker I felt. It was devastating. The cost of human life was pretty cheap in this movie, too, another sign that the stakes were high, of course. Still, it was a good thing that Captain America was such a compelling hero, and that I was rooting for all the heroes, or it would have been tough to make it to the end.
And can I just say, damn Falcon's wings were COOL and Anthony Mackie was so good? Completely believable and so well acted. He and Natasha didn't feel like sidekicks; they were more like colleagues.
Stray thoughts:
* Somewhere after the fight on the Insight ship ended, I thought to myself, "this movie would make a pretty awesome opera and give some tenors a real chance to show off!" When I shared this opinion with Yebisu, he just shook his head and said, "that does sound like something you'd be into."
* Best Stan Lee cameo ever!
* The set dressing in this was so good. Did anyone else notice that Pearce had Newman's Own Sockarooni spaghetti sauce in his fridge? :D (But then Pearce shot the poor cleaning lady and I felt bad for getting all happy over a tidy domestic detail. Damn you script!) Natasha's arrow necklace!
* The USB drive hidden in the vending machine was great, mostly because when I saw that the vending machine was being refilled, I thought, "seriously, casting people, that's who you think would be in the hospital next to Nick Fury's room?" But then it made plot sense!
* I was a bit confused about HYDRA's plot with the Winter Soldier: defrost him every few years or so, reboot his brainwashing, send him out on a job, and then freeze him again? What? Wouldn't it have been simpler to just hire regular assassins when they were needed? Oh, wait, I'd better not ascribe logic to this part of the story. ;p
* What would I add to Cap's list of things to check out while he'd been asleep? I'm assuming from the list he'd amassed that he'd taken a crash course in social studies via Wikipedia or something similar, and the list represented the gaps. With that in mind, I suppose I'd add Mad Men and the movies of Alfred Hitchcock.
Tl;dr version: It was so engrossing that I completely forgot to eat the packet of fancy cookies I’d smuggled into the theater in my purse. It’s the best movie in the MCU to date, at least in my humblest of opinions.