Captain America 2 (Spoilers!) · 1:30am Apr 7th, 2014
Awesome movie. Really, really good all the way around. Good acting, good effects, good writing, good worldbuilding... just about everything fit together well.
I've never read the comics. In fact, except for 'Watchmen' and 'Kingdom Come', I've never read any Marvel or DC comics at all. So I've been really pleased with how the movies don't require years of comic knowledge to understand. Same thing with this one. The fight with Batrok was great, a nice contrast of fighting styles between Cap's blockier, stronger approach and Batrok's lean, athletic gymnastics, and it wasn't relevant that I didn't know that Batrok is an established comic character. (I found out when I read the wikipedia article after the movie ended). Same with Runlow, who is a supervillain in the comics. The movie held together great, even for a comics neophyte like me.
Sam Wilson was an awesome sidekick here, to the point where I think he could do well in his own movie. His dialogue crackled, his personality bounced off Cap's in a really fun way, and he did some awesome stunts and had great set pieces in the final battle and when they were interrogating Sitwell (the bald SHIELD agent).
Armin Zola was perfect as a sort of Big Bad figure who did all his Big Badding before the movie began. His monologuing was nicely chilling, peppered with just the right amount of wit (including his note to Cap that a computer doesn't break just because you crack the monitor), and it actually served a useful purpose in stalling Cap. Great antagonist there. I liked him a bit more than Pierce, although Pierce was still good in his role.
Cap, Black Widow, and the other leads were all spot on. Cap was really good as a fish out of water in the more modernized NSA-environment that we have today, as opposed to the 1940s where he grew up. His discomfort was very well displayed, as was his fundamental moral core--the world may change, but his values won't. (I understand there was a comics arc called Civil War in which he was on the Bad Side or something--I don't know, I didn't read it--but I much prefer this interpretation of Cap. Some hero concepts work well when tormented by moral ambiguity, like Hulk or to a lesser extent Iron Man. Cap works best as a pure-hearted knight, IMHO.)
And Nick Fury was awesome, as he always is. The scene with him fighting off a massive blockade of fake officers was excellent. His lines were great, as was his dialogue with Cap and his final scene with Pierce. (See above--Fury works well as a morally ambiguous hero).
As for the overall plot, I loved it. Granted, I was probably predisposed to like it, since I tend to be on the liberty side of the perennial 'liberty versus security' debate anyway, but I thought it was well presented overall (with a couple caveats, see below). It did a good job of showing how even good guys like Fury can get drawn into the security-at-all-costs kind of ideology.
So, yes. Wonderful movie, see it, tell all your friends. :-)
Now, for a few quibbles:
* I don't think 'The Winter Soldier' was the right name for the movie. Bucky was functionally an elite goon for the bad guys; literally the only point when he was anything else and it mattered was at the very end when he saved Captain America from drowning in the Potomac. But he only showed up for a few other scenes, and in those scenes he really could have just been some other elite HYDRA soldier. I get that they're setting up CA 3, but I really feel like putting the focus on him was the wrong move. After all--he's not the enemy, or even that important a character here. It's HYDRA that should have been emphasized. (And if that would have been a spoiler, they could use another subtitle, or just not use one at all.)
* I agree with digby that having '20 million' targets was stacking the deck a bit near the end, and that it would have been a little more compelling if there were instead a few hundred targets or somesuch. (It would also be more impressive to me; I work with Big Data, and getting a few hundreds hits out of 7 billion says to me that the algorithm is really good; getting many millions says that it's not very good and it's getting a lot of false positives.) I think it would also fit in a bit better with Zola's concept that HYDRA learned that wars of conquest don't work and conquering works best by getting the people to accept it from the get go. Killing 20 million people is a war of conquest. Whereas, if they only killed a few hundreds of people, then they could better bill it as the ultimate in national security. (After all, 20 million people is 3 out of every 1000 in the world, so it's likely that most communities would lose someone, which makes it hard to spin the narrative that everyone who got killed was a terrorist. A few hundreds of people both demonstrate HYDRA's awesome firepower while also making it much easier to tell everyone else that you're just killing the few bad apples.)
* Probably the biggest change I would make is that I would have put a little more emphasis on how honest SHIELD employees were manipulated or convinced by HYDRA, and I would have reduced the number of explicit HYDRA cultists a bit. Make it more clear how people who weren't Nazis or HYDRA members were nonetheless convinced by the security-at-all-costs philosophy to go along with various aspects of the program, only realizing too late what it was they were helping to build. We got some of this with Fury and to a lesser extent Cap, but I think that, for instance, having Sitwell be someone who just honestly wanted what was best for everyone, who honestly believed that a first-strike policy would save lives in the long run by killing a few potential terrorists in the present day, and who only later realized that the first strikes were going to kill tens of millions of innocent people, could have been a neat scene.
* The congressional hearing came close to undermining the message of the rest of the movie. No, Black Widow, the problems with a massive unaccountable agency that is empowered to do anything they want "for the greater good" are not solved by having a small group of unaccountable heroes who are empowered to do anything they want "for the greater good". The problem with SHIELD/HYDRA wasn't that it used a helicarrier instead of an Iron Man suit, it was that there were no checks or balances to restrain their power... so being all "You can't do anything to us because we're that valuable" kind of undercuts the lesson. It's also reminiscent of the movie Hancock, except that movie was about the eponymous superhero learning why that attitude kind of sucks.
However, this movie did make up for this a bit by having her end with saying that the government can in fact arrest her if they so choose, and also by showing Agent 13 joining the CIA, where she'll be able to work for the nation... and will be accountable to her superiors, who are accountable to Congress, who are accountable to the voters of the nation. (This reminded me of a Star Wars expanded universe scene in which a politician says that he won't make a special place for Jedi in his government; if Jedi want to serve, they certainly may, but by joining the military or police just like any other citizen--in other words, they aren't given the freedom to break laws and take missions into their own hands just because they were born Force-sensitive.) Still, I think I'd have cut the scene, or done something to show people trying to address this problem (maybe building more Iron Man suits/Falcon suits and training users so that, if Wilson or Stark robs a bank or something, they can be arrested without jeopardizing national security?)
But these are all little quibbles. Overall, it was a great film, and I'm still loving the MCU. 9/10 great movies so far, and even Hulk wasn't that bad. :-D
I didn't really read it either, but from my understanding Cap mostly sided with the anti-registration side. This made him one of the "bad guys" in regards to the law, but morally in the right, seeing as the whole civil war apparently turned out to be a scheme engineered by Norman Osborn (a/k/a the original Green Goblin and Marvel's resident evil corprate megalomaniac).
That might be the appropriate solution in the REAL world, but it would only undermine the entire narative concept of there even being super heros in the first place if that kind of tech gets turned into the tools of common law enforcement.
The general conceit in such setting is that the check against any one hero going rogue is all the other heros who would then step in to take them down.