With last year’s Iron Man and Thor outings behind them, moviegoing are beginning this year’s serving of Marvel movies this week with Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The movie landed in Australian cinemas last week and SydneySocial101 is here with our review of the superpowered spy thriller.
The movie picks up after the events of The Avengers with Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) trying to balance his role as a soldier within SHIELD and attempting to make sense of and find his way in a world very different to the one he knew in the his first film. After a bold attempt on Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) life by a mysterious assassin known as The Winter Soldier, Rogers and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) find themselves both on the run and dragged into a web of conspiracy and intrigue that ties just as much to the SHIELD we know from previous Marvel movies as it does the Captain’s own past.
I think at this point, Captain America has actually become a character whose movies requires more suspension of disbelief than the cosmic and mythological Thor’s do. The first film threw war movies, super soldiers, red-skinned Nazi’s and alien artifacts into a blender and ended up creating something that was very unlike any of the other movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Winter Soldier is very different to its predecessor but when it comes to the movie’s conceptual and structural aspects, it bears more than a few similarities with The First Avenger. That said, where the first Captain America movie was a period/war movie, The Winter Soldier is very much trying to be a spy/political thriller – and the movie comes together quite well in this aspect.
For a pair of directors who prior to The Winter Soldier have spent most of their time with NBC’s Sitcom Community, Anthony and Joe Russo do a great job with the direction in the film. The direction feels very cohesive with the rest of the Marvel’s filmography and also helps the film nail that ‘Spy-Thriller’ vibe that is so desperately works to capture. The movie also had some really tight and fantastically choreographed fight scenes – especially when it came to the confrontations between The Winter Soldier and Captain America (the sound effect with The Soldier’s robot arms collides with Cap’s Shield was delightfully satisfying to hear).
One of the most fascinating aspects to Captain America is his commitment to old fashioned idealism and his consequent struggle to reconcile that with the realities of today’s conflicts. While this side of his character that was criminally underused in The Avengers, The Winter Soldier makes this character struggle the centerpiece of the movie (much to my delight). The way that Rogers pushes up against the idea of punishment coming before the crime and the way that modern warfare works is really interesting to watch play out. As much as the movie is about Captain America in the modern world, there are a lot of plotlines that carry over and evolve from his WW2 adventures – which fans of that first movie will really dig and appreciate.
The Winter Soldier also does a great job of expanding the cast with both the titular Winter Soldier and Sam Wilson AKA The Falcon (Anthony Mackie) making strong additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Robert Redford also does a great job as the film’s not-initially-obvious-but-also-kinda-obvious villain, Alexander Pierce. The movie ends on a high note with a huge climactic battle sequence that almost puts the third act of The Avengers to shame as well as leaving enough loose ends to give audiences some idea where the already confirmed Captain America 3 will be heading.
The biggest thing that’s going to come out The Winter Soldier is definitely going to be the revelations that come in the later half of the movie. The movie has big implications for every other franchise in the Marvel universe from eagerly-anticipated Avengers 2 to the hit-and-miss Agents of Shield TV show. Unfortunately because the movie spends so much time on these franchise-wide implications, it does suffer from some of the same problems that Iron Man 2 had.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is another great outing for Marvel. Although it’s definitely a movie that’s going to best enjoyed by superhero-enthusiasts in the same way that the Cap’s first outing was, it’s still a blast to watch and there are a lot of big events in the movie that viewers looking forward to Avengers 2 will want to tune in for.
8/10