Captain America: 21st Century Edition
by Andrew Collins
For a film with hardly a single original moment, Captain America: The Winter Soldier performs surprisingly well.
Wrap Bourne, Minority Report, and Olympus Has Fallen into the Marvel universe and you might get something like this film. Chris Evans and the S.H.I.E.L.D. gang (Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow) make a fine showing beating up baddies and saving the day in the capital of the free world.
Every new Marvel film ups the ante on action sequences, and The Winter Soldier picks up where Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 left off. Instead of an army of Iron Man Suits or Dark Elf spaceships we have dogfights around not one, but three hover-carrier-gunships. During it all, Captain America demonstrates ad nauseum his prowess in hand-to-hand combat and indestructible-shield-throwing. It was cool and all, during the first action sequence when Cap and company freed the hostages from a hijacked ship, but two hours and countless bodies and bullets later — and even when he finally meets his match in the cyborgian “Winter Soldier” — I had grown desensitized.
How many punches, stun guns, and hundred-foot falls does it take to bring down Captain America? We may never know.
More problematic than the action sequences, from a storytelling standpoint, are the huge technological leaps the film takes in order to further the plot. Instead of deus ex machina we have technica ex machina (I don’t know Latin, but you get the point). Is a good guy in a tight spot? Why not give him a handy little tool that can melt through ten feet of asphalt in seconds? No way to infiltrate enemy headquarters? Well it just so happens that Black Widow has some shape-shifting material that makes her look exactly like a world leader from another country.
[SPOILER:] Was Nick Fury pronounced dead in the hospital after multiple gunshot wounds? No problem, Bruce Banner came up with a drug that slows the pulse down to one beat a minute.
Some people may find this sci-fi-caliber tech creative and cool; I say too many super-gadgets makes for cheap storytelling.
The Winter Soldier is not without its strong points, however.
In contemporary Washington, D.C., Captain America must confront a decidedly more postmodern world than the one in which he fought against the Nazi’s Hydra, 70 years in the past. Serving in the Army was much more black and white then, Cap tells an aging Peggy Carter. You followed orders, and yes, even though you may have done some terrible deeds in battle, the cause was just. Freedom was on the line.
But military tactics and goals have changed, and with them has disappeared much of battle’s traditional nobility. After S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury sends him to handle a hostage situation while giving Black Widow a separate assignment, Captain America questions whether he can still trust the orders coming from the shadowy higher-ups. He’s in the business of protecting freedom, after all, not serving as a tool for the powers that be.
His skeptical premonitions prove accurate as he discovers that Hydra lives on and has embedded itself in S.H.I.E.L.D. with nefarious intent. This conflict marks the film’s strongest quality, as Captain America’s doubt taps into today’s increasingly legitimized fears of mass government surveillance, concerns over eroding personal privacy, and debates about the expediency of military intervention. Without compromising his idealism or integrity, it moves him past his flag-waving origins and makes him relevant for the 21st century.
His experience mirrors our own, after all. Nations and institutions often look black and white to the naïve and others looking on from the outside. With real-world experience among these institutions, however, this perception often crumbles into confusion and disillusionment. Before we know it we’ve found ourselves caught among competing forces in a world where we’re not sure who to trust.
Captain America, with his moral compass ever steady, provides the ideal we long for to lead us on the true path. He’s the man we wish we had at the helm of our armed forces, the man who sadly does not exist in a world in which all have turned aside to corruption.
And in the end, that — more than his fist-and-shield prowess — makes him a superhero.
