Captain America: The Winter Soldier

[Frenetic Pony]

I just watched this. I really like the part where capt America kicks people and they fly like 20ft.

 

Yeah the over the top Cap stuff was fun, he actually felt like a ridiculous comic book guy this time around instead of just "typical action hero with a shield".

 

But... I don't know. I mean the action was quite well filmed usually and felt really kinetic. Scarlett Johanson is hot and she's in a skintight outfit a lot. There are explosions.

 

Maybe I'm just getting burned out on Marvel and superhero stuff. I enjoyed it, but I was never totally engaged. After all this is the 7th Marvel movie I've seen. The formula kinda wears out you know? The bad guys all kinda look the same. The hero's gotta save the shit at the last minute. Oh no

Samuel L. Jackson didn't die! Of course he didn't, his only weakness is animal monsters. We all know that.

 

Maybe it's just become too much the same for me. Or maybe it's just me and there's something here that didn't click with me, even though it obviously did for a lot of reviewers and whatnot. Which is weird cause I liked Iron Man 3 well enough and think Guardians of the Galaxy looks good. Maybe it was just that the movies tone is too self serious, and I kind of expect Marvel to be more fun than that.

 

Also, wtf crack are you guys smoking Constantine was horrendous. Maybe I just hate the straight faced gravelly good guy with no personality routine. If you're a good guy be, Han Solo or John McClane. Crack some jokes and shit. Don't just stare off into the distance all the time taking yourself so seriously. Ugh, Christian Bale's robot Bruce Wayne, the worst.

[TheLastBaron]

Maybe I just hate the straight faced gravelly good guy with no personality routine.

This is the exact opposite of Constantine and the fact that no one realized this made the movie super funny for me because it was such a bizarro take on the character. They took a snarky British con-man based on Sting and thought, let's change his name, make him American, and we can get Keanu Reeves.

Also I agree with the Christian Bale as Batman sentiment. I can't stand him as Batman, to the point that I skipped the third movie just because of him. I liked The Dark Knight, but solely because of everyone who isn't Bruce Wayne. I really like Christian Bale too, just not here.

[SecretAsianMan]

Also I agree with the Christian Bale as Batman sentiment. I can't stand him as Batman, to the point that I skipped the third movie just because of him. I liked The Dark Knight, but solely because of everyone who isn't Bruce Wayne. I really like Christian Bale too, just not here.

 

I felt that way about Tobey Maguire in Spiderman, except I don't really like him all that much.

 

I liked watching Shia LaBeouf get thrown around in Constantine.

 

In general I enjoy the Marvel movies.  I don't think they're great, or even all that good (except the Avengers, which I liked a whole lot) but I enjoy them for what they are.  The only one I had any serious problems with was Ironman 3.  That movie has so many plot holes it drove me nuts, even by comic book movie standards.

[Brannigan]

With Constantine I just enjoyed the world and a lot of the non Keanu Reeves characters.  Again I enjoyed Peter Stormare's brief turn as satan, that was fun.

 

Edit: Rachel Weisz was basically keanu but female. so that was bad too.

[Merus]

I really enjoyed this, and for the reasons I hoped I would. There's lots of stupid little things that don't make sense but this is an archetype movie, and the things that needed to be there were there: the villains were the reasonable moral-compromise, end-justifies-the-means kind of people, and Cap punched those people in the face. I appreciate that Marvel is pretty comfortable porting real-world conflicts and concerns into the realm of superheroes.

 

I'm really curious to see what happens with Guardians of the Galaxy.

[Dewar]

This movie was talked up a lot to me, which I think sent me in with unreachable expectations. Still I think it's probably my second favorite Marvel film behind Ironman 1, so that's cool. It helped that, despite Captain America being one of my favorite Marvel characters, I didn't know a lot of the details about the twists and turns in the movie. I was actually caught by surprise a couple of times, which is a rairity for me in cinema today. I'm looking forward to catching up on the last few episodes of Agents of Shield to see how that all changes.

[Sno]

I really loved Winter Solider, thought it was a great movie. I don't know how i'd rank the other MCU movies, but Winter Soldier is right up near the top. There's so much that works about that movie, any issues i could raise are so minor. (I liked the first movie a whole lot too, but it's so different.)

Arnim Zola totally pulling the Bond villain thing kind of made me want to yell "fuck you!" at the screen, the movie had seemed too smart up until that point to just go do an info dump like that, but then it did it anyways. So close. Also, the fights on the boat in the first act also had some pretty indecipherable shakey cam going on, and the way Falcon flies around in the third act looks kind of terrible, like there's no real weight or inertia to his motion.

That's about all i got, everything else was stellar. (Maybe the scene with the minigun dude was straining believability a bit. He probably should have tried to aim for the legs, Cap's shield isn't exactly all that big.)

You know, and they infuse this movie will all these hot-button issues, and then maybe the gravitas of the conflict is lost a bit when the plot twist is THEY'RE ALL NAZIS.

Robert Redford made for a goddamned great villain though, and it was awesome to see Samuel L Jackson's Nick Fury finally have a substantive role. His car chase, in particular, is probably one of the highlights of the film.

The thing i'm finding admirable about the MCU is the consistency of that franchise. It's nine goddamned films in, and when i think of the worst movie in that series, it's a movie i still mostly enjoyed. (Right now, i'm thinking Dark World is probably the most problematic entry in the series. I also think Iron Man 2 is way more forgiveable now that the things it tried to set up have actually paid off, even though later films ended up being much better at seeding in connections without pulling away from the main narrative. It's a different kind of filmmaking though, this huge interconnected thing.)

There are so many other studios preparing efforts to try and mimic the succes Marvel has had with the MCU, and i'm pretty sure most of them are going to fail hilariously. (I want to believe JJ Abrams and Disney can pull off their plans for Star Wars, and that's probably the only one i'm hopeful for.)

Probably one of the things that has been keeping the MCU thriving is their willingness to play around with different tones and even completely different genres, the DC/WB films could probably learn from that.

 

The only one I had any serious problems with was Ironman 3.  That movie has so many plot holes it drove me nuts, even by comic book movie standards.

Which plot holes?

[SecretAsianMan]

I honestly don't even remember them all at this point.  The 2 that I can recall are

 

Why he waited until the end of the movie to take the shrapnel out of his chest.  The entire point of that thing was that it couldn't be removed and he needed a glowing light in his chest to keep him alive which he uses to power an armored suit.  It basically renders his self-destructive behavior in Iron Man 2 entirely pointless because apparently he could have had it removed and not needed an arc reactor at all.  Maybe there was some kind of explanation as to why it had to happen in that movie, but if there was I missed it, which is pretty bad since it's kind of a big deal.

 

The other was the Dr. Hanson's death.  Not the fact that she died, the way that she died.  She threatens to inject herself and blow up like the others, then Killian just shoots her.  She doesn't die instantly if I recall, which means the she could have still injected herself and either 1) survived because the treatment would heal her or 2) blown up like she threatened to do.  If she didn't blow herself up because Stark was there, then it was a pretty crappy threat to begin with.

 

I probably had other things at the time that bothered me but I disliked that movie enough to push most of it out of my mind.

[Sno]

Alright, yeah. The ending definitely bugged me a lot. "This thing that we've established over the course of the prior two movies as an inoperable threat to the character's life that requires this elaborate electromagnet to hold in check? Let's just go contradict all of that in a throwaway scene."

There are a lot of things in that movie that are erroneously cited as plotholes though, like people always pointing out the thing with him not calling on the suits until the end of the movie, despite there being multiple scenes to establish that his lab is buried under rubble. It's only cleared away in the third act, and he immediately takes advantage of it.

[cyrix]

I honestly don't even remember them all at this point.  The 2 that I can recall are

 

Why he waited until the end of the movie to take the shrapnel out of his chest.  The entire point of that thing was that it couldn't be removed and he needed a glowing light in his chest to keep him alive which he uses to power an armored suit.  It basically renders his self-destructive behavior in Iron Man 2 entirely pointless because apparently he could have had it removed and not needed an arc reactor at all.  Maybe there was some kind of explanation as to why it had to happen in that movie, but if there was I missed it, which is pretty bad since it's kind of a big deal.

 

The other was the Dr. Hanson's death.  Not the fact that she died, the way that she died.  She threatens to inject herself and blow up like the others, then Killian just shoots her.  She doesn't die instantly if I recall, which means the she could have still injected herself and either 1) survived because the treatment would heal her or 2) blown up like she threatened to do.  If she didn't blow herself up because Stark was there, then it was a pretty crappy threat to begin with.

 

I probably had other things at the time that bothered me but I disliked that movie enough to push most of it out of my mind.

I think the implication was supposed to be that

the serum the bad guys used (or something derived from it) is what allowed the surgery to be successful.

the thing with the doctor lady kinda bothered me too though.

[SecretAsianMan]

I think the implication was supposed to be that

the serum the bad guys used (or something derived from it) is what allowed the surgery to be successful.

the thing with the doctor lady kinda bothered me too though.

 

I suppose that makes some sense, but it's still dumb because that seems like the kind of thing they would explicitly point out.

[Merus]

The thing i'm finding admirable about the MCU is the consistency of that franchise. It's nine goddamned films in, and when i think of the worst movie in that series, it's a movie i still mostly enjoyed. (Right now, i'm thinking Dark World is probably the most problematic entry in the series. I also think Iron Man 2 is way more forgiveable now that the things it tried to set up have actually paid off, even though later films ended up being much better at seeding in connections without pulling away from the main narrative. It's a different kind of filmmaking though, this huge interconnected thing.)

There are so many other studios preparing efforts to try and mimic the succes Marvel has had with the MCU, and i'm pretty sure most of them are going to fail hilariously. (I want to believe JJ Abrams and Disney can pull off their plans for Star Wars, and that's probably the only one i'm hopeful for.)

Probably one of the things that has been keeping the MCU thriving is their willingness to play around with different tones and even completely different genres, the DC/WB films could probably learn from that.

 

I agree with all of this; I think the thing that's making it work is Kevin Feige, who appears to have learnt how to pick directors who can bring something new to the material while still respecting the universe (probably to the detriment of Agents of Shield, but pfft), but they don't get too precious about the film universe if it'll make for a better story. And because he knows the comic books well, he's worked out how to encourage directors and writers to ask for minor characters they can introduce. Like the mercenary in this film; potentially a generic mercenary, but because they went to Marvel and got an actual villain you've got someone who has a backstory and a little personality to him.

 

But man, now I'm thinking about the similarities between the Marvel universe and Fast and the Furious in terms of audience expectations.

[Frenetic Pony]

I think the implication was supposed to be that

the serum the bad guys used (or something derived from it) is what allowed the surgery to be successful.

the thing with the doctor lady kinda bothered me too though.

 

Doctor lady made sense, she didn't have the super power thing, she was just threatening to kill herself because she thought Guy Pearce needed her and she wanted Tony to be let go. Pearce says he's got Stark now so doesn't need her, then shoots her because he's a dick and why waste time?

 

I also hope The Avengers 2 doesn't go Winter Soldier. I like the first cause it was stupid fun and a stark contrast to the "dark gritty" bullshit from Batman and Man of Steel. I like The Dark Knight cause at least Heath Ledger is having fun. I honestly can't stand most self serious comic book stuff though. You're dressed as a bat, get over yourself.

[Sno]

I agree with all of this; I think the thing that's making it work is Kevin Feige, who appears to have learnt how to pick directors who can bring something new to the material while still respecting the universe (probably to the detriment of Agents of Shield, but pfft), but they don't get too precious about the film universe if it'll make for a better story. And because he knows the comic books well, he's worked out how to encourage directors and writers to ask for minor characters they can introduce. Like the mercenary in this film; potentially a generic mercenary, but because they went to Marvel and got an actual villain you've got someone who has a backstory and a little personality to him.

 

But man, now I'm thinking about the similarities between the Marvel universe and Fast and the Furious in terms of audience expectations.

Absolutely, I don't think there's really any question that Feige is the reason it all works.

This piece was making the rounds a few days ago and i think it's a pretty interesting read.

[Roderick]

I almost entirely agree with Sno. I saw The Winter Soldier yesterday and found it a completely compelling, riveting movie. I loved how they dialled back most of the superhero action in the first half in favor of more down-'n-dirty stuff with cars and people abseiling. And when the goofy stuff does happen (Zola), it's sprinkled light enough to work and has at that point been built up so well it's totally agreeable.

Zola's scene in particular was golden. How could you not like it? This was straight out of Portal 2! This was Aperture Science in the 70s with all the hilarious data tapes and ancient monitors! What an amazing pay-off. Sure, 'them nazis' is kind of a cop-out, but you didn't actually want this to be a Bourne movie, did you? At the end of the day, there has to be a satisfying comic book villain, and I feel like they earned every single thing by setting it up with such style and care.

All in all, among the top films in the MCU, ranking right after Iron Man in my book.

[Bjorn]

Went to see this last night and it was a ton of fun!  My original reaction to the Zola scene matched Sno's reaction, but Rodi comparing it to Aperture Science makes me soften on that a bit. 

 

And this movie confirmed my long held fan theory that Nick Fury is in fact Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction!  After abandoning a life of crime, Jules wanders the Earth for awhile before reinventing himself as Nick Fury to act as a force of good rather than evil. 

 

Best Easter Egg ever that confirms this is:

 

The engraving on Nick Fury's tombstone at the end reads "The path of the righteous man: Ezekiel 25: 17." It got a legitimate belly laugh out of me, which several people looked at me oddly for.