My Favourite Movies: Captain America – The Winter Soldier

If the addition of this movie to my favourites list surprises you don’t worry, it surprised me too. My regular readers and people who know me IRL will know that I don’t ‘do’ superhero movies – to say nothing of movies based on comic books (something I really don’t ‘get’). Despite that fact I have seen my fair share of this seemingly endless deluge of Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Hulk, Thor and other character movies that has been pouring out of Hollywood for years now. Most of what I’ve seen has been somewhere between poor and, at best, reasonably entertaining. Most though have frankly bored the pants off me and I have started to refuse to view them when my friends trot off to see the latest blockbuster. I did however relent with Winter Soldier because I thought that the trailer looked different, looked interesting, looked adult (rather than teenage as usual) and looked unusually dark and complex.

Of course I worried, with good reason, that the trailer had shown all of the good bits and that I would sit through 131 minutes of largely padding between set action scenes where they blow up major parts of major cities (usually including Paris and London for some reason) but I was actually very pleasantly surprised. Not everything it seemed had been given away by the trailer. That in itself is something worthy of note. Now I had seen the original Captain America movie and thought that it was OK (but just OK) as it was hampered by the usual problem of first franchise movies – having both to stay true to the original comic books whilst bringing the character to the attention of an audience potentially unfamiliar with the back story. It worked, for me at least, but was rather dull I thought. The second movie, having got the background stuff out of the way (notwithstanding the Cap’s stroll through the Smithsonian Museum for those who hadn’t seen the first movie), could move forward with new ideas and new storylines. The thing I found fascinating almost from the off is the conflict between the Captain’s 1940s sensibilities and morality and the early 21st century which is, let’s be honest, one huge grey area. In effect the whole movie was trying to answer the question: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (answered beautifully at one point by the comment that the bad guys are the ones shooting at us!). That for me was the selling point of the movie. It was complex, multi-layered, grey, messy and unresolved (largely) at the end. People died (but didn’t), friends became enemies, trusted players turned out to be the worst baddies, peace became order, freedom was replaced by fear, democracy was replaced by force and the worst of tyrannies was considered to be progress, all at the hands of an agency dedicated to the exact opposite. Complex doesn’t really begin to cover it. It was positively and intelligently labyrinthine. That was another definite selling point. Despite all of the usual, and excellently choreographed, fight scenes, despite all the gunfire and explosions, despite the flying aircraft carries (I kid you not) and the expected excellent special effects, this was underneath it all an intelligent movie. That’s not something we see much of these days. Taken at face value this was just another in a long line of wham bam, thank you mam, blow the shit out of everything summer blockbuster. But that was just the surface sparkle to keep the kids happy and glued to the screen for two hours. Beneath the surface however was a movie about power, about corruption, about values, about the wrong way and the right way of doing things, about trust, about friendship, about honour and duty, about protecting the weak and bringing down the strong if necessary no matter who they are.

This film pits outcasts and misfits against the power-elite and their hired minions (and not the fun yellow kind). It has leaders we cannot trust on one side – none more so than Robert Redford in some inspired casting – with salt of the earth types on the other. The action, and there’s plenty of that, is almost a backdrop to the real story inside the shiny outer coating. Beyond the dazzle there is, surprise of surprise, actual substance which is what makes this movie for me. The fact that there are super-heroes and, very much in the background, super-baddies is almost irrelevant. The movie portrays a struggle against two opposing ideologies that are actually fighting it out in the streets, alleyways and battlefields across the world right now as you’re reading this piece of fluff. That’s the real core of the movie if you can, and want to, see beyond the spectacle. That’s what surprised me and pleased me about this movie which I enjoyed just as much this weekend on DVD as I did some months ago at the movies. The more I watch it the more I see the nuances and the subtlety (not something usually associated with Hollywood blockbusters) and the more I raise an eyebrow and the more I raise a smile. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have good actors (Chris Evans is very good as the Captain and Scarlett Johansson is obviously have a lot of fun playing Black Widow as is Sam Jackson as Nick Fury who hams it up gloriously) a script which moves at breakneck speed and top notch SFX but that’s there to keep the teenagers and movie executives happy. It’s the subtext that really counts, that’s where the real story is and that, for me at least, is where most of the fun was.