My thoughts on Captain America: The Winter Soldier (mercifully spoiler-free)

It should come as no surprise that I liked the film, but it’s important for me to discuss why I liked it.  While I admittedly tend to like just about everything, I do surprisingly put a lot of thought into my reasoning.  So here goes.  No real spoilers, unless you count really basic plot stuff that shows up in the trailers.

• The most important thing about Winter Soldier is that, while I was watching it, I finally figured out the secret of why the Marvel Studios project has been so successful: the creative teams involved do not treat ‘Superhero’ as a genre.  To them, a Superhero is a character that can be used to tell stories in any genre, but not a genre in and of itself.  Winter Soldier‘s political conspiracy storyline is a welcome addition to the Studio’s narrative oeuvre (incidentally, this word is impossible to write without a spell check), and it is probably one of the best films of that nature in recent memory.  More importantly, this movie highlights the sheer flexibility of Marvel’s brand, which is great news considering that the company has recently announced that it has plans for about fifteen more years of movies.
• Winter Soldier is a sterling example of the sort of story that Captain America does best: the eternal moral conflict between the grand ideals that America claims to stand for and the corrupt cynicism that all too often festers beneath that image.  Notably, this film plays this struggle out in ethical terms and not patriotic ones, which allows the story to deal with the issue without degenerating into a series of ideological bullet points.
• Despite the fact that the movie is entitled ‘Captain America,’ it really is a team movie like The Avengers (just, y’know, lower-key and with more espionage).  While the good Captain is our viewpoint character for most of the film, he is not its sole hero.  He, Black Widow, and Falcon are all equally important to the outcome of the plot, and I really could not call any of them ‘sidekicks’ to anyone else.  Actually, scratch that: everyone is Nick Fury’s sidekick, but that’s beside the point.
• Sam Wilson/Falcon is definitely my favourite character in the film, and I hope Marvel does more with him in the future.  I could go on all night about why I love him, so I’ll just say that his character marks the first time I’ve ever seen a work of fiction acknowledge the existence and significance of the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and leave you to see the movie for the rest.
• Black Widow is in excellent form throughout the movie, and in many ways, she helps bring the whole story together.  Her roles throughout the story range from suave spy to cunning negotiator to warrior, but perhaps most significantly she is Steve’s Vergil, guiding him into the dark netherworld of espionage.  And she’s not even a love interest, either; she shares some tender moments with Steve, but these are moments of camaraderie and mutual respect more than anything.
• Honestly, the whole cast is great.  Samuel L Jackson has always been a great Nick Fury, but Winter Soldier is probably the first chance he has had to truly humanize the character.  Robert Redford is particularly impressive as the new character Alexander Pierce, and his performance’s stoic confidence adds a lot of weight to every scene he’s in.  Hayley Atwell returns from the first Captain America for a handful of scenes, both of which broke my heart into little pieces.
• I have to make a separate bullet point to mention the fact that Danny Pudi, best known as Community‘s Abed Nadir and one of my favourite actors working today, makes a brief cameo during the film’s final act.  Sorry, but this is important to me.
• I want to talk about the actual Winter Soldier himself, but I really can’t say anything that isn’t a huge plot spoiler.  Even considering that the character’s backstory was revealed in a comic published nearly ten years ago (i.e., way past my water mark for caring about spoilers), there’s enough variation from the comic to merit my silence.  For now.
• As has become standard for Marvel Studios productions, the whole movie is replete with allusions to the company’s mythology, which is always a ton of fun.  I’m particularly pleased by the fact that one character specifically namedrops Doctor Strange, one of my favourite Marvel heroes.  The allusions also extend into Marvel’s cinematic history, including a brief reappearance of Garry Shandling as Senator Stern from Iron Man 2 (an appearance which incidentally casts his role in the older film in a much darker light).
• Unusually for a modern action movie, I noticed that Winter Soldier used slow-motion only twice (by my count) in the entire film.  The action sequences are thus much faster and more intense than those in most films of this type, which lends a greater sense of realism and urgency to the events.
• EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT TO ADD THIS THE FIRST TIME: This movie has some awesome thematic similarities to the Metal Gear franchise, especially Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.  This is personally important to me because of reasons.
• I want to say more, but perhaps now would be a good time to stop and maybe go to bed.  Anyway, it was an excellent movie.