Before I review Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in the interest of full disclosure, there's something you need to know about me. In junior high and high school, when my friends were talking about the homecoming dance or the big game, I was probably somewhere deeply involved in a debate over the differences between the Uncanny X-Men and its teenage spin off, The New Mutants. When my peers were busily studying for an important exam, I was busily arranging my comic collection into alphabetical and numerical order. In other words, my friends, I was a gigantic comic book nerd. I still am actually, and this means I am kind of already in the tank when it comes to comic book movies.
This is not to say that I love every film featuring superheroes. We all know there have been some terrible cinematic atrocities committed in the name of Stan Lee over the last few years. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner as Daredevil and Elektra? The two nightmarish, borderline fever dreams of badness that were the Fantastic Four movies? No, I haven't taken leave of my senses enough to approve of garbage water like that.
But I root for superhero movies, for them to be good, for them to succeed. I want to be swept up and exhilarated by them the way I was by the comics when I was a kid. So I'm less likely to analyze a comic book movie for its thematic unity or aesthetic accomplishment and am more likely to rate it on a fourteen year old teen age boy's scale of Awesome-osity.
So how does the new Captain America film rate? Quite well, actually.
It's a sequel to 2011's The First Avenger which was purposefully and gloriously square in its narrative and aesthetics. The movie was intended to echo the "Go get 'em, boys!" films of the World War II period in which most of the film is set.
Winter Solider finds Captain America reawakened in the 21st century and trying to adjust to life as the world's fittest 94 year old man. He works as an agent of SHIELD, the shadowy super-spy organization that makes the CIA and FBI look like the Keystone Cops, and he is generally the fastest, strongest, most moral guy in town. All of those characteristics make him stick out but some more than others.
This film hearkens to the past, but not the patriotic, up-by-your-bootstraps days of the 40s and 50. Instead, the film evokes the paranoid, corruption-behind-every-door-of-power vibe of the 1970s. The film cinematically name-drops All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, and The Conversation. The Washington D.C. setting, unexpected double crosses from trusted friends, lean economical visual storytelling, and the clever casting of Robert Redford as an important government figure are all meant to make us feel as though we're meeting in a shadowy parking garage and a dark figure in the corner is telling us to "follow the money."
The film uses a not terribly veiled allegory to address ongoing questions we face as post-911 Americans. I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that SHIELD has developed a super weapon - new helicarriers (the flying battleships seen in the Avengers movie) that can target and kill literally millions at a time. Steve Rogers, Cap's civilian alter ego, questions the wisdom of having a weapon that powerful and far reaching. Who gets to decide who is an acceptable target? Who determines who is so great a risk that they warrant high tech death from above with no warning? The helicarriers could easily be read as superhero-sized versions of the drones we have patrolling the skies in war zones and who knows where else across the world. The characters are storyline are fantastic and spectacular in the truest sense of both of those words, but some of the concerns raised by the film are surprisingly real world. It's a little on-the-nose at times, but any comic book movie that asks its audience to weigh the value of freedom versus safety is doing something interesting in my opinion.
For all that, it's still a superhero movie, and we are treated some pretty great action sequences. One of the opening scenes takes place on a hijacked ship, and the fluid camera movement follows Captain America as he almost single-handedly shuts down a small army of pirate-terrorists. The action is crisp, exciting, and importantly, comprehensible. Some directors in this genre, Christopher Nolan among them, seem to think that filming a fight sequence as though you're the one getting beaten up is a good way to go. Thankfully, the directing duo of brothers Anthony and Joe Russo are more of the "let's let the audience know what in the world is going on" school of thought when it comes to action. Cap's battles with Batroc the French mercenary, the Winter Solider, and an elevator packed with a dozen trained fighters all rate high on my scale of Awesome-tude.
The movie is a bit of a rarity - an exciting, well-made superhero movie that takes itself somewhat seriously and manages to pull off more than just snark and spectacle. Captain America is the most sincere and self-serious of contemporary heroes, and this movie manages to create a nice, fizzy friction between his "old fashioned" ethics and morals and the 21st century's cynicism and distrust. Scarlett Johnanson returns to the Marvel comic book movie world with her signature brand of unexpected violence and very expected sex appeal as the Black Widow, and Anthony Mackie makes an auspicious debut as the Falcon with one of the coolest movie jet packs I've ever seen.
So, in this case, the fourteen year old comic book nerd in me is satisfied and the forty year old movie critic is pretty pleased too. Lucky for me, even though both those guys are happy, I only had to pay admission once.
