So, I went into The Winter Soldier with a great deal of trepidation. I loved Captain America: The First Avenger the same way I loved Iron Man. These superhero movies work when you just let the story speak for itself. These are interesting characters with interesting backgrounds. But both movies are also deeply flawed. Their final act always have to end on a violent denouement. Now I get these are superheroes, fantastic beings in a fantastic world. But what makes them good is that they are deeply relatable to us: flawed, fearful, but overcome it in the end. The problem is that final act always feels tacked on, rather than well thought out like the rest of the plot. Iron Man has to fight a bigger iron man. Captain America has to fight a WWII villain with lasers and stupid, CGI visuals. These movies also tend to get sequelitis, that is they must have everything and more. Make it bigger and bigger for no reason other than spectacle. And while The Winter Soldier is bigger, it got smaller, more personal, as well, making it that rarity of rarities, a sequel that is actually better than the original.
The Winter Soldier is fairly simple enough. Cap (Chris Evans) now works for Nick Fury and SHIELD. It opens with him on a mission with a team of SHIELD agents including Black Widow (Scarlett Johannsen) to free a SHIELD carrier from pirates. They succeed, but Black Widow also downloads a bunch of data from the computers to give to Fury. Cap has a hard time with this and confronts Fury, and sets up the central theme of the film: Trust. Who can be or is worthy of trust? This plays beautifully for Cap as he is a man out of time, coming from an earlier and earnest age. He is the idealistic Superman to Fury's pragmatic Batman. Cap threatens to resign, but then Fury is attacked in an assassination attempt by a mysterious assassin, the Winter Soldier, a Soviet relic from the Cold War. Fury, near death, contacts Cap to help him, saying SHIELD is overrun internally by agents from the evil HYDRA group. Cap agrees, and sets off with Black Widow to foil HYDRA's latest gambit. They even intorduce The Falcon, Cap's partner since the 1970's comic.
Now, I know this plot description doesn't say much, but I don't want to spoil anything. Suffice to say, it is a lot of fun. But what really makes this film so good is that it works on many levels. One, Cap is a morally upright guy from a bygone age working in an organization whose mission deals with moral shades of gray. It also deals centrally with the issue of trust, trust in Fury, trust in the Black Widow, trust in the mission, trust in the team, trust in the worldview. All of these elements get rocked in Cap's world, a man dedicated to good and what's right. It really gets into Cap's head and how he tries to reconcile this alien world and all its complexity. Cap is not an idealist. He has seen the ugliness of war and yet still fights for what is right. His eyes are wide open, but his heart refuses to give into the easier, morally ambiguous route and let darkness overtake him. To him, the ends never justify the means. While in The Avengers, this makes him almost a characicture, in this movie, that earnestness is what makes him great. This movie also works from the fact it is really a mystery movie, full of intrigue. No gods or space monsters to destroy the Earth here. Mostly a whodunit, an onion with layers to peel. I liked the change of scope. It's still a superhero movie, but it is much more personal. In the end, these are the movies I find good. Unfortunately, the movie gets a little muddled with plot. It loses it's way occasionally, but I am willing to bet that was post-production cuts. Coincidences happen, big plot points suddenly resolved, that sort of thing. But all in all, a great film, probably the best Marvel film next to Iron Man.
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