Hey! Would you mind telling us your opinion on Bucky being put in cryo in CACW?
Oh man. Oh man. I almost wish you hadn’t asked me this because I go really back and forth on this.
First off you’ll probably need to know that I think that A) Bucky is currently being used as a glorified plot device and B) his writing in CACW is not good. Also, C) I am not really invested in Bucky Barnes.
On the one hand: I appreciate that Bucky used his customary One Act of Free Will Per Movie to make the smart choice not just for himself, but for everybody. Bucky really wasn’t a part of the fight over the Accords, and I find it amusingly ironic that he probably was the most accountable for his actions, in a way. I appreciate the sacrifice that he made to make sure that he couldn’t hurt anyone else, even though he wasn’t responsible for what happened.
On the other: It feels cheap? It’s frustrating. We spent an entire movie watching Steve Rogers fight for this man’s freedom, and he goes back in the deep freeze. It’s not actually irritating for me, at least, because it was Bucky’s choice, but its also kinda symptomatic of why I don’t feel too attached to Bucky: we never get any chance to know him. We didn’t in CATWS because of the programming, understandable, we didn’t in CACW, a movie that explored his mysterious past with HYDRA and was ostensibly about saving his life? Ridiculous. And now the next time we see him he’s either going to be freshly defrosted or he’s just going to be somewhere with Steve with no explanation. Unless they interject him in the Black Panther movie in which case I will flip so many tables.
Now, it’s not like we’d get to know Bucky much if he had remained defrosted at the end, but it’d be a lot easier to swallow any character development they might shove at us in Infinity War.
Other reason it bugs: Bucky Barnes, as a character, appears to be fairly pragmatic, in contrast to Steve’s hotheadedness/recklessness. In this movie about accountability and shifting blame and brainwashing, Bucky Barnes has the guts and the strength to sit there and say “But I did it.” And I...kinda really admired this? Here was a person acknowledging that it wasn’t his fault but still laying claim to some responsibility for what he did. It’s not the self-loathing guilt Tony Stark embarks on or the walls the Steve Rogers puts up so everything just bounces off of him, just - acceptance. Here is what happened, and here is my part in it. And it wasn’t okay.
I would have loved an ending that indicated Bucky was going to actually do something with this. I don’t know what, maybe fighting to clear his name, or using his information on HYDRA to atone for his involuntary part in their madness, or something. Not this passiveness that infects everything Bucky does now. I need Bucky to actually be useful to the narrative, to add to it, not just be a Steve Rogers’ Accessory Now With Robot Kung-Fu Grip. Cryo is not a new beginning for Bucky, it’s just another Romania, a waiting area until Bucky as a character can be hauled out and used to further someone else’s storyline again.
But cryo was also Bucky’s choice, and it was responsible and thoughtful, and I don’t want to take the dignity of it away from the character.
