i say this all the time, but it can always be said again. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the best marvel movie, and I have three points as to why:
1. TWS has the best A plot (hydra) and the best B plot/emotional plot (steve trying to learn to live in the world, bucky showing up, etc.).
The main conflict feels REAL, especially when you watch it now, a U.S. intelligence agency that is secretly overrun with Nazi’s, who intend to scare the world into submission and use their targeting weapons to kill off everyone they see as a potential threat to their power? I mean you can’t say it didn’t age well. But that aside, it’s done well. The slow gradual reveal of what is actually going on, the idea that Fury and the Good Guys™ in SHEILD had absolutely no clue until it was literally shooting at them, it’s all executed with perfection, and its pulled off even better because of the way we see Steve reacting BEFORE the reveal. Steve is insistent, throughout the movie, that something isn’t right. He doesn’t trust Fury, he is angry with him when he finds out Natasha was sent to retrieve information from the ship during the hostage situation, and he is very clear that what SHEILD is doing with Project Insight is wrong, when he delivers probably my favourite steve line in the whole series. (I’m not sure who the gif is by pls lemme know if its yours so i can credit you!)
“By holding a gun to everyone on earth and calling it protection. (…) Yeah we compromised, sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well, but we did it so that people could be free. This isn’t freedom, this is fear.”
It sets my favourite character arc in the MCU, following through Civil War all the way into Endgame, where Steve doubles down on his line in The First Avenger, “I don’t like bullies, I don’t care where they’re from.” The A plot of this movie not only has all the makings of a great political action thriller, it also has the best characterisation of Steve Rogers in the MCU, and allows itself to be a serious film, without undercutting the seriousness of the moments with any of the jokey quips that often plague a good marvel movie (theres a great discussion of Marvel’s use of Bathos in their movies in this video).
And then they tie it into the B plot, the emotional plot and character arc of Steve, in an extraordinary way. This is my favourite B plot, probably of any movie ever. It allows our main hero character to be all of the things male heroes so rarely get to be. He’s emotional, he’s nostalgic, he’s sad, filled with grief and loss. Steve spends this movie in a very dark and lonely place. He seems to have few actual friends, before he meets Sam. He doesn’t trust Natasha or Fury, Peggy is old and has dementia, and from what they show us, he doesn’t seem to have any other real personal relationships. He spends his free time at the museum where they have carefully cataloged the life of “Captain America” for the world to see. He spends the movie trying to figure out not only where he fits in this new world, but if the new world even has a place for Steve Rogers, rather than Captain America. The emotional beats come hard, one after another, and the movie absolutely nails them all. He goes to the museum, he looks at the display about Bucky, he’s grieving the loss of his brother, his best friend. He sees Peggy, he’s truly grieving the life he didn’t get to spend with her. The reveal of Bucky as The Winter Soldier is so powerful, because Steve, in the middle of a fight for his life, becomes a dazed, confused man completely stunned, to the point where he gets himself caught, because he can’t react. He puts on the Cap 1 suit to fight Bucky, because he’s allowed himself to believe that the only part of him that matters is Cap, but then its Steve, not Cap, who pulls Bucky back from the brink. We see our hero willing to die rather than kill his friend, even though he knows letting Bucky live is dangerous, because Bucky is his friend, and he loves him. Bucky embodies everything Steve lost, and Steve finds him again, and is determined to save him. Bucky is the personal side of what Hydra is doing.
The main political/action thriller plot alongside a deeply moving emotional B plot about loss, grief, recovery, and saving the people you love, even to the point of losing yourself pair perfectly, with incredible pacing and storytelling, to make an absolutely spectacular movie (not just a good marvel movie, but a great movie, period).
2. Every single action sequence is absolutely spectacular.
I mean we have the Lemurian Star fight, where Steve takes out like 20 dudes and then goes HARD against Batroc:
We have the Fury Car Chase:
The Iconic Elevator Fight where Steve takes down 15 dudes in an elevator literally with one arm tied behind his back for part of the fight (and is immediately followed by Steve taking out an entire airplane with just his shield):
The Causeway Scene, where Steve, Sam, Nat, and Winter Soldier!Bucky all shine:
and the final fight on the Helicarriers, which ties the emotional B plot into the action so splendidly:
Not one of these scenes misses the mark, or feels lackluster. The action is incredibly well choreographed and beautifully executed, the score is intense and chilling and unique, and the scenes all manage to have emotional depth or character/plot relevance to them while still being brilliant standalone actions sequences. Which leads perfectly into my third point, because the fight scenes in this movie exist not only to show us cool action, but also to tell us something about the characters.
3. The Winter Soldier gives Steve, Natasha, Sam, and Bucky, the main characters of the movie, each the chance to be fully developed characters.
Steve becomes a fully fledged character in The Winter Soldier, he comes into his own. He stops trying to be who he thinks the world wants him to be, and decides to finally make choices for himself, and be the person he feels like he’s supposed to be. He is compelling, multifaceted, and his characterization, as a take no shit kid from Brooklyn who doesn’t like bullies, who believes in the idea of what America is supposed to be and fights for the idea, not the actual entity, is flawless formed in this movie. His fight scenes also give him more personality as the movie goes. He’s an absolute TANK in this movie, we see his strength for what it really is, what it was always meant to be, absolutely super human. He can barrel through walls, jump from a plane without a chute, incapacitate (but not kill) 20 guys all on his own, and none of it even seems like a challenge until he has to fight Bucky. His fighting style is acrobatic, fast, but also controlled and measured, he understands his own strength now, and he knows how to use it.
Natasha also finally has a chance to become a more full character. In the Iron Man movies, she’s the Sexy Femme Fatale who knows Fury, but she doesn’t have much depth. In Avengers, we learn more about her, we see more parts of her, but she still exists more as a device to move the plot through than as an actual individual entity. We learn that she has created so many false personas for herself that she isn’t even sure if she trusts herself anymore. We see her flex her intelligence (”The person who made this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly.”), her spy skills (the mall sequence? shes 12 steps ahead of everyone at all times), and her fighting skills, all in ways that teach you more about her as a person. She is lethal, but she is also kind, protective, and funny. She could kill a man with her bare hands, but she would also sacrifice everything to save the world, even showing the world every bad thing she ever did, which we see haunts her. This movie was the first movie were I truly feel like we got to see Natasha as herself, not as Black Widow, or in a role she was playing to get the job done, but as herself.
Sam is also brilliantly well done in this movie. He’s introduced to us in this movie, and by the end of it there is no question of who he is, what he stands for, and the kind of person he is. He’s a counselor, a veteran, a man with PTSD. He is funny and charming, he is kind and genuine. He reaches out to Steve when they first meet, and it’s clear he sees that Steve needs something, be it a friend or an invitation to a support group, and he offers it in a cautious and unassuming way, which shows he’s perceptive and has a high emotional intelligence. He has a sense of duty, but much like Steve, it is not to his country as an entity, but the idea of freedom and what America should be. His fighting style is also very telling. He clearly has hand to hand combat training, but he has his own style, meaning he is a well enough trained soldier that he is able to take all the things he learned and implement them in a way that feels natural to him. His fight scenes also show confidence. He has no problem telling the villain to “shut the hell up” and just get too it, he tells Steve that he’s ‘got it’ when they’re in a fight together, and it shows easily why Steve feels like he can trust Sam. Because Sam will get the job done. Sam becomes Steve’s right hand man. Not a sidekick, but a partner. In one movie, we learn all of that about Sam, and it doesn’t feel forced, or over done, it’s just a part of the narrative the story is trying to tell, and it not only introduces him in a way that creates a strong, likeable character, but it also plants the seeds almost immediately for the moment when Steve will pass the mantle of Captain America over to Sam. Because, after all, “He does what Steve does, just slower.”
Bucky is also interesting, because he spends pretty much 90% of his scenes not as Bucky, but as The Winter Soldier. He has TWO (2) scenes (not including the post credit scene) where he is even a whisper of himself, and yet.. we SEE who he is. Bucky comes out when he sees Steve, when Steve calls him Bucky, and he’s in the bank vault. He remembers himself, for just a second, and this soft, cautious side of Bucky comes out. We see that when he is given the chance to break free of the mental chains he is bound by, he is not the same confident, cocky Bucky we saw in the first Cap movie. He’s unsure, he’s terrified and stressed, he’s been changed by what he has been put through, and in those small moments, we also see a glimpse of that. Bucky is not a person to these people. They leave his injuries but fix his metal arm, they fry his brain again because they need him to complete a mission, before they can shove him back in a freezer. When he fights, he fights with little to no regard for the way it will impact his body. He jumps from the causeway bridge and slams down hard on the car, no doubt causing damage to his joints. When he blows up the car, he sidesteps at the last possibly second. When his metal arm is hurt, he barely reacts, even though we later learn that he feels pain in that arm. The fighting he does as The Winter Soldier teaches us about what has happened to Bucky, and what Hydra has done to him. It shows us that he functions as a tool for Hydra to use, and we see, in that moment in the vault, that Bucky knows it. When they tell him he has shaped a century, and his face is so easy to read. He’s angry, and afraid of what they want him to do. We learn, for sure, in Civil War that he remembers everything he was every forced to do, but in the scene in the bank vault you get a glimpse of that. Behind the Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes is in there, and he thinks he’s a monster. In the final scene in the helicarrier, when Bucky finally comes back, he’s not happy, or relieved, he is completely terrified. The more Steve pushes, the more Bucky recoils. He is a man who doesn’t want to have to face himself, not for real. The more Steve tries to drag him out, the more angry he becomes, because how long has it been since Bucky was just Bucky. The look on his face when Steve finally breaks through is a look of pure horror, at who he is, and what he’s done. Even when he spends the movie as mostly a mind controlled weapon, we still understand who Bucky has become, because the movie allows us those little tiny moments to understand.
The Winter Soldier doesn’t miss a single beat throughout the movie. It nails the emotional bits, the fights, the character arcs, and everything else (not to mention a killer score to boot), and I don’t think we talk enough about how this movie is not just one of the best Marvel movies, but is also just individually an absolutely exceptional movie in its own right.
