We’re just around the corner from the release of the fourth Captain America film, subtitled Brave New World, which will be the cinematic debut of Sam Wilson’s take on the stars and stripes. So now seems as good a time as any to look back on the second film in that franchise, The Winter Soldier. While the first Captain America film was decent, it wasn’t …

We’re just around the corner from the release of the fourth Captain America film, subtitled Brave New World, which will be the cinematic debut of Sam Wilson’s take on the stars and stripes. So now seems as good a time as any to look back on the second film in that franchise, The Winter Soldier.

While the first Captain America film was decent, it wasn’t the home run I think a lot of fans were hoping for leading up to the release of The Avengers. The Russo Brothers seemingly heard this loud and clear when it came time to write and direct the sequel, titled The Winter Soldier. This was the first time an MCU film had really branched outside of the pure comicbook genre of the previous films and delivered a hybrid film, one that was still faithful to its comic origins, but also was a pretty compelling political thriller, inspired by such 70s films as Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, All The Presidents Men, and Marathon Man. In it, the Man out of Time himself suddenly finds himself not dealing with an alien invasion, but modern-day and grounded problems, those without a sci-fi twist. Aliens aren’t the threat here, terrorists are and Steve Rogers has to not only figure out his place in this new world, but what this new world is.

In the film, Cap finds himself hunting down a terrorist cell and starts to unravel a conspiracy that lies at the heart of the very government he’s been working for since he was unfrozen. Hydra, whom Rogers knew as the occult-science division of the Nazis, may have been defeated during the Second World War, but they were not eradicated. They sulked into the shadows and began to slowly plot their return by infiltrating various levels of government and other positions of influence. Rogers, with the help of former Russian assassin Natasha Romanov, unearth the truth, which forces HYDRA’s “New World Order” plan to come crashing down.

There’s a lot of interesting themes at play within The Winter Soldier. Early on in the film, Nick Fury is giving Rogers a tour of the new Helicarriers that S.H.I.E.L.D. have built, which are tied to spy satellites and have the ability to take out a threat before the crime has been committed. Fury argues that society has no choice but to act first to save lives, Rogers counters that “punishment is supposed to come after the crime”. Cap argues that holding a gun to everyone on the planet and calling it freedom is fear and ruling by fear is not the way to go. The most interesting debate arguably comes from Zola, the HYDRA agent from the first film. He observes that when they tried to take away people’s freedom by force, the people would fight back, just like the Second World War. So HYDRA learned that fear was the better agent of chaos. By engineering the world to be as ruthless, chaotic, and unsafe as possible, the people would be more than willing to give up their freedoms in the name of better security. This naturally reinforces Steve’s previous comments with Fury and without diving too far into the weeds on this one, I’m sure it’s a sentiment that some are, at the very least, starting to think more about these days.

When talking about how the film would be framed, co-director Anthony Russo had this to say about the film:

“It’s hard to make a political film that’s not topical. That’s what makes a political thriller different from just a thriller. And that’s what adds to the characters’ paranoia and the audience’s experience of that paranoia. But we’re also very pop-culture-obsessed and we love topicality, so we kept pushing to [have] scenes that, fortunately or unfortunately, played out [during the time that Edward] Snowden outed the NSA. That stuff was already in the zeitgeist. We were all reading the articles that were coming out questioning drone strikes, pre-emptive strikes, civil liberties—Obama talking about who they would kill, y’know? We wanted to put all of that into the film because it would be a contrast to Cap’s greatest-generation [way of thinking].”

The Winter Soldier also boasts some of the best action within the MCU on the big screen. Unlike other films, which focus on superpowers and magic, this film is far more grounded by design, so the fights reflect that by having its action grounded as well. Car chases, shootouts and hand-to-hand fight scenes are what you get in this movie and it’s some of the better action in the MCU, as it doesn’t feel as sloppy. The stuntwork is actually really solid, especially the hand-to-hand scene between The Winter Soldier and Steve Rogers on the street.

The Winter Solider is a film that opted to push boundaries for Marvel. This wasn’t another superhero film, but a hybrid that pulled elements from other genres, even more successfully and deliberately than The First Avenger did. Great action, compelling narrative, genuine stakes, and even some solid humour make this one of the best MCU films ever made.

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