64 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

    Captain America finds himself in a difficult situation as Nick Fury is killed, and SHIELD has been compromised.  Without anyone to trust, Captain America works to unravel a mystery of who is behind Fury’s death, and how to prevent their conspiracy from being implemented.
    A hard movie to summarize. The plot moves along with every step, and even the quieter sequences have plenty to say and do.
    I have a few complaints about this movie, but they are fairly minor.  First, I don’t like Scarlett Johansson’s hair flattened out like that.  In both Iron Man 2 and Avengers, her hair had a certain amount of fluff to it, which looked right to me.
    The second complaint is more substantial.  Several of the action sequences - but not all of them - are shot too close and edited too fast.  In some of these cases, it makes sense.  The elevator fight is a close-quarters kind of thing, and it makes sense.  But when they’re outside fighting, I prefer longer shots, both in terms of distance and duration.
    Neither of these complaints makes the movie bad at all.  It’s smart, and has something useful to say.  It’s tightly written, and everything in it contributes in some way.  The action isn’t quite as satisfying as some of the other movies, but they do a great job of showing Cap’s improvement with the shield.
    It’s a dark movie, thematically.  The villains don’t adhere to the same comic-book villainy of the first movie.  In the first movie, Hydra is a military force.  They use their uniforms, they move orderly, and their goal is to take over the world.  Here, the goal is far more specific, and that goes a long way to making the stakes feel more genuine.  There’s a big difference between announcing plans to rule the world, or to blow up the ocean.  When you specify a target (especially when you see the target process going on) it becomes less nebulous and more real.
    The music is really interesting.  They took a page from The Dark Knight, and the Winter Soldier actually has some very striking music cues, which parallels nicely with the cues that the Joker had.

    There was a less distinct weakness that the movie had, but I don’t feel like I can stick to it.  I didn’t have the same emotional response to this as I did to a few moments of heroic behavior in the first movie.  In that first one, I still get misty when Rogers jumps on the grenade, or when he says he doesn’t want to kill anyone; he just doesn’t like bullies.  I suppose those moments could have been re-created by having a few “saving civilians” moments.
    Still, another proud addition to the Marvel movie cannon.