Sunday, April 6, 2014

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I'm sorry the picture is so bad.
Epic. That's the one word I would use to describe this brilliant movie. With only one small flaw I have no choice but to declare Captain America: The Winter Soldier, (directed by Anthony and Joe Russo) the best Marvel movie ever. Ready for this. Better. Than. The. Avengers. Guys. BETTER THAN THE AVENGERS.

So with that being said, I guess I need to explain myself. Don't worry. I'll try not to spoil everything. To save some space I'm just gonna call it Captain America 2 for the rest of the review. So. Captain America 2 was an action movie. It had a plot, of course it had a plot. It's a Marvel movie. And the good folks at Marvel aren't going to just shove pointless action down our throats. But when you look at it all together, it is, without a doubt, an action movie. I think a lot of people will agree with me when I say that's exactly what we wanted from this movie. Give a superhero movie too much plot and character development and you get an Iron Man 3, which is passable, but not something everyone is going to love. Give it too much action and it just becomes two and half hours of blowing stuff up. Captain America 2 manages to find a good balance. The action starts within the first fifteen minutes and doesn't stop until the end. This is not one of those movies that you are going to be able to get up to go to the bathroom during. You're going to be locked in your seat from start to finish.

Action aside, the plot was just enough. For the most part I saw the plot as 'oh no who is shield and who is hydra and oh my god gotta save the world and set up for Avengers 2'. It was pretty easy to see who the bad guy was. The second he walked on screen I was like "that's the douche that is in control of running all the bad guys." And I was right. While the plot was easy to follow along with and wasn't really too hard to figure out it still had just enough power to get me interested. But like I said. It was an action movie. Which is what we all wanted.

So for the small flaw that I mentioned earlier. For a movie called "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" there was a disappointing lack in Winter Soldier. But that's just my opinion. *Spoilers* It also would have been nice if we all didn't know The Winter Soldier was Bucky, but hey, that's how the internet ruins things. I don't even really think that was too much of a spoiler. Anybody who owns a computer or looked at IMDb knew that Bucky was The Winter Soldier. Which is kind of unfortunate. It would have been nice if in the theater we were realizing it was bucky the same time Steve was realizing. So that's my complaint.

But here's more positives. Chris Evans (Steve/Captain America), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow/Natasha), Anthony Mackie (Sam/Falcon), all were fabulous in their roles. And it wasn't just them. Everyone, even the minor characters, did their roles justice. The cast was amazing and their acting was amazing. I couldn't ask for more.

There's so much more I want to say. So many good things. I can't decide what to say next. The characters? Or do I fangirl now. Hard decisions.

Let's talk about the female characters of this movie. Black Widow and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders). I am not what you would call a Black Widow fan. I think she's kind of overrated in the Tumblr community.  And I think her hair in this movie was stupid. I liked it better curly. Whatever. In The Avengers i thought she was just a token female character, and I think you're just kidding yourself if you think she was anything different. She wasn't the token in this movie. I think they should have called the movie something like "Captain America and Black Widow". She felt real in this movie. And she actually saved Steve a few times. Same with Maria Hill. Okay so I'm still mad about the How I Met Your Mother ending so I must say when I saw her on screen I got mad and boo'd in my head. Nothing against Cobie Smulders, but it's going to take a while to get over that betrayal. But she redeemed herself by stepping up later in the movie by not being the token girl. She played a larger part than I thought she would have. Not as large as Black Widow, but larger than her role in The Avengers.

One last note I have in my head. This isn't going to be your typical dry wit Marvel movie that the last few have been. There weren't any really laughable parts. Just a few chuckles. I think that's what this movie needed. It would have been stupid for such a serious action packed movie to have all that humor in there. So I think it was a good call.

To wrap this up, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I'm more than happy with it. I'm not even like a huge Captain America fan. Sure he's cool, but he's not like Iron Man cool.

Okay one more thing. Thank me for this later. There are TWO end credit scenes. TWO. Not one. TWO. Stay for the whole thing. They did that with the second Thor movie too. I don't know if Marvel thinks it's clever or something. Like are they thinking 'oh they all figured out that there's an end credit scene let's be sneaky and put TWO in'. Plot twist. You are sneaky. Everyone left after the first end scene except me, Sydney, and these two old people. We win. Your move Marvel. What's next? Three? No. I don't think so. I personally think they should go back to just doing one. Two is kind of pushing it.

Obviously, five out of five stars.