5 Reasons The Winter Soldier Missed Out on Greatness

Warning: Spoilers!

As far as sequels go, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a pretty damn good one. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise; superhero movie sequels often tend to be better than their predecessors. These sequels are free of what can be a cumbersome origin story and able to tell more interesting stories.

Marvel movies haven’t had this success. Thor: The Dark World was an absolute mess of corny writing and criminally uninteresting characters. Iron Man 2 had some interesting material to play with, but the movie itself was subpar.

TWS broke this mold. The movie was filled with good characters and had great action sequences, but it stood apart from other comic book movies due to the heavy themes within the movie. The themes in TWS were deeper than you get in most comic book movies, and the film certainly benefited from them.

But it could have been so much more.

Here are the five themes that TWS touched on and how they missed the boat:

Evolution of Warfare

Early on in the movie, Captain America is clearly struggling to adjust to the way war is fought in 2014 compared to his era, the 1940s. He doesn’t liked modern day “intelligence” and is uneasy with neutralizing threats before they materialize.

Cap came from an era where warfare was more black and white. There was a clear enemy and you marched on that enemy. That’s no longer the case today. Warfare is greyer than it used to be. Our enemies aren’t nations, but individuals scattered across the globe who are performing acts of terror.

Instead of delving deeper into this theme, the movie clearly identifies the main villain: Hydra. In a superhero movie, good and evil has to be black and white. There is no room for grey. I understand it, but I count it as a missed opportunity.

Government Access to Data

In the movie, Hydra has taken over part of SHIELD and is attempting to eliminate all possible threats. To do this they have developed an algorithm capable of identifying any threat, now and in the future. The algorithm draws its information from the public and private data that the common person shares every day: Facebook posts, bank records, cell phone calls, etc.

Considering all the news the NSA has made lately, this was a very topical plot point for the movie. The country struggles today with how to react to the NSA. Is there infringement of our freedoms OK because they are trying to protect us?

Back to Hydra. This particular theme was squashed when it was revealed Hydra was operating within SHIELD. We no longer have to have a debate over whether SHIELD’s collection of data is ethical, because it’s only an “evil” sect of the organization that using it against us. Again, the movie has moved from grey to black and white.

Data Leaks

After Cap and his team foil Hydra’s master plan, they decide to upload all from SHIELD’s data to the internet and share it with the world. SHIELD has become compromised, so it’s the right thing to do. This overlaps a little with the last theme.

The amount of information they made public would have made Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden look like amateurs. The world would have FREAKED out over this big of a data dump. Yet all we get is one throwaway line about the data “trending” on social networks.

This happened at the end of the movie so I get they had to wrap it up, but I felt this was another theme that they could have expanded on a little more.

Captain America’s Adjustment

Cap’s adjustment to the 21st century is told through a variety of jokes. Jumping forward in time 60 years has to be one hell of an experience, but the movie glossed over it. They had more important stories to tell, I guess. I don’t really blame them. I still would have liked to have learned more about how he adjusted, what he thought of modern day customs and how difficult it has been for him.

The Winter Soldier

The Winter Soldier is introduced as a mysterious super soldier who almost kills Nick Fury. The Black Widow refers to him as an intelligence urban legend, an assassin rumored to have been working for over 50 years. She treats him like a mythical figure. I thought the movie was setting up a really interesting character, but they almost immediately pivot away from him before introducing him as Cap’s best friend from his WW2 days, who has been preserved and turned into the Winter Soldier.

I felt they didn’t do enough justice to this character. I would have loved to have heard more about his mysterious past. Maybe they will tell us more in Captain America 3, as this movie ends with Cap going off and searching for his old friend.

I write all this not to diminish the movie. All these themes helped make TWS a very good superhero movie. If they would have gone a little farther with some of this material, and toned down the comic book stuff a little more, I feel like it could have been a truly great superhero movie.

Unrealistic, I know.

(Image courtesy of BusinessInsider.com)