Captain America: The Winter Soldier
“On your left.”
The movie opens up with Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) taking a run around the Washington Monument like he does every other day.
“On your left,” declares century-old Captain America (Chris Evans) again, passing Wilson without even being slightly out of breath.
“On your left,” he says as helaps Wilson…again.
This opening scene sets the tone for the relationships between the characters and the dialogue of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with hilarious banter between the intense action, the writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, exceeded expectations with developing personality.
When S.H.I.E.L.D. is overturned and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is blamed and targeted, it is up to Captain America, Sam Wilson, and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johannson) to straighten out the mess that is being made. Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), Fury’s longtime colleague, is in charge of the largest defense projects in S.H.I.E.L.D. and is on the brink of detonation; the project takes out millions of potential threats before they individually know what they could be capable of. Found in the wrong hands, it is only a matter of time before it goes off leaving the three heroes to fight battles to win the war.
Though many of the battles are intense scenes of the bad guys wielding futuristic weapons while the three heroes try to save the world, some are extremely personal, especially for Captain America. We see throughout the entire film his struggle with the modern world and the way people call for protection of its citizens remarking, “You hold a gun on everyone on Earth and call it protection. This isn’t freedom. This is fear.”
Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, and Scarlett Johannson brilliantly bring their characters to life with deep emotions, but the way the directors, Anthony and Jack Russo portrayed them with close-ups and openness it is not hard to say that this might be one of the best superhero movies out there setting us up for the next installments to come—don’t forget to sit through the credits.
This film gets a wonderful 8 out of 10 stars.
