…I dunno.
There’s some tells in there that suggests that the Who needs box office when you have a tiresome Leftist message? crowd might have gotten more of a look-in with this movie than they have with the franchise to date. On the other hand, this wouldn’t be the first time that somebody cut a trailer to show a message that was blessedly not present in the actual flick itself.
Still, the presence of Robert Redford in this picture is setting off alarm bells. Which is funny, because he’s no more liberal than is, say, Samuel L Jackson. It’s just that Jackson can keep his opinions from showing up in the film, and Redford largely can’t.
Moe Lane
PS: Hey, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Who is and who is not the bad guys has been a running theme in Captain American comics, post WWII. This second outing for a Captain American movie seems to be picking up on that theme.
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Also, the title doesn’t refer to Captain America. If you don’t know who the “Winter Soldier” is, I suggest you don’t look him up. It will give away too much of the movie.
Also, trailer for The Dark Knight Raises hinted at a OWS storyline. That turned out to be not be the case. So there’s me reassuring you.
I suspect that the ‘theme’, as you call it, is largely because the later creative minds couldn’t fully stomach the character established in WWII.
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Think about the man, who, with brothers serving, and with other options to contribute to the war effort, would not settle for anything other than combat. Steve Rogers is a fanatic.
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We can choose to interpret him as a fanatic for America, indifferent to variations of the moment, or he tends to become some flavor of Democrat, New Deal, or FDR partisan.
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The other significant element is the counter-intelligence he practiced in the United States versus the Axis powers.
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Thought experiment: Take a written-during-WWII Captain America story about him doing counter intelligence work in the States against the Nazis. Especially generic Nazis and or German nationals. Update it, fairly mechanically and faithfully, to a later era of enemy. (Soviets, communists, Al Quada, whoever.) Be sure to keep the level of criticism of government exactly the same, as well as giving suspects the same treatment in terms of rights.
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Do you think a contemporary writer would rather do that story, or do you think they would rather do anything, rape the character and warp to backstory, to avoid doing so? I think the official property owners heavily revised the character, so that they could avoid offending the political fads of the day, and maybe because they employed very many lefty PC shills.
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Anyway, that is my explanation for Captain America’s backstory, to include certain traditional opponents, and the whole ‘he was really frozen back in the Nazi era’ bit.
Well, yeah. Marvel is a real liberal company (see Luke’s comment below). I am actally shocked and appealed for you guys to expect otherwise.
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You have to also admit that the movie universe (Earth-199999, for reference) has actually been very apolitical in my eyes so far. You’re complaining about this movie’s apparent theme, yet can you do so in any of their other movies? If they did pick up on a political theme, the message is not shoved down your throat like most movies do and they have been more than fair so far.
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In fact Agents Of SHIELD has already been running with the above theme to a degree and has treated it with a lot of respect in my opinion. In the last episode, they had a very unsympathetic Snowden/Assange-like character whoam they stranded in Hong Kong! Brilliant stuff!
I was not expecting otherwise. I get the impression that Marvel has not been writing Captain America to my taste for fifty years or so.
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I do not have to admit that, as I haven’t seen any of them, and cannot be obligated to have an opinion.
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Earth 199999’s political qualities aside, the title is most explicitly a reference to something I can complain about. That being Marvel’s participation in a vile campaign of hate-speech directed against America’s servicemen.
Marvel has always been more liberal then DC so expect some of that “social justice” butter getting spread throughout this movie a lot.
I keep seeing the title and thinking that they’re going to put John Kerry in Capt. America’s suit:
http://wintersoldier.com/
One could argue that this is essentially what Marvel did, much earlier in the history of publication.
Luckily, by the time I get around to considering whether to buy the Blu-ray, NetFlix or Amazon will have answered all these questions.
DC made KGBeast evil. (And got some great stories out o it.)
Marvel instead chose to take the Le Carre path of moral ambiguity with Winter Soldier. It’s not a decision I agree with.
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As sicsemper notes, there’s a pretty radical departure between the WWII Cap and the Cold War Cap.
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Also, SHIELD isn’t beholden to the US government in the Marvel Universe. (Although I haven’t watched the movies enough to know if that’s holding true in movieverse.)
In fairness to the writers, there are two factors, somewhat outside of their control, which make the writing environments very different.
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One was the WWII writing for publication situation, and attendant mores. Reservations about the means or ends of FDR’s exercise of power would have at least invited scrutiny, and certainly would not match how Captain America was being marketed. As for something which looked at the parallels of FDR and the Democrats, and of Hitler and the Nazis, of the Soviets and the Japanese, of the Commonwealth and of the Italians, it would have likely gotten somebody in serious trouble.
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Another was that the idea of a super hero setting was not as developed as it was in later years. Super hero settings have accumulated more and more things that make them a worse model for looking at complicated social situations. Whereas, during WWII, without all that interfering overhead, and with the audience having direct experience, it was far easier to plausibly tie together the super heroes and the conflict of the day.
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Where we start getting back into adaptation choices that /are/ the fault of the writers is making the Nazis into comic book villains. One, the more they are treated as being different from humans, the harder it becomes to do a Cap story modeled on his Nazi stories about other groups of humans. Two, a version of the Nazis that focuses on doomsday weapons, foiled at the last moment by a super hero, strikes me as trending towards de facto Holocaust denial.