the star spangled man with a plan
While Batman has always been, and I imagine always will be, my favorite superhero, Captain America runs a very close second. One of the first comics I can remember purchasing is the What If... cover featured at the top of the post, which is a story in which Captain America manages to save the life of the scientist who created the Super Serum, and he an his crew of Super Soldier Howling Commandos run rough shot over the whole German army. Like most of the What If series it is heavily dependent on subverting decades of Marvel history, of which eight year old Steve knew absolutely nothing. It still manged to become one of my favorite stories, and I read it constantly. I didn't even really mind that it ended on a cliffhanger, and years later when I did come across the second part (What If...Captain America had formed the Avengers for those interested) it failed to really live up to my expectations, as it just returned history to the status quo with a few minor cosmetic changes. (What If... after all had a pretty strong run of doing this to all the major Marvel stories.)
When I got back into comics in my mid-twenties, it was Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America that really sucked into the Marvel Universe. Until that point I had been content to read Grant Morrison's Batman run (which is stellar) and all the major DC crossovers (which were very much not stellar), but the Cap run was what got me coming back to the comics shop week after week. I even plunked down fifty bucks to get the big fat omnibus that covered the first 25 issues of the story.
All of which means I was really excited last week to sit in a theater last week and watch Captain America: Winter Soldier, a film highly influenced by that Brubaker run on the series, and a film that might be my favorite Marvel movie to date. Chris Evans reprises the role of Captain America, his third outing after 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger, and 2012's The Avengers. I thought Evans was good in the previous films but he really shines here. Cap's portrayal as "A man out of time" has been key to his characterization for the past forty years or so (ever since Stan Lee retconned both his death and his survival at the end of WWII) and this is the first real opportunity that Evans has had to play the role this way. Cap's civilian identity of Steve Rodgers is public knowledge, but unlike with Tony Stark, he's not courting publicity. He haunts the edges of Washington DC in a baseball cap and hoodie, attending a museum exhibit on his life, or visiting the woman he loved 70 years ago as she lies dying in a nursing home. He is a natural leader, but as he confides to Black Widow during the course of the movie, what he could really use is a friend. Which of course, leaves him wide open for gut punch reveal of the Winter Soldier's identity.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is heavily influenced by the paranoid and claustrophobic spy films of the 1970s. The middle of the film plays very much like "Three Days of the Condor, but with Super Heroes." (The Condor himself, Robert Redford, even has a role in the film as the powerful and shadowy government agent who you probably shouldn't trust) While those films were heavily influenced by the Watergate scandal, and that breach of trust between government and its people, this film takes that breach as a given. Much like the TV show Homeland, it takes a look at the cost of freedoms caused by everything from drones, to NSA surveillance. Granted, in Homeland the surveillance isn't being conducted by a Nazi scientist who has uploaded his brain into a giant UNIMAC super computer, but lets be honest, wouldn't that show be better if it was?
