Captain America: The Winter Soldier Discussion Thread - SPOILERS

[DEWLine]

What Maria is in the comics...is a woman who knows she's intended by her political masters as window-dressing to some extent. Someone too well aware that when she was first picked to succeed Fury Sr., she was intended to fail.

Her mother is dead, and her father blamed her for it by way of the fact of being born. She's an ex-Marine from Chicago, snapped up out of the Corps by SHIELD and she was expecting to slowly earn her way up and out of the Madripoor field office. Then Fury Sr.'s covert op in Lavteria blew up in New York City's collective face. And her life changed forever after that.

One of her favourite movies is _A Few Good Men_, and when she confessed to Tony Stark that she suspected she was intended to fail, she compared her situation to that of Tom Cruise's character in that film.

Now...she has a better handle on what's needed to do the work of being an Executive Director of SHIELD. She's watched others do the work, she survived being a fugitive from Norman Osborn's HAMMER operation with most of her sanity still intact. And now she's coping with more brushfires every day. And a budget situation that gets tighter by the year. And it's a rare quarter-year where she doesn't have to bury a few thousand agents because a Helicarrier was either sunk by a computer virus or blown out of the sky by a madman who stole some black-ops tech.

Oh, and she's just had a hole shot through her gun hand.

So she's got a lot to cope with. If she gets a little snarky, I can live with it.

 

[Trekker4747]

Oh, and [Maria] just had a hole shot through her gun hand.

A flesh wound in an action movie, let alone an action super-hero/comic-book movie.

 

[Corran Horn]

I had to laugh at Natasha starting to say her *Grandpa* had shown her Wargames. Of course it's possible, but it's not *that* old.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Oh, and [Maria] just had a hole shot through her gun hand.

FIFTH BASE!

 

[DEWLine]

It wasn't fun for her. At all.

Having MODOK there as a witness to the shooting? Probably emotional salt in the wound.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I wish we had the typical A through F scale of all the others so my votes with the other movies could be consistent. A+. Holy shit that was game changing. I think it's a good movie as a standalone, but tied to everything else (including the TV show), it's just head's and shoulders above everything. Fun throughout. Great suspense, great action, good humor, good character moments. Clearly nothing will be the same after that.

Robert Redford spoiling his roll wasn't that big of a deal. While he had dialog that gave cover for his actions, I think he was always going to be suspected. But Sitwell shocked me. More importantly, I was expecting him to have some kind of redemption given that he's a reoccurring character on Agents of SHIELD. Instead, he gets thrown into a tractor trailer.

With:

Spoiler: Agents of SHIELD spoilers

With Blake unconscious from Deathlok and Sitwell dead, things have changed overnight for the main people.

One minor surprising thing. I'm surprised Sharon Carter never had a moment where she explained who she was. That seemed an obvious thing to do, perhaps for the post-credits scene. It's clear Romanov knows who she is. But it never happened by the end. Oh well, something for next time along with the search for The Winter Soldier.

Haven't read everyone else yet, I'll edit or double post after I do

 

[The Old Mixer]

HAIL, CENTIPEDE!

Cut off 1 leg, 99 more shall take its place!

HAIL, CENTIPEDE!

Cut off another leg, 98 more shall take its place!

HAIL, CENTIPEDE!

Cut off...(maybe this chant would work better as a drinking song....)

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Re: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Discussion Thread

^

Although I do think actual spoilers for AoS should probably be in spoiler code or the AoS thread (obviously, your comment is ok).

- So I guess Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is only one season then?

It's possible AoS was always a fakeout and Marvel and ABC weren't planning to continue after one season. With the ratings as they are, maybe that's not a bad thing.

FWIW, it won the 18-49 demo last week and it comes in second in its timeslot to NCIS. It's ratings aren't great, but they're actually decent all things considered.

If anything, the show has a clear mission now - to fight HYDRA.

Since this movie was more or less Nick Fury Vs. SHIELD, it can be assumed that Fury will build back the organization under his control and it will be run his way.

I had been thinking the show would have been a good place for that (I thought a hypothetical season 3 since an event like that would destroy SHIELD and they wouldn't want to do that so soon. I wish I had written that down somewhere so I could be ironically quoting it now).

I am disappointed that Agent Jasper Sitwell appears to be a HYDRA sympathizer...but we'll see.

Jasper Sitwell got thrown into a motherfucking truck, no? In a way, that's a shame. Coulson has such a history to him, he almost deserves an opportunity to fight him himself. Alas, it seems not to be.

 

[davejames]

Really damn good movie, and I can't help but be impressed with the way the Marvel people have decided to shake things up with their movie universe.

The only small distraction for me-- as with the last Thor and IM-- is wondering just why the hell, once again, the other Avengers never responded to the massive threat to Earth and millions of it's inhabitants in this movie, or at least showed up at the end to help Cap take down the other carriers.

I know there are whispers that this will be explained in the next Avengers (perhaps by having SHIELD engineer events so that they'd all remain separate and unaware), but that doesn't stop it from being a somewhat distracting plot hole in this one. At least for me.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Maybe we should have a separate "MCU spoiler-heavy speculation" thread or somesuch...someplace where we can feel free to discuss the whole enchilada.

For example, are they planning to retool the show as the A-Team? Because the Bus is a lot more expensive and high-maintenance to run privately than a freaking van....

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The only small distraction for me-- as with the last Thor and IM-- is wondering just why the hell, once again, the other Avengers never responded to the massive threat to Earth and millions of it's inhabitants in this movie, or at least showed up at the end to help Cap take down the other carriers.

Tony Stark destroyed his suits in IM3. Maybe these events in TWS will help him realize that that was a bad idea. Black Widow was present, obviously, and Thor being off-world is easy enough to imagine. The only mystery is where Banner was, but him electing to stay out of things—assuming he was even aware of them and not off in the jungle somewhere—is also pretty easy to imagine, I think.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

It's also just a timing thing. The writers themselves were asked this question. They said there simply wasn't time for everyone to show up.

ETA: I assume only DC residents would have an idea, but where exactly is the Triskelion? Is it basically next to Arlington cemetery?

ETA2: I think it is basically Roosevelt Island (looking at this image)? If so, that's a huge shame to destroy the island for that monstrosity. Really a crime.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

Really damn good movie, and I can't help but be impressed with the way the Marvel people have decided to shake things up with their movie universe.

The only small distraction for me-- as with the last Thor and IM-- is wondering just why the hell, once again, the other Avengers never responded to the massive threat to Earth and millions of it's inhabitants in this movie, or at least showed up at the end to help Cap take down the other carriers.

I know there are whispers that this will be explained in the next Avengers (perhaps by having SHIELD engineer events so that they'd all remain separate and unaware), but that doesn't stop it from being a somewhat distracting plot hole in this one. At least for me.

The only small distraction for me-- as with the last Thor and IM-- is wondering just why the hell, once again, the other Avengers never responded to the massive threat to Earth and millions of it's inhabitants in this movie, or at least showed up at the end to help Cap take down the other carriers.

Tony Stark destroyed his suits in IM3. Maybe these events in TWS will help him realize that that was a bad idea. Black Widow was present, obviously, and Thor being off-world is easy enough to imagine. The only mystery is where Banner was, but him electing to stay out of things—assuming he was even aware of them and not off in the jungle somewhere—is also pretty easy to imagine, I think.

Simple explanation to this question:

*The Avengers are only called upon to deal with world-ending threats like the Chitauri invasion (and the Ultron robots.) Calling them in to deal with this would be like calling in SEAL Team Six to stop a domestic assault, and would have taken away from the focus of the story, which is Captain America kicking ass.

 

[Gryffindorian]

Sitwell was more than a sympathizer; he was an agent of HYDRA. The senator, played by Gary Shandling, was a sympathizer.

 

[Tosk]

The only small distraction for me-- as with the last Thor and IM-- is wondering just why the hell, once again, the other Avengers never responded to the massive threat to Earth and millions of it's inhabitants in this movie, or at least showed up at the end to help Cap take down the other carriers.

The same reason they don't always show up in the comics. If they all show up for every adventure, you get nothing but Avengers stories.

 

[Dream]

I just bought a Cap 2 Winter Solider action figure, and also a 6 inch Marvel Legends WS figure. Good superhero movies tend to get me to spend money on the merchandise.

I still haven't bought a single Green Lantern figure. I still see a ton of the GL movie toys on sale on the unsold clearance shelves at a nearby Toysrus.

 

[trekkiebaggio]

There weren't any tie-ins with the tv show but I'm curious to see what happens next and how the show deals with what happens here.

There's a couple of HUGE tie-ins if you saw the 4/1/14 Agents of Shield episode -- The 'Clairvoyant' was discovered to be a computer program (effectively, it was the 'digital' Arnim Zola, which makes sense once you see the film); and Agent Sitwell was sent to the ship that Cap and crew rescued the hostages from.

Yeah, I should have said, 'at time of writing...'

 

[Guy Gardener]

I still haven't bought a single Green Lantern figure. I still see a ton of the GL movie toys on sale on the unsold clearance shelves at a nearby Toysrus.

Imdb says 2011.

I would have guessed 2009.

Green Lantern seems like something that happened to another generation.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

This is kind of cool

Apparently the list that Steve Rogers had of things he had to catch up on varies wherever the movie was released in order to make it more accessible to the audience. Pretty nifty considering I missed half of them when I saw it anyway.

 

[Corran Horn]

AoS gives something of a comparison as to the timing of the Phase 2 movies. Thor 2 definitely happens before CA: TWS since they cleaned up after Thor 2 quite a few episodes ago in AoS. It's possible Iron Man 3 happens in parallel with CA: TWS, explaining Stark's absence. He's a pretty obvious ally for Widow and Cap to seek out during their run--unless they didn't seek him out because it was obvious. There's ways to stretch it both ways.