Captain America Winter Soldier

[psocoptera]

1) Fandom is now awash in Steve/Bucky feelings, and, you know, I am willing to sail on that ship if the writing is good, but I personally am now awash in Steve/Sam feelings. Yes, okay, he's such a classic book-two guy - the nice, friendly, not complicated one, and of course by book three our heroine Steve will get back with the book one angstmuffin, but I personally have a giant soft spot for book-two guys. (Also, I was never so into Sebastian Stan, but oh the hotness of Anthony Mackie.) Let me rec On Your Right by thingswithwings for anyone else with me on this ship.

2) Speaking of Bucky, wasn't he wearing vastly more eyeliner in the posters and trailers than he was in the final film? What's up with that, did they decide it was getting too much mockery?

3) So excited to see what this means for Agents of SHIELD.

4) I liked that Maria Hill was masterminding the plan to take out the Insight helicarriers, as it fits perfectly with her helicarrier expertise in my 'verse ::grin::.

5) Ok, so, I thought there were some interesting choices made here about who was secretly HYDRA. Let me say up front that I generally am dubious about "character x just has to be white" arguments, as they usually reflect a sadly limited worldview. But, like, given that HYDRA was an offshoot of THE NAZIS, it just seemed sort of weird to me the extent to which a lot of the HYDRA moles in SHIELD were... not Aryan? Sitwell definitely reads as "not white" to my eye, I couldn't decide what I thought he was, but Maximiliano Hernandez who plays him is Latino (and once gave an interview talking about how Latino kids should get to see Latino superheroes, I cannot imagine he was thrilled with his MCU character turning out to be HYDRA). Frank Grillo, who played Brock Rumlow, the, uh, head fighter guy, has Italian heritage. Garry Shandling, Senator Stern, was born to a Jewish family. None of them look like Nazi poster boys. Even if we imagine that HYDRA was willing to recruit opportunistically and ignore race, what exactly were they telling these guys to get them on board? How do you get a Jewish man happily whispering Heil *anything*? Maybe we're not supposed to read the Sitwell, Rumlow, or Stern characters as sharing the ethnic origins of their actors, but, I don't know, I tend to, unless the character bio explicitly specifies another origin (like Natasha being Russian).

6) I continue to be surprised by the extent to which it's okay now to show large aircraft crashing into office buildings and people inside the building trying to survive that. Possibly this is a sign that I am old, or at least increasingly outside of the 18-to-24-year-old demographic these movies are made for? I mean, even a 24-year-old was only 11 in 2001.

7) Whyyyyy can't we have a Black Widow movie. Marvel will sell me a talking raccoon and Ant-Man, but not a deep dive into Natasha's character?

8) I think my favorite part was the note-perfect Smithsonian exhibition. Yes that is exactly what that would look like, mad props to the designers, and it was such a good way to bring the history in. (And I just love invented artifacts and scholarship and stuff like that.)

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i feel like making the bad things all about Hydra and not about regular old corruption, hubris, and authoritarian impulses was sort of a cop-out.

that said, the film canon version of Hydra is, even in the first film, less about adherence to Nazi ideology and German nationalism, and more about using Nazi German sponsorship to advance the (ill-defined) Hydra ideology. recall, e.g., the thing where Hydra has a contingency plan that involves destroying Berlin, splits with Hitler, and kills his messengers. given that, it's not hard to imagine the Hydra movement evolving into something just as murderous and totalitarian as Naziism, but is more racially and ethnically inclusive.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

No, sure, but, I don't know, I still feel like anyone not clearly part of the "master race" would be thinking "heil Hydra? how about 'heil, no'". Am awaiting the Sitwell backstory fic, I guess.