Let's Talk About Movies; Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Followup

Note-A Level 3 Spoiler Warning is in effect. Major plot details of Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be discussed. Plot details that will more likely than not bleed over into Agents of Shield. Proceed reading at your own risk.-End Note

Alo Party Peoples.

Now that you've had a chance to go see the movie, we can talk about the twist. Let's skip the pleasantries and get right to it.

So, after finding out that the super secret info Nick Fury gave them originated from Cap's old training ground in New Jersey, he and Natasha go there and find a, giant vacuum tube supercomputer, okay, underneath it. When they power it on, they discover that it houses the uploaded consciousness of Arnim Zola, a Nazi mad science booster from First Avenger. Who promptly informs them that Hydra, the Nazi mad science R&D department from First Avenger, didn't die with the Red Skull. Instead, it just took on a new form. After the war, most of Hydra got drafted into the newly formed Shield, where it ended up becoming a sort of cancer. Achieving massive influence within the organization, using the Winter Soldier to kill people they didn't like, and shaping the post war world to be ready to "give up their freedom for security".

I sort of saw a parallel there with how the Space Race got jump started by both sides hiring German rocket scientists captured during the war, but I don't think that's what they were going for. What do I think they were going for? I'll get to that later.

They also discover that Zola helped Shield develop a special algorithm to track literally everyone on Earth. I'm not kidding, Shield is tracking your movements, your purchases, your Internet surfing, your employment, and your everything else. All in the name of using that information to find potential threats, and kill them before they become a problem. That's actually why they've been building the weaponized helicarriers, to be the means by which they will kill them. To stop this, Steve, Natasha, and their veteran friend Sam "Falcon" Wilson break into Shield HQ and upload Shield's secrets to the Internet, where they immediately start trending on Twitter, after which they end up becoming fugitives on the run from a Hydra infiltrated Shield that now has nothing to hide.

It's not that big a leap to say that there's more than a little influence from the WikiLeaks scandal last year. I'm as much for freedom of information as anyone else, but I realize that what Chelsea Manning did put quite a few people overseas in serious danger. We keep secrets for a reason, not everybody is a trustworthy individual that won't immediately use that information to destroy you. "We [security agencies/Shield] take the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be."

It's a big risk for them to make that parallel, and it seems that the filmmakers are of the opinion that the whistle blowers had noble intentions but that their actions will have very serious consequences. I agree with that. The real question however is, why would they take that risk? Surely they know that there are plenty of critics and media personalities that are vehemently opposed to WikiLeaks, not that they're without good reason for being so, and that they will certainly think of attacking anything that even looks like it might sympathize with them.

My follow up question is this. How can you make a Captain America movie set in the present day and not be political in some way? No, the Avengers doesn't count because it isn't really Old Glory's movie. When I asked my father that question, he said something like this. "It would have to be a very flat movie. You have to speak so some side of the political spectrum to make this character work in the present." I very much agree. When you have a movie where your lead character is named after a country and wears it's colors as their uniform, politics kind of come bundled with the material.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it's worth discussing. Please let me know what you think in the comments and/or on social media.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B