But this is a moodier, more thoughtful Marvel movie and a big step up in ambition and achievement from The First Avenger. a dozen thugs in a tight space - or that the good Captain can’t find a zillion cute uses for his only weapon, a war-surplus shield (discus, battering ram, boomerang, you name it). Not that the film lacks Marvel’s mandatory fisticuffs, car chases, bus flips, gigantic military hardware and a spectacular fight in an elevator - Steve vs. (READ: The cover story on All the President’s Men by subscribing to TIME)īeatty hasn’t been in a movie since Town & Country in 2001, but Redford was available to lend his liberal gravitas to The Winter Soldier, a sharp and pertinent political fable masquerading as a pre-summer blockbuster. That notion - of powerful or violent forces conspiring against civilians - also primed some of the decade’s finest, most haunting movies: The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty, and All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, both with Robert Redford as a cocky crusader against government corruption. Note that all these items are from the 1970s, back when Vietnam atrocities, the Watergate scandal, the Jonestown massacre and the spike in urban crime led many Americans to decide that paranoia was the purest form of realism. He finds the Internet useful and keeps a notebook of touchstones he missed: disco, Rocky, Star Wars and the Marvin Gaye album Trouble Man.
“I’m not dead.” But having missed six or seven decades of American popular culture - which is to say the only culture Americans know and revere - he realizes he has some catching up to do.
“I’m 95,” Steve replies, a smile concealing his hurt. (READ: Why Marvel’s Superhero Roundup The Avengers Was Very Nearly Super) So in the new sequel, Captain America: The Winter Solider, after Steve (Chris Evans) brushes lips with fellow Avenger and fabulous babe Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), alias Black Widow, she asks, “Was that your first kiss since 1945?”