Ranting About Writing - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Godzilla was such a good piece of screenwriting it's making me revisit other great screenwriting triumphs of the recent past. Winter Soldier is definitively one of those triumphs, 'cause there are SO many things that could've gone wrong in the process of scripting this that could've made it terrible, or alienating, or unsuccessful, but they knocked this film out of the park at every junction. I STILL find people talking about how good Winter Soldier is, even though the very reveal of the Winter Soldier’s identity is actually impossible because the man who kidnapped him had himself been kidnapped five minutes before him in the film before. There are SO many potential plot holes that are plugged by good writing and slick directing, and it is just a gosh diddly-darn miracle it turned out as good as it did. People say Marvel films aren't cinema, and they've got a point in the sense that they don't explore massive change and the realities of existence in the way a decent standalone film does, but it's a complete mislabeling to say they aren't storytelling, or aren't doing lots of very thought-out, deliberately-crafted work to give us the outcome we're looking at. Everything about Captain America was milquetoast (if well-executed) before this film, and so was his supporting cast, but this film transformed him into a action hero powerhouse in a well-plotted world who had the realism and the relatability to carry the franchise in his own right. He went from the very background of the Avengers poster to the very foreground of the Age of Ultron poster because of this film. People cared about him! They were right to! 'Cause this film's frikkin' awesome!

Source: Captain America: Winter Soldier, by Ed Brubaker

I've read a fair amount of the source material this film is based on (basically everything by Ed Brubaker) and it's honestly very good for comics, but for a movie it's pretty awful - too many stories, too much continuity, too much comic book stuff that's harder to pitch to general audiences. What the Russo brothers did was translate the typical Captain America comic book-ness into a contemporary film genre people are familiar with (the Cold War "trust no one" action film) and then using modern action film techniques to make it exciting and tight modern screenwriting to keep it grounded. Justice League failed at all of these things, and it didn't have all the continuity demands this had. This works great as a solo film and as part of its larger universe, and it brings a version of Captain America that is eminently likable, cool, and human, something that - I'm gonna be honest here - was not always easy to find in normal Captain America comics. For about ten years in the 2000's, writers tried to do an ultra-realistic Captain America who was as racist and out-of-place as a white guy from the 40's is thought to be, but they took it too far and just ended up making him a total bummer. As Winter Soldier handled in its very first scene, you can hit a balance between antiquated and adapting and not feel fake, and if you really want to make a story about a man out of time and what that would actually look like, well, traditional cinema is a great way to explore that, so it's not trapped by the limits of having to be an ongoing series.

So, in conclusion, Winter Soldier is great. I've seen it so many times it's almost become trite, but it keeps its awesomeness when it comes to the action scenes and the storytelling. The way the characters have been handled in the films following it are a testament to how good the storytelling and character work was, and if we're totally honest, this film was one of the triple punch of Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and itself that led to Marvel dominating the landscape in the 2010's so far. That Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame were so well-received is in part a follow-up to that previous triple punch, and in part only possible because Soldier did such a good job of establishing the characters, expanding the universe, and creating a quality benchmark for action scenes (superhero stories are at their storytelling core just action).

If there's one last thing I'm gonna rant about, it's that Sebastian Stan is an actor who's been almost criminally underused (by regular acting standards) in his role as Bucky Barnes. Dude showed more emotion and depth in his five minutes of mask-less screentime in Winter Soldier than Anakin Skywalker got to show in his entire prequel trilogy of films. He was honestly done a little dirty in Civil War from a character standpoint so the story could progress, but even then he managed to show a whole range of things in his limited time. And in the snippets we've gotten in Infinity War and Endgame, he's given a consistently moody performance that doesn't make you feel like he's an emo, he's just quiet. The great thing about the Marvel TV shows is that he's finally gonna get a chance to flex his acting in a lead role, and considering a lot of the script greatness of the MCU has come from sidelining him until this moment, I think that's a good tradeoff for everyone.

Go watch Winter Soldier. Then go watch Civil War. It's great, guys.