A Soldier for all Seasons

People often say that things were simpler back then. It doesn’t matter when in time back then was, when a person says it or when that person was born, it was always simpler back then; Maybe they’re right and things have just always been heading toward some kind of complicated singularity, but I strongly believe that these people are wrong.

Old people usually are.

Things, generally, have been getting simpler and simpler with time, thanks mostly to microwave ovens and computers. There is, however, one respect in which things did get more complicated with time: making movies.

(Yes, this is a convoluted introduction)

I remember when I was a kid, an action hero could stand in the middle of a battlefield with no shirt on, firing the biggest machine gun he could find from the hip and still kill all the bad guys and escape unscathed. A cop could commandeer any vehicle at any time for any reason, then catch up with a bad guy and shoot him in the leg, from behind, in the middle of a crowd, then let out a witty one-liner. An evil mastermind would always tell the hero every part of his plan before leaving the hero’s fate in the hands of mentally challenged lackeys operating a needlessly complicated (and usually themed) torture device.

With time, movies, as well as audiences, evolved. For probably more than one reason, the average moviegoer has now started being more interested in proper gun handling, police procedures and competent (or at least slightly more believable) storytelling, and now movies are more researched and, generally, a bit more believable.

Of course, things aren’t perfect. I don’t think I’ll live to see a world where actions heroes don’t rack their shotguns for absolutely no reason, but at least now, when a computer is hacked in a movie, it usually is by something resembling a command prompt (or MS-DOS) instead of a rotating colored dodecahedron (give yourself some geek cred if you get the reference).

The point that I’m so laboriously trying to get to is that I recently saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and that despite its very modern aesthetics, the movie felt so much like something out of the early nineties that I half expected Steven Seagal to show up to kick Jean-Claude Van Damme’s ass (please don’t e-mail me saying that Van Damme could actually kick Seagal’s ass).

This return to the Golden Age (just kidding; the nineties weren’t the Golden Age of anything) is most apparent in how the movie portrays technology and science. It’s always seemed somewhat ironic to me that as marvelous technology made its way into our daily lives, it slowly dropped out of our imagination. We used to dream of trips to Pluto and laser guns, now all we can think of is slightly smaller phones and somewhat rounder cars. 

Winter Soldier, however, brings that retro futurism back in force. Not only does everything have an AI, from elevators to cars, but one of the villains is literally a computer back up of an evil scientist’s consciousness. Made on reels of tape. In the 1970s. All this pointlessly convoluted pseudoscience reminds me of the robot maid in Rocky IV, and I don’t say that favorably.

I never bring up Rocky IV favorably.

I also thought that we, as a species, had evolved past the idea that the police, or good guys in general, could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to do it. I thought that gone were the days of cops pulling out their guns, finger on the trigger, after hearing a strange noise, yet here I am, watching Nick Fury completely smash a dozen civilian cars (and a handful of pedestrians) to escape the bad guys. You might say that he was under pressure and not thinking straight, or that a couple of civilian casualties were a good trade off for the life of a hero, except that rash decisions and the greater good mentality are the main themes that are explored in the movie and firmly attributed to the bad guys.

Plus, Fury’s kind of a useless dick.

I really wanted to like this movie. It’s an action movie with amazing choreography, very good visuals and fight scenes that aren’t filmed inside of a rock tumbler, it has some very nice, crisp and colorful photography and it makes a few pretty funny references and jokes. It’s actually very competent.

But I can’t. I can’t, because, like a lot of movies back then, it seems to think that I am functionally retarded. Yes, Winter Solider, I noticed that George St-Pierre isn’t actually Algerian. Or French, for that matter. No, Winter Soldier, I don’t need to see Fury’s car’s fucking health bar to get that he’s in trouble. You also don’t need to tell me the entire plot of the movie in the first half hour. No Winter Soldier, I will not buy a Corvette. Or a MacBook. And don’t tell me that Nick had the time to actually type all of these answers on his phone back in the Captain’s apartment. 

There are a lot of things that I would be willing to forgive. After all, I grew up watching Commando, Tango and Cash, Lethal Weapon and the likes, so I’m okay with the Captain somehow being able to kick people back 20 feet, or having his shield bounce off of the soft, squishy bodies of the bad guys, but embed itself in steel and concrete when it misses, or the obligatory former friend turned nemesis (which Winter Soldier pulled twice, by the way).

I’m just not a fan of a movie that is that formulaic and devoid of any original thought. Winter Soldier is almost insulting to its viewers’ intelligence in its predictability, and the fact that it’s otherwise so well made just serves to remind me that it could have been so much more.

Wow, that sounded so much harsher than I thought it would…

Winter Soldier is a well made homage to the action movies of back then that completely forgoes subtlety in favor of sweet, sweet set pieces and action scenes that, on the other hand, have all the flair and elegance of any 21st century Hollywood blockbuster.

Now that sounded too nice…

Winter Soldier is mediocre but polished, thoroughly average and middling. If, in a few months, you get a cold and call in sick on a rainy Tuesday, and if it’s on Netflix by then, it’s definitely worth streaming.