Hacker Cinema
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2014 · Film · 136 min
Part of Captain America Collection
Directed by Joe Russo, Anthony Russo
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Steve Rogers, aka Captain America is living quietly in Washington, D.C. and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy—the Winter Soldier.
7 positive1 negative13 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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22 comments on Hacker News
A lot of the best Marvel movies are really other genres wearing a marvel skin
Look at Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a pulpy world war 2 film, really. If you took Captain America out it would still be a fun film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a spy thriller
Ant Man is a heist movie, like Oceans 11. Guardians is a sci fi comedy.
After a while they started to all just become "Marvel Movies" and that's the point they stopped being nearly as fun imo
I would argue that it is the opposite. People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier (I think it was the last movie I watched in theatre) and pretty much everything was explained to the audience. Guy Richie has character intro screens like Street Fighter in his movies.
Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
I watched "The Mothman Prophecies" and quite a lot of the movie was up to interpretation and there was many small things in the film that you might overlook e.g. there is a scene in a mirror where the reflection in the mirror is out of sync with his movements, suggesting something supernatural is occurring and he hasn't realised it yet. While I love the movie, there is very few movies like that.
If you watch movies before the 90s. A huge number of movies will have characters communicate efficiently and often realistically.
The movie that doesn't get enough credit at predicting the future, or what is now the present, is Captain America: The Winter Soldier. DOGE, Palantir, Larry Ellison's vision of nonstop AI surveillance, and all the data-sucking tech companies swearing fealty to the orange authoritarian are bringing the plot of that movie directly into reality, and I'm always surprised that it never gets mentioned.
The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.
Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).
Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]
[1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-explained/
I didn't watch it (I read a plot summery) but I did watch what I think was Captain America or Captain America: The Winter Soldier and they had a guy uploaded into a computer. That's earlier in the timeline, right? So it's proven doable in the universe they set up with the films.
I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.
The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind.
(Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.)
The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.)
My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
A good rule of thumb is if the derivative work is drawing sales away from the original work. Nobody is buying Captain America - The Winter Soldier to calculate the SHA256 so the movie studio sustains no losses from it being shared, so it shouldn’t count as copyright infringement.
Ends up worse then that: 8a707ed2cb8e1aa2e54c1b68d78e76b51d05f0a23c8a8b9d2f7f04aca01b3a96
This is the SHA256 of Captain America - The Winter Soldier. Pulled from my Blu-Ray copy of it. It can only be produced (in the current universe) if you have access to the complete data from the Australia Blu-Ray release of that movie.
So to create that number, every single frame and pixel of the original movie was included in some way.
Is the number itself copyright? After all, every byte of its input definitely was - there's no way to produce it without those bytes.
I bring up "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" because its also on the same fantasy scale as Shang Chi and other Marvel films. The feats are fully superhuman, and super-physical. Physics just don't work like that.
> Marvel’s best raw martial arts fights were probably on the likes of Daredevil (Netflix), Winter Soldier, and the Falcon Series.
That's called "Street Level" superheroes. There are superpowers, but they're much toned down. Its a different genre.
I thought Shang chi was very disappointing as a martial arts film. The choreography seemed weak. The bus fight was decent. Jackie Chan portrays himself as an incredible fighter but always very human. Shang chi, in my opinion, portrayed himself as a… pretty good fighter but weirdly powerful.
Marvel’s best raw martial arts fights were probably on the likes of Daredevil (Netflix), Winter Soldier, and the Falcon Series. But I don’t feel they’ve gotten Kung fu or traditional Chinese stuff down well ever.
Thing you haven't mentioned is that with no oversight, no transparency no counter, no clear your name, the tyranny which wants to ruin your life doesn't need to build a CSAM scanner to do it. A tip-off to the police, a falsified claim from an "eye witness", an "accident" putting your name on the wrong report to get the machinery rolling and it will, as you say, roll by itself. See what actually did happen to Sir Cliff Richard[1] where "a complaint to the police" got his house raided and his name dragged through the media and despite not being arrested, not being charged, case being dropped, him suing the media and winning, suing the police and winning and the media apologising, he says his reputation will never be completely cleared - and it probably never will be, and it didn't require any specific tech.
"The System" didn't need to wait patiently for a big tech company to build a complicated system with dastardly moustache-twirling weaknesses before it could affect Sir Cliff, anymore than Big Brother in 1984 needed to wait for Winston to be seen taking action on the telescreen in his house before the system crushed him. If "The System" wanted to accuse you, it could accuse your car of having been seen on a nearby road at the time, your likeness being seen on CCTV, and if you get rid of licence plate recognition scanners and CCTV then it would be "an anonymous witness" seeing you in the area at the time or "overhearing you discussing" something.
> "Most people don't understand how life destroying a false accusation is"
Citation needed? Because we were forced to read 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird in school and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people were as well; we've seen cult TV series like The Prisoner and The Fugitive focusing on the lives of the trapped trying to escape "the system". Blockbuster films have been made about the power of "The State" chasing people such as Enemy of the State with Will Smith. Films in the pattern "wrongly accused must fight to clear his name" and "stalwart good guy fights the system gone bad" are practically genres on their own - The Fugitive as a film with Harrison Ford, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Shawshank Redemption, and specifically about someone falseley accused by a child, The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen which is in the IMDB Top 250 films.
Are you also, for example, complaining about the system where doctors and social workers are mandatory reporters if they have any evidence or suspicion of children being abused? That's a "their word against yours" system which pervades the nation, has no oversight, has no objective criteria, no explanaiton of the workings of the brain behind it, relies on humans when we know for certain that there are doctors who make mistakes and errors of judgement and at least some who would look the other way for money.
At least with the tech company CSAM scanners we can potentially have a society wide discussion about how they work in detail, whether that's reasonable, who could and should oversee them and how, what kinds of data cloud companies are obliged to know about their customers and what is reasonable for them to not know, etc. But even in tech circles we can't actually have those discussions, most of the attempts to discuss the details of how it works are drowned out by people who haven't a clue what Apple announced, misunderstand massive parts of it, conflate two or three different systems, don't seem to understand that other tech companies already do this with much less careful design, and cry tyranny and blame China.
Hypothetically, iMessage or any chat system could be built end to end encrypted, any cloud file sync or file storage could be. One end of the spectrum is that they should be. If that's your position then "the system" will probably work around you, that's the "opt out of modern life" position of the "return to the woods" lifestyle. You can't unmake billions of cheap ubiquitous cameras, you can't unopen Pandora's box, and you probably can't stop people emotionally reacting strongly to topics of child protection. If your reaction to that is "not listening, no no no" then it doesn't seem likely to sway "the system" very much at all.
> "CSAM is a dastardly and effective way to establish a totalitarian rule by fear of life in jail, nothing more.
America has effectively incarcerated a lot of people into for-profit prisons without needing this. China has effectively added a lot of population control by rule of fear without needing this. You don't need a high-tech murder-detector to make people fear being thrown in jail for murder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard#Property_search,_investigation_and_BBC_litigation
I would comment as follows.
Iron Man - sort novel for setting marvel tone but mostly banal action movie
Iron Man 2 - banal action movie
Thor - banal action movie
Captain America: The First Avenger - particularly banal action movie
Marvel's The Avengers - banal action movie
Iron Man 3 - banal action movie, sort of interesting to see protagonist suffering PTSD anxiety from being a superhero
Thor: The Dark World - banal action movie
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - first interesting take. Patriotism is not the same as government obedience. Real fight choreography approaching a soft john wick.
Guardians of the Galaxy - Early rock and roll aesthetic pretty interesting
Avengers: Age of Ultron - banal action movie, perhaps mcu lowpoint
Ant-Man - superhero heist movie, literally deconstructs larger than life superhero tropes. I think thumbs up
Captain America: Civil War - by this point doing the mcu's own thing, which is novel, but probably not interesting outside
Doctor Strange - banal action movie
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - aesthetic still feels mostly fresh.
Spider-Man: Homecoming - super down to earth high school drama, frustrated working class villains suffering the fallout of superheroes, seems interesting to me
Thor: Ragnarok - great film, very genre savvy. Rare achievement to make godly strength brutes feel really engaging to watch. Taika Waititi is a genius.
Black Panther - pretty good. interesting aesthetic. directly addressing racial tensions.
Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame - Mostly fan service and not too surprising but honestly still novel.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - Ehhh I really don't remember
Captain Marvel - Beginning had some great hard sci fi imo. Thought the ending message of newly apotheosizied female not needing to prove herself to her evil male mentor was a solid take, whereas a classic "mano a mano" kind of showdown would be so typical of the genre
Spider-Man: Far From Home - Villain emphasizing themes of the power of deceptive media? heck yeah.
Wandavision - Really bizarre and interesting start. Unfortunately non-self-aware conclusion
Falcon and Winter Soldier - Active discussions of race and the problematic nature of superheroes being supremacists? Very good.
Loki - kind of a super cliche topic (time cops) that is also somehow really rare? eh.
honorable mentions for Logan and Deadpool for being just great; and the Amazing Spiderman for its excellent aesthetics despite terrible writing.
I think the stupidity lives in your point of view here. "Old x was better because it was sophisticated, new x is not because blah blah blah" is a story as old as time. The observable fact that you are either unaware of recent history or unwilling to learn from it is revealing. https://pessimists.co/novel-archive/
> Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes.
I'm not going to defend MCU as being a pinnacle of meaning or depth, because honestly I tend to see _all_ of art as being fundamentally bullshit. However, all of what you wrote can describe one MCU entry or another. Literally every single one. I get media criticism, but ffs you should probably actually watch a recent entry before you pass judgment. Ideally with an open mind - if you go in assuming a work is trash, you will find it is trash. Even bubble gum pop has artistic value; I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find intellectually interesting themes in MCU.
I recommend you take a moment to watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier. It has (for a child's movie at a nine-year-old level) sophisticated treatment of the security-vs-liberty tradeoff, the politics of mass surveillance, adapting to societal change, dealing with loss, and more. https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-hydra-shield-paranoia/
Unrelated to above points, but I think you should reflect on your arguments and whether things like the production schedule are actually part of a coherent framework to evaluate film, or just another fact pulled out of a hat to prop up your prejudice.
If you're willing to call everyone else stupid, I hope you won't mind me saying I expect better from someone on HN.
So recently I was watching through Marvel movies to get ready to finally watch the last two Avengers ones. I'm not crazy about them but it's ok fun. Part of the problem with them is what you say, the action is so much CGI it just turns meh.
But then I was watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was not very engaged but following it. At some point I caught myself having a elevated heart-beat and at the edge of my seat. This was the highway bridge scene.
I asked myself what is going on, I don't really care that much about the characters or plot, why am I so engaged?
Then I saw this episode of Corridor Crew's Stuntmen React[1], where one of the stunt performers mentioned almost every stunt in that scene was a practical stunt. And with that it all made sense.
[1]: https://youtu.be/SgGpPRBTBTI?t=45
Ah yes, Blender the "hobbyist" tool that's also:
* Used by NASA for a lot of their 3d modelling
* Used in Spider Man 2 for storyboarding
* Used for some special effects in Red Dwarf
* Used in Captain America: The Winter Soldier for previsualization
* Rendered the entirety of the movie Next Gen
The list goes on and grows every year. No, it won't affect the next Pixar movie, but if that's your standard then 3Delight sounds like just as much of a hobbyist thing.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier made a strong point about the issues of surveillance and trading freedom for security, where even the good guys (SHIELD) didn't realize until too late that they were doing the work of literal nazis. There was lots of boom boom in it, but it wasn't a dumb movie.
Arguably, Iron Man 1 was quite explicit about the issues of war, terrorism, and sales of weapons; it had a quite dark undertone for a MCU movie.
I disagree, at least at the matter of degree.
Scorsese said "[f]or me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves."
The paradoxical nature has been there between Thor and Loki, for example. Or Thanos and Gamorra.
The most revelatory Marvel movie was Captain America the Winter Soldier.
"Steve Rogers: The Future? How could it know? [Sitwell laughs] Jasper Sitwell: How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola taught HYDRA how to read it. [Steve and Natasha look at him in confusion] Jasper Sitwell: Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores. Zola’s algorithm evaluates peoples’ past to predict their future. Steve Rogers: And what then? Jasper Sitwell: Oh, my God. Pierce is going to kill me. Steve Rogers: What then?! Jasper Sitwell: Then the Insight Helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few millions at a time."
Coincidence or intentional, the fact that they kept that plot line after Snowden, that took balls. IIRC a lot of films around 2001 re-shot in respect of 9/11, and they could have re-shoot if they wanted to avoid it.
I can agree that these aren't the forefront of most Marvel plots. But I can think of far more movies that I'd accuse as not-cinema before I'd go after Marvel.
Hard to sit through, and obligatory IMO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_(film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrOBqC1A0sc
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ (because I saw it be on and disappear from YT before)
What's with the comic book movie hate? Most of the Marvel ones are pretty good.
I'd say the one exception is the soundtracks. Movies used to have memorable soundtracks. Nowadays the soundtracks are pretty boring. They use a process of filming using another movies soundtrack nowadays and then going back and recording a soundtrack afterwards. It makes movies sound the same. It's cheaper to make but it makes the movie going experience cheaper too. It reduces one of the best parts of going to the theater, the sound system.
I'm pretty sure that Marvel used the soundtrack to Mad Max for the filming Winter Soldier and then went out and recorded for the winter soldier.
The scary thing is, this is pretty much the plot for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843866/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
Now, I'm surprised. My country is supposed to be the one that has to always encounter, "Not available in your Country."
But these movies are available in Indian Rupee and they're cheap. ₹100 ($1.63) for Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I'm India. :-)