Russo & Russo: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Although Captain America has his own quirks, skills and attributes, what most distinguishes him is that he is the first genuinely historical superhero – at least in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe – as well as the first superhero consciously crafted by the government to prepare against an apocalyptic future. In Captain America: The First Avenger, that also created a superhero historicism that was rich enough in tone, style and palette to launch the Agent Carter spinoff, which in turn luxuriated in that hyperreal period backdrop in an even more extended and distended way. There’s something singularly, bleak, then, about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as Captain America (Chris Evans) arrives at the future projected by the first film only to find himself calcified into a Smithsonian exhibit in the midst of an almost unbearably denuded, digitised vision of Washington DC. That sense of a lost future is one of the key reasons why this also feels like the film in which the MCE accepts what it really is – neither an unabashedly pro-capitalist superhero narrative of the kind that emerged in the wake of 9/11, nor a putative genre critique in the vein of Christopher Nolan, but a capitalist realist concession and compromise, a sense that the world we live in only deserves to be saved by superheroes because it’s the only one that can possibly exist. That in itself is something of a contradiction – if we live in the only possible world, then why do we need superheroes at all? – just as the plot turns on the discovery that H.Y.D.R.A. has utterly intertwined S.H.I.E.L.D., but in a way that somehow doesn’t preclude wholehearted devotion to S.H.I.E.L.D either. In fact, the contradictions are so palpable that the film can’t ignore then, instead falling back upon the knowing tone that characterises the MCU – a peculiarly suffocating, constricting and joyless kind of knowing, chirpily reminding us of how unimaginative it all is while also forbidding us to imagine anything different. Critical to that sense of suffocation is the combination of digital action with an extraordinary amount of on-location shooting – especially around X and Z Streets – as if to position us in a steadily shrinking analog space, or to inhabit the very idea of the analog shoot itself as a steadily contracting position. Of course, that also means that the chases, both in car and on foot, are particularly impressive, as we move, seamlessly and digitally, through a selection of very real spaces that provide a quite stunning panorama of post-millenial DC. And in some ways the film’s pleasures subsist on what amounts to a sublime effort to reinvest the Capitol with the military-industrial supremacy it possessed half a century ago, when it was populated by the Greatest Generation that Captain America spearheaded. From the newly constructed Triskelion – the latest iteration of the city’s brutalist-classicist continuum – to the final “Battle over the Potomac,” Russo and Russo evince a taste for massive discrepancies in scale, figures against vast landscapes, that occasionally recall the moody vistas of 70s surveillance thrillers, especially once Robert Redford steps in to helm S.H.I.E.L.D. In some ways, then, it’s the most sublime of MCU films, but that also makes it the most sanctimonious as well, alternating perky self-awareness with mindless self-importance for what often feels like a lecture or business plan as much as a film, a critical juncture in the MCU Phase Two rollout. At the very least, it relegates cinematic immersion elsewhere, especially towards the massive digital fandom that seems to splinter scenes and shots into ready-made gifts, memes and tumblr avatars. Yet few recent films have captured the sense of a deflated, diluted present so perfectly as well, if only because that’s what every speech, spectacle and superpower is striving against, like a statement of unbelievable rhetorical bombast that’s continually collapsing in on itself, evacuating the very space it’s designed to expand and occupy: “You’re not going to put any of us in a prison because you need us. Yes, the world is a vulnerable place and, yes, we’ve helped make it that way, but we’re also the ones best guaranteed to defend it.”

Comments

[FrankDux]

I like the parts where he defies physics. Constantly.