Pete Wright:
Welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast in which we assemble to explore the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe five minutes at a time, and this is our ninth season. We’re looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Pete Wright.

Kyle Olson:
I’m Kyle Olson.

Pete Wright:
And today we’re talking about minutes 111 through 115, which begins with a little punching, a little social media, a little name tag immolation, and ends with some strong helicarrier-on-helicarrier violence.

Kyle, this is — I mean, we’ve been waiting. We’ve been waiting, and we get it. It’s finally here. I didn’t think this day would ever come.

Kyle Olson:
I know. Here we are. Cap versus Bucky for everything.

Pete Wright:
That’s it.

Kyle Olson:
This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for, the mano a mano, the two of them going toe to toe. And only Cap is still probably holding back some, but the Winter Soldier is in full control and going after kill shots, kill shots, kill shots. He is absolutely there to do it.

My thought as I was watching it, watching Cap, is that he still has the mission. Cap’s mission is get to the server, put in the blade, make sure that they — that’s his mission. He’s not there to kill Bucky, stop Bucky, or anything about Bucky. He wants to save him, but that’s secondary. So Cap is a soldier. He is on mission. He’s on task.

What do you think the Winter Soldier’s orders were?

Pete Wright:
If his orders were to stop Cap from achieving his goal, he should have made a harder fist. He’s holding this chip, this blade, in his hand that Cap had dropped, and he never crushes it. And we know he could have crushed it.

Kyle Olson:
Yes. We’ve seen him, even in the last couple of minutes — we saw him tear open, he rips the wings off of Falcon, which I’m sure had to be whatever the titanium version is.

Pete Wright:
Stronger than a silicon board. So what was his objective? I don’t know. I have no theory.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t either. Because we saw him take out a bunch of soldiers, so is it to make sure that the carriers get to enough height to get their angles, or whatever it is, by any means necessary? And then he obviously takes out Falcon. That’s something that is in our way of making sure that Project Insight goes off.

And then when it comes to Cap, I don’t think he knows what that thing is — the blade, the server blade that has to be put in.

Pete Wright:
But he knows what it is enough to know to hold on to it.

Kyle Olson:
Exactly. He knows that Steve thinks this is important. So therefore you’d think it would be the case. But then, of course, as in all of these things, it gets knocked away and over the side, and, oh no, what are we gonna do now?

But through the whole thing I was sort of going, is it just a holding action? Is it literally all he has to do? We know if he just maintains this fight for another two minutes, then Project Insight goes off and millions of people die.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s over.

Kyle Olson:
But does he know that? I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
Right. We have no indication that Bucky has a bug in his ear being told from somebody in a chair.

Kyle Olson:
Right. It’s that launch-into-space thing. They just launched him, and then it’s up to him how he interprets things as he’s out in the world. Because Pierce — I don’t know if even Pierce knows that he’s in play. There was sort of the plan, but then things are not going how Pierce thought they were in the conference room with all the people. He makes a big play, and we’ll talk about this, but I don’t know that he knows all the other things that are happening.

Pete Wright:
Right. Because just in terms of setting the stage of the five minutes, we’ve got four simultaneous clocks that are ticking. One is obviously the Charlie helicarrier, with dome underside. We have Pierce’s office slash council room as our second clock. Our third clock is the Triskelion, floor 41, where we have a meeting between the Falcon and Rumlow. And the fourth is Charlie Bridge, which is where our Hydra bridge techs are talking to one another and trying to launch this thing.

I guess there’s actually a fifth clock, because we do cut away to Maria Hill, who is elsewhere. But — no.

Kyle Olson:
But she’s not in danger. She’s just at this point — and we’ve already seen she can handle herself. So in our minds we’re sort of like, oh okay, we don’t need to worry about her, unless.

I don’t know, maybe. Is it possible that a flying helicarrier could crash into the Triskelion? No, that’s ridiculous.

Pete Wright:
It’s probably fine.

Kyle Olson:
It’s probably fine.

Pete Wright:
They went up out of the river. They’ll probably go straight down back into the river.

Kyle Olson:
Straight down, as we know, flying things.

Pete Wright:
Very gentle.

Kyle Olson:
They immediately, just like leaves or feathers, slowly fall.

Pete Wright:
A leaf in the wind. Watch me fly.

So, sticking with the belly — I find this fight really exhilarating, first of all, because it’s designed well, as all of the fights are. But I want to get to your point, which is that Cap is probably holding back a little bit.

Then the end of this fight — so we’ll jump around a little bit. At the end of the fight, Cap has Bucky in — what is the wrestling move that he has Bucky in?

Kyle Olson:
I think it’s just a chokehold.

Pete Wright:
See, I wouldn’t have even been able to get you there.

Kyle Olson:
I’m sure there are some MMA fans who know exactly what that is, but basically just a standard takedown. And it works. They fight up on the thing, the blade goes over, they fall to the midpoint, whatever that weird Dyson Airblade thing is that’s sticking out.

Pete Wright:
Definitely a Dyson Airblade. I got that same vibe. The whole column is a Dyson product.

Kyle Olson:
Right? And then down at the bottom, it’s really smart, because I was looking at it going, oh, you have him, you’re holding him with that one arm. I was like, oh, he can still hit you. And then I was like, oh wait, Cap is restraining the cyborg arm. Because if you got punched in the face with that, it’s lights out.

So it’s really smart the way he does it, even though it leaves Bucky’s other hand free, and he usually gets a stab and a kick, and a stab and a punch, and gets his gun, everything he can. But unfortunately the Winter Soldier still needs to breathe, and so when Cap holds that airway, then it’s lights out for Bucky, and that’s when they would ring the bell.

Pete Wright:
Well, and this hold is the place where it seems to me that Cap is no longer really holding as much back. Do you get the sense that he’s dislocating appendages?

Kyle Olson:
Yes. I think he absolutely dislocated his shoulder, because he says, “Don’t make me do this.” And as a soldier — still with your soldier, there’s still no sign of Bucky at this point — he absolutely puts some severe pain on him. But even at this point, if this was a Nazi in World War II, Cap would have absolutely killed him.

Pete Wright:
You’re absolutely right.

Kyle Olson:
So I think he goes farther than he wants to, but he still just knocks him out. He doesn’t bust his windpipe. He doesn’t actually make it so that, oh yeah, he’ll wheeze himself to death while I’m out taking care of some computer maintenance.

Pete Wright:
Fair point. Well, and you’re right, because after this bit he leaves Bucky passed out at the bottom of the dome set, the one they called the salad bowl. ILM called it the salad bowl.

And practically everything outside the immediate footprint of that fight is digital expansion. Beautifully done, honestly. Apart from being a ridiculous component of a helicarrier, it is gorgeously rendered. It looks great.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, even in that shot where they fall down onto the blade, I was sort of looking for the mat lines a little bit, trying to figure out.

Pete Wright:
Nothing ever really took me out of it.

Kyle Olson:
I know that what they’re standing on is practical, what’s behind them is practical, but I know they did not build a giant plexiglass wall and fill it full of little — or big — metal discs and stuff. I know all of that was there, but it’s still, even after more than ten years, it still looks great. And brightly colored.

Remember when they used to have color in Marvel movies?

Pete Wright:
This was it. This was the end.

So, beyond the beauty of the production, of course, he gets up and he starts scaling the Dyson spike.

Kyle Olson:
Cap is back on mission. He’s like, all right, I gotta.

Pete Wright:
He’s back on mission, but Bucky wakes up and just starts shooting at him. Shoots him in the stomach.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, his arm is still dislocated, so he uses the cyborg arm and is just taking shot after shot, and hitting pretty much every shot.

Pete Wright:
It’s gruesome. It’s great.

Kyle Olson:
And Cap is continuing on. Cap takes shot after shot after shot, and then finally, when he gets there and he almost gets the blade in — the clock is ticking, all this stuff — he gets another shot, and he collapses on the ground without having put the blade in. And we see that Bucky has shot him essentially through his stomach. I was trying to figure out the angle of that thing. Probably sideways, like through his side and then out his chest, because you see it under the star on his costume.

Pete Wright:
I think it was a bank shot. I think he banked it off a piece of Dyson spike.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, okay. Little Bullseye action there.

Or maybe he was bending the bullet, like in Wanted.

Pete Wright:
Doing a little Bullseye, a little Deadshot.

Kyle Olson:
And you can see that if it hasn’t hit his spine, then at least it’s enough to — okay, now this is, I think, the third time he’s been shot. He’s got three bullets in him at this point from this fight.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, and stabbed in the shoulder.

Kyle Olson:
And stabbed, yeah. And that was enough to actually knock him to the ground, so you start to go, oh, did he just shoot him in the spine? Is he really — he can’t stand anymore?

Pete Wright:
What does the super soldier serum give Cap, from the comics, for healing?

Kyle Olson:
More, but not like Wolverine level. It’s kind of like a slow regeneration over time. I think in one of the Marvel role-playing games they actually ranked it. Essentially Spider-Man has the same kind. It’s one of those lesser abilities, where given enough time you can come back from all these things. But Wolverine is like, five minutes, he’s coming back, be ready. Whereas Cap, it’s hours or days.

Pete Wright:
You’re not witnessing wounds heal and bullets coming out of his head and that kind of a thing.

Kyle Olson:
Exactly. He’s not gonna do the spitting-the-bullet-out thing.

Pete Wright:
Right. Okay. All right. This is a very satisfying fight. It is less satisfying for me than the bridge fight. If we’re ranking the big fights in this movie, it’s actually less satisfying than the other giant meetups, fisticuffs, in this movie.

Kyle Olson:
Okay. How so? What is your criteria that makes it lesser for you?

Pete Wright:
Well, specifically speaking of the highway brawl — this one weirdly feels the least, and I’m gonna say the word and I know that it’s hyperliteral, but it’s the least grounded of the thing. It’s literally off the ground, but it’s also the most like we’re in a lair of some sort.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, you’re literally floating in the air.

Pete Wright:
And the others are like, this is what these incredibly powerful soldiers do when they’re just hanging out on the street and they’re destroying your car. That gives me a lot more anxiety as an audience member: look how real this is. This helicarrier is not and has never been real. It’s never been a thing, apart from an item of fantasy.

Kyle Olson:
It’s interesting, because I think of the scene in Avengers where Cap and Tony have to restart the engine of the helicarrier, and it’s just as unreal. But yet it felt more real, because even though you’re watching a CG guy in a suit starting a CG engine, the way that they shot it made it feel much more visceral. And then when he gets caught in the engine and banged around, you still felt more reality of it, even though it was far more CG than this.

Do you think it would have been better to have it be on the deck? Or in a traditional ship control room?

Pete Wright:
Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe. Maybe for me — this is my taste — but you bring up the Tony thing. If we’re comparing Tony and Cap, the best Tony-Cap fight is the Tony-Cap fight in the Russian bunker.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah. I was thinking helicarrier to helicarrier, because that scene also took place on the helicarrier.

Pete Wright:
No, I totally get it. But this is the comparison for me. Put them on the ground in a space that I can visualize, that I can relate to, and it is going to be more impactful than being in a helicarrier. The Natasha-Hulk experience in the helicarrier — that’s not in a place that’s completely fantastical. I’ve been in a submarine. I’ve taken the tour of the submarines. That’s what it feels like to me. I can relate to that. I can’t relate to this room. This is all comic.

And that is in a movie that we have been celebrating for weeks for how wonderfully grounded it is. Suddenly we’re in — I’m looking at a still of the Dyson stuff, and it looks like it’s right out of an Ed Wood film. Just with color. It’s a lot of round things and columns. There might as well be a Tesla coil in here. Do you know what I’m saying? And I say that not to disparage it. I love it. And it feels the most remote.

Kyle Olson:
It does unfortunately fit a standard Marvel pattern of, they get to the third act, and then.

Pete Wright:
We’re going all in.

Kyle Olson:
Exactly. Consequences be damned. We gotta go as big as possible, and then you lose out on stuff. This is a minor sin comparatively, but it is very clearly like, oh, this starts a pattern that is still continuing on to this day, that is not good. You can draw a line directly from this to, I’d say, maybe one of the worst of the finales, which is Black Widow. And it’s a direct line, where the Black Widow one is completely removed from reality in a movie that had been much more grounded even than this, I would say.

Pete Wright:
And suddenly we’re falling from a comic blimp.

Kyle Olson:
Yes, and moving from platform to platform. It was a complete disconnect by that point. And unfortunately, it’s sort of starting here.

Pete Wright:
And yet, give me a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy, still to come. Guardians of the Galaxy starts bonkers. It’s already bonkers. I’m okay. And in many respects, the same thing can be said of Doctor Strange.

But I think part of it — when you look at the sins of the movies that you’re bringing up, this one and Black Widow — when you start with a grounded promise and we’re so satisfied for two-thirds of the movie, you have to be aware that there is risk to take it in this direction, because that’s not the promise you made when we started. And I’m still on board on this movie, but man, you’re poking the dragon by bringing up Black Widow.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah. Well, okay, then I will say this: if this is in the contenders for top Marvel films of all time, in terms of overall quality and belovedness — not even ranking where, but in the top five — Black Panther is also in that category, and does the same thing.

Pete Wright:
Right. Yep.

Kyle Olson:
That same thing with that train thing at the end. Every single time — I love that movie. I love 99% of that movie. And then they get to that thing and every time I go, oh my god.

Pete Wright:
You’re absolutely — that train thing at the end. What are we doing right now with this parade of pixels? What are we doing? You had it right there. You had the whole movie in your hands, and decided to do the parade of light rather than giving the actors a chance to be.

Kyle Olson:
Letting the actors do their thing, letting the stunt performers do their thing.

Having just watched that again recently, having it be a reprise of the waterfall fight would have been better.

Pete Wright:
Then it would have been a callback.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, what about a callback?

Pete Wright:
It would have been glorious.

Kyle Olson:
That’s what I’m saying. You do all the sonic stuff, and they lose their suits, and then it’s back to mano a mano, and it ends the exact same way, and everything from there on is exactly the same.

Anyway, back to this one. So yeah, I see your point. I do love the super science. I do love the ridiculousness. But it is so grounded, and even will be again later on in this same act, in this same movie, that we get up to this height, and at this altitude the emotional stakes get a little bit wonky.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Let us go and see what Pierce and Natasha are doing.

Kyle Olson:
To the control room. That’s good. Because Pierce had a plan. This was good, because he hoped to get the council on his side. But if not, then he had a little plan in place: if they decided to vote against him, then their badges would burn through their chests and kill them.

Pete Wright:
So here’s the thing. Do you think someone like Natasha — I sort of feel like, by Marvel’s own accounting on these badges, I’m not sure what’s on screen lives up to the threat that they promised. They burn so fast, and they wreck organs, and they fry them with their name tags. We get that. And we see a couple of the council members burn. And I never get past the fact that I think Natasha could have taken off the jacket fast enough to not be burned. I just am not sure that these things were aggressive enough in the effect to actually make me feel like she was threatened.

Am I overthinking it?

Kyle Olson:
No, I don’t think so, because this is the PG-13 nature of it. The devices themselves, from what Pierce describes, from what he says will happen — I guess it’s almost like a piece of molten steel that will essentially burn through your entire body and then destroy whatever it comes in contact with, which is, you know, there’s a lot of important stuff in that area, like heart and lungs. And so it will go fast. So we only see it sort of spark, and then people drop out of frame.

Pete Wright:
So there’s something happening.

Kyle Olson:
And that’s it. But then he says, oh, this will burn through your sternum faster than, you know. But because of the PG-13 nature of it, we’re not really allowed to see it. Everybody just goes “ah,” and they fall out of frame. Back to the Ed Wood thing of, ooh, dead. You don’t get to see that stuff, because it’s still a comic movie and you still gotta keep it moving, with the kids.

Pete Wright:
Well, and I don’t want to overtly armchair a movie that’s as old as this one is, and a movie I already love, but it almost feels like maybe it’s got a poison dart in it that injects into you, something that’s fast. This doesn’t feel on screen fast enough to carry through the threat, because we don’t get to see it.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, because it takes like two or three seconds.

Pete Wright:
And she has now seen three people die. And we’ve been set up to believe she is the best of the best. And it just feels to me like she would have been able to rip off the jacket. And now I’m one of those guys. I don’t like being that guy.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it could have been saved by something simple, like as soon as she sees the first one, she sees it, looks at hers, and then goes to move, and then Pierce is like, ah, ah, ah. Not so fast.

Natasha, the whole thing has always, I feel like, been written as a little bit behind the time. Whereas I feel like she should be the one who goes, oh yeah, I already knew that. But we’re gonna see her come out of this — not, unfortunately, in these minutes, but down the line.

But the threat does work, because it gets both Natasha and Nick to stand down. They’re like, oh, all right. So it’s not a Mexican standoff anymore. You got us. Even though the information has been released, that was out there, they’re not able to stop anything on their side from the computer-y stuff going on.

Pete Wright:
Right. And it’s trending, she says. Done, and it’s trending. We’re referring, of course, to the information dump from last week. She has dumped all of Hydra’s and Shield’s secrets onto the internet. And man, it’s trending fast. I don’t know where she did it. I don’t know where she dumped it.

Kyle Olson:
We don’t know much about what the social media scene is like in the MCU.

Pete Wright:
We sure don’t.

Kyle Olson:
I’m glad for it. I really don’t need to know.

Pete Wright:
Well, probably the closest we get to it is Spider-Man.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, we get to see, almost in real time, his life unravel as J. Jonah Jameson makes his big announcement.

Pete Wright:
Right. So Pierce gets his break, and mostly he’s still talking to the Charlie Bridge lieutenant: what’s our timeline? And then on the bridge we have what reminds me of an Imperial cruiser bridge. If these guys were wearing the pointy hats, I’d think they were right out of Star Wars.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, they are definitely the baddies.

Pete Wright:
They are so bad.

Kyle Olson:
And so you see the — I guess he’s just listed as, I think, Charlie Commander. So this actor is Jon Sklaroff from New York City. Born NYC, baby. It’s a pretty incredible thing: he has 73 credits on IMDb. I’m gonna list off just a handful of the ones I pulled up, because he is a perennial worker and seems to be beloved by casting agents because he’s in New York.

So what show has he definitely been on?

Pete Wright:
Well, Law & Order.

Kyle Olson:
Law & Order, yes. Multiple Law & Orders. He was in Three Kings, CSI, NCIS, Bones, Monk, ER, 24, The Mentalist, Chuck, Gotham, Lucifer, The Rookie. He has run the gamut.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, Murderers’ Row.

Kyle Olson:
Man, I hope those residual checks are sweet, because he’s got a bunch of them coming in.

But one thing I thought was interesting is that he made his television debut in 1996. This is not a test, because there’s no way you’re going to know this. But he made his television debut in 1996, in — if we remember — a Dick Wolf show. It only lasted 13 episodes, but those 13 episodes had featured appearances by Kirk Acevedo, Drea de Matteo, Kate Walsh, Lance Reddick, J.K. Simmons, Peter Stormare, Jennifer Garner, and Giancarlo Esposito.

Pete Wright:
What?

Kyle Olson:
Yes. I did not even know this show existed.

Pete Wright:
What is the show?

Kyle Olson:
It is called Swift Justice.

Pete Wright:
I’ve never heard of it.

Kyle Olson:
It sounds like a parody, but I hadn’t either. You know why we didn’t hear of it? It was on UPN. Dick Wolf created a show on UPN. It’s about a New York City ex-cop named Mac Swift who takes on investigations the police can’t handle.

Pete Wright:
Of all of those actors, I don’t know who would play Mac Swift.

Kyle Olson:
Mac Swift was played by James McCaffrey, who unfortunately is no longer with us.

Pete Wright:
Who was it?

Kyle Olson:
He has another incredible resume, but most famous to gamers, he was Max Payne. And he was also in Control, which I know is one of our favorite sort of sci-fi horror-ish games. His voice is no longer with us, but his legacy looms large.

But the promo for the show was fantastic, because it’s like — I was like, oh right, I’m already on board. In a world where crime is re-da-da-da-da-da. And it gets to the end, and you see him, Mac Swift, as Swift steps out and he says, “Sometimes when there’s no justice, there’s just this.” And he pulls out two guns and starts firing them. And I was like, 1996. Chef’s kiss.

Pete Wright:
Oh, so much was just okay back then. So much stuff was just fair and awesome.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, but I hope whoever was doing the casting on that show got an Emmy for it. Because, man, for just 13 episodes, the amazing array of talent that they got in there.

Pete Wright:
God, that’s a lot.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And so for here, now he’s the Hydra — clearly a Hydra person.

Pete Wright:
Giancarlo Esposito.

Kyle Olson:
He’s following his orders, trying to get his ship high enough that he could murder millions of people.

Pete Wright:
Yes, and he is talking to a Hydra bridge tech who is just talking about minutes and feet and everything’s fine.

Kyle Olson:
Yep. This is our ticking clock, rather than having a literal countdown. They’re just going by, cutting back and forth: it’s getting close, it’s getting close, it’s getting close.

Pete Wright:
I love that one of the things we see as it’s getting close, getting close, getting close, is the exterior shots where all of the guns are coming down.

Kyle Olson:
Railguns, I guess.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, railguns. But they’re all modeled after Cap-era Axis guns.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, exactly, like battleship weapons. They look like they’re just regular howitzer-type cannons.

Pete Wright:
And I think it ends up looking really good. And I think it feels more appropriate in this reveal than it did in the tour of the base, because then it just felt like, oh, these are just — this is what laser guns look like. And now it looks.

Kyle Olson:
Right. It literally could have been a Captain Proton-era death ray. It could have been just glowing rods that extend and incinerate people. But instead they’re just like, oh no, they’re just gonna fire big bullets.

Pete Wright:
Right. It’s not stuff that we recovered from New York.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah, that’s right.

Pete Wright:
So I really like it. It still looks — in the air, for some reason, it looks really practical. It looks solid. And the ticking clock is really good for me. It works well. I like everybody bracing for those last three seconds.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, we see the targeting. It goes in through the whole targeting thing, and there’s a lot of stuff there. People have gone through and listed all the names. We’re not going to list all the names here, but if you want to find out all the names that are on screen, they are readily available through just clicking and clacking those keys, and you can find them.

The notable ones that I found on that list are pretty much what you expect. We have Matthew Ellis, who is currently the president, if you watched Iron Man 3. He was the president, and he remains the president. Bruce Banner is on the list. Maria Hill, which I think is interesting, because that gun had to do so little work.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s literally right there.

Kyle Olson:
Just an inch to the left.

Pete Wright:
It’s just straight down.

Kyle Olson:
Steve Rogers, who obviously — that’ll be a much harder shot, because he’s above where the guns are. Tony Stark and Stephen Strange. All the rest of them seem to be either randomly generated, or they’re friends and family. We didn’t see anything else that was Easter egg-y in terms of the names.

Pete Wright:
Then we actually get the resolve that Cap, even while shot through the spine to the stomach, is able to lock Charlie.

Kyle Olson:
Presumably, yep.

Pete Wright:
And then this is it. This is when the helicarriers go to town on each other.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, exactly. You find out that what Maria was doing was changing the targeting system so that each insight carrier would target the other carriers. And so then you see the guns go from pointing down at the people, and swing up to point at the other ones. And you actually get to see inside the Charlie control booth and look out and go, wait, wait, those guns are pointing at us. And then, hellfire.

Pete Wright:
And it’s staged really beautifully, having one of them higher than the other. It just looks really good in the sky. I think they managed to pull off what could have ended up being a really clumsy — this is a battle at sea, this is pirate ships going at each other, but they’re doing it over the Potomac.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And of course, then Cap is the one who called down the fire on himself. He is not clear, and Maria knows this, but he’s like, fire anyway. Even though he’s there at ground zero, this is his job. He did the work, and now it’s gotta be done. He’s willing to sacrifice himself. He’s going to make the sacrifice play here.

There’s no reason for him to think that he’s gonna be able to crawl away in time.

Pete Wright:
And we don’t have any expectation — in fact, even if we presume what’s going to happen, he’s gonna fall out of the dome and into the Potomac. He’s going to be crushed by helicarrier. That’s kind of where we are.

Kyle Olson:
Right. As we’ve established, helicarriers fall like rocks. They just drop straight down.

Pete Wright:
Right. They drop straight down. Everybody knows it.

And that marks sort of the end. The very last — I mean, two seconds of this minute — do you hear a scream?

Kyle Olson:
What is the — yeah, I might have to.

Pete Wright:
If you need to go back and listen to it: what’s on screen is, we’re behind Cap’s head, he’s kind of grasping on the railing, and the dome is falling down out of the helicarrier. And there is a scream that — let me just say for the record, it is not the Wilhelm scream. I know what the Wilhelm scream sounds like.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
It’s not that, I promise. But there is an effect in there that feels very stock and screamy. And I can’t tell if they’re trying to suggest that this is what Bucky sounds like when he screams. It does not sound like Bucky.

My hunch that I finally came to is, when they’re building these sequences, they’re building them out of entire massive beds of sound to make shrieking, ripping sounds of metal. And I think this is a sequence that just ended up having this instanced kind of scream element to make it sound like destruction. But man, it sticks out to me like a big, big sore thumb. I can’t unhear it. It sounds like that’s what they want Bucky to sound like when he falls.

Kyle Olson:
Interesting.

Star Wars — in Empire Strikes Back, when they did the special edition, I remember going into the theater and seeing that when they re-released them with all new effects and all this stuff. When Luke does his, after the “I am your father,” and then “it’s impossible,” then he throws himself off. In the original version, he just — basically, I’d rather die than turn to the dark side. That’s the big moment. In the special edition, he goes “aaaah.”

And I was like, so you’re saying that Luke was considering this and then slipped?

Pete Wright:
Okay, we’re doing this — and changed his mind.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, or it was like, oh, actually, woo. And it was like, well, I guess I gotta roll with this now.

So screaming sounds are very important. As we are both sound nerds, there is one particular door squeak that I use, and every time I hear it, it drives me crazy, because I’m like, I know you just went in, took a creaky door sound, and put it in. And every door that opens up has this exact same sound, and I’m like, come on.

Pete Wright:
Yep. Loafers on wood again.

Kyle Olson:
Uh-huh. So I get ya.

Pete Wright:
Well, go listen to it, because then you’ll never unhear it, and then we’ll be cursed together, and it’s gonna be great. And this marks the beginning of the third act resolution. The boys are gonna fall.

Kyle Olson:
Yes, that’s right.

Pete Wright:
Because gravity does what gravity do.

Kyle Olson:
And the only other note I had in my thing is, I love the fact that when we cut to space — I always think it’s funny when you’re in the middle of a scene and cut to space. And the satellites, just to let us know, like, oh, how are they getting this information? Oh, cut to space, there’s a shot. And they are Insight-branded satellites.

Pete Wright:
Satellites, I know.

Kyle Olson:
They built a satellite and then literally somebody had a stencil and put “Insight” on the side of the satellite.

I love that. I’m watching the last couple of seconds.

Pete Wright:
Oh, you’re checking for screams.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah. Wow. Yeah, you’re right. There absolutely is the sound of a giant piece of metal falling onto a hundred-year-old Russian resurrected super soldier.

Pete Wright:
That’s what it sounds like, right?

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Wright:
I’m not totally crazy.

Kyle Olson:
Ooh. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
I don’t think that’s what he sounds like, though.

Kyle Olson:
Maybe the only time we ever hear Bucky scream in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe journey. The last time we heard him scream was falling off of a train.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, maybe I should go comp that. I wanted to run this through my stem splitter, but I’m not sure it’ll take it from the score as a vocal.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I would say we could play the Wilhelm scream, but I think it might be copyrighted. I don’t know for sure.

Pete Wright:
Oh, do you know what? You wonder — if you’re listening to this show, do you think anybody listening to this doesn’t know what the Wilhelm scream sounds like, Kyle?

Kyle Olson:
I don’t know, I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
I think we know our audience.

All right. This was great. We’re gonna watch gravity do stuff next week, and I’m very excited about that.

Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Cap’s got a big choice to make, and we’re gonna see the consequences of all these actions.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, there’s choices to be made. I’m sure there’s consequences. There’s a lot going on.

Kyle Olson:
And somebody goes for a little swim.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. And somebody gets dragged out. We don’t know how it’s gonna end. What are we talking about?

Kyle Olson:
We don’t know how it’s gonna end.

Pete Wright:
This is all — we’re all just posturing.

Thank you, everybody, for listening to us on this show. Go find Kyle on the Craft and Chaos podcast, CraftAndChaos.fun. You can listen to that. It’s been on hiatus for a while, so now is a great time to binge.

Kyle Olson:
That’s right, you can catch up.

Pete Wright:
I’ll be there too. And you can find all the other films — actually, of this show, all the other seasons. Are you going back and watching some old Marvel movies? You can catch me and Kyle and all of the Marvel Movie Minute crew in our seasons for all of the Marvel movies that have come before. They’re all in the feed, hundreds of episodes, pulling apart the movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Kyle Olson:
That’s right. If you don’t have time to watch the whole movie, you can listen to the Kerner commute back and forth over, like, a hundred hours.

Pete Wright:
Years of your life you could lose to this, the history of this show. We’d appreciate you doing that. Thank you, everybody. And we will see you next week.

Kyle Olson:
That’s right. More winter, more soldier. ‘Nuff said.