Pete Wright:
Welcome back to 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 in this, our ninth season, we are looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Pete Wright.

Matthew Fox:
I’m Matthew Fox.

Kyle Olson:
And I also.

Pete Wright:
Today we’re talking about minutes 116 through 120, which begins with Natasha finally figuring out the badge thing and ends with gravity in all its complicated senses.

Matthew Fox:
I gotta say — and I know this is just random — we make jokes about, oh, they design these movies knowing that people do minute by minute. But the ending of this five minutes, where it’s literally Cap in slow motion falling out of the helicopter? That was just one of the best cinematic needle stops I’ve ever seen.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. That was beautiful.

Pete Wright:
That’s just art, man. That’s just art. It’s really beautiful.

And I think this five minutes — we talked about the big fighty-fighty stuff the last five minutes. We have a little bit of the echoes of the fighty-fighty stuff in this five minutes, but mostly we’re resolving the cross-cut scenes that have sort of held us for the last ten minutes. And I think it works pretty well.

It actually holds up well in terms of the minute-by-minute approach, because the first minute, minute 116, we’re in the council chamber. Pierce is watching through the glass as the helicarriers tear each other to pieces over the Potomac. “What a waste,” he says. We still love Redford. Now he’s a surly Redford.

Kyle Olson:
It’s a great shot, though, too — just over his shoulder as he sees his entire everything falling apart. All his plans, the last twenty years. I don’t know how long Project Insight’s been in his brain, but it’s all come down.

Matthew Fox:
And I thought this was pretty significant, both this and the little “Hail Hydra” at the very end. Because we had discussed a while back, to what extent is this character a true believer, versus a mwahaha power guy, versus kind of a dupe of the powers that be of Hydra? And I think this is a pretty clear sign of someone who honestly believed he was the hero of the story.

And I was thinking about it more, and thinking about, so why is it this is happening? And I don’t think it’s coincidental that we’re gonna get Age of Ultron pretty darn soon. That they started out talking about how part of what got Insight going and all of this was, there are freaking aliens out there and they might attack us, and we need to be a more stable, secure society.

And I couldn’t help but think, the fear that drove Redford’s character to do this kind of thing is not that far from what drives Tony Stark to create Ultron. He’s still very much a villain in a way that Stark doesn’t quite get to be — although we can discuss that when we get to that movie. But to me, that line and the “Hail Hydra” really confirmed he really believed this. It doesn’t make him any less villainous, but he is not a mustache twirler. He’s not, you know, Bones — man — Crossbones, the guy who becomes Crossbones, Rambo, what—

Pete Wright:
Rumlow.

Matthew Fox:
Rumlow, thank you. Me and names.

Pete Wright:
I like Rambo, though.

Matthew Fox:
Who, right? Who I think just wants power because he wants to be a bully.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Matthew Fox:
I think Redford genuinely believed this was gonna make the world a better place.

Pete Wright:
Well, I think there are two things going on. Whether Pierce was ideologically pure in his belief that this was going to make a better place — yes, I agree with that. When he says “Hail Hydra,” my first thought is, does he understand that maybe Hydra doesn’t necessarily share the ideological purity of just making the world a better place, but also exists to accumulate power and authority for the sake of having power and authority? Does that make sense as a sort of nuanced difference?

Matthew Fox:
I’d say so. I mean, it’s a hard question, because if you ask, okay, well, after all these movies and all these episodes of Shield, what does Hydra actually really want?

Pete Wright:
Right.

Matthew Fox:
It’s a never-ending Russian nesting doll. Every season, every movie, there’s a new one. But I think part of the point of that is that no one knows what Hydra actually wants.

Pete Wright:
Hydra doesn’t know what Hydra actually wants.

Matthew Fox:
It has many heads.

Kyle Olson:
Yes, that’s the downside of “when you cut off a head” — the heads don’t know what the other heads are doing. So every time Hydra shows up, it kind of seems like everyone’s pursuing their own thing. Because aside from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the next Hydra we see is Baron von Strucker, immediately getting defeated at the start of the next Avengers movie. And he is very much the classic “blah-ha” supervillain, with the monocle and everything.

Pete Wright:
Mustache twirling.

Kyle Olson:
Very different than the Hydra we see here in the immaculate, well-tailored suit at the top of a tower.

Pete Wright:
It’s one of the things that makes this version of Hydra the most interesting for this movie, because it is the greatest complement for the ideologically pure Steve Rogers, right? It’s a better evildoer because it wants something that’s not just power. And Steve wants something and is out of time and isn’t always quite sure what that is, but he knows it’s good and honest.

And so I think that’s a lesson for me in this five minutes that I don’t think I’ve ever thought about — the value of a deep evildoer.

Matthew Fox:
Well, and to me, I feel like it is a better, more interesting villain, but it also highlights why Red Skull still needed to be the villain in the first movie. Because the first challenge for Cap isn’t the deep idealism. It’s, you now have all this power. Will you become a bully?

Because to me, Red Skull is very much like the Baron. He’s not ideological, he’s just a supremacist. And very much therefore in the kind of — he’s a Nazi, except that he thinks the Nazis are just as weak compared to him. And everyone else, when they compare to him.

And so I think that Cap first needed that challenge of, you have all this power. Will you become the supremacist? Will you believe that you are better than everyone else, because you actually literally are? Or will you still hold to that humility of, I’m here to help? And then once that is established, now we can get to, okay, if you’re only going to use your powers to serve your ideology and to serve your ideas of good, now let’s pull that rug out from under you and see what happens.

To me, I like this villain a lot more. I never really thought about it until I was watching it again just now and now talking about it. This to me feels like a very good follow-up to the Red Skull conflict.

Pete Wright:
It is. I love that you brought up Red Skull, because the parallelism between the villain and the challenge that Cap was facing at the time is really smart. And I wonder how much this is the time where I’m gonna say something and Kyle’s gonna say, “But I read a book,” and it’s not true. Because it makes me think that it was intentional, that the Russos somehow had a plan to have the villain be parallel to Cap in a way that is much more intelligent than just the pixels on screen. And my headcanon sort of likes to think that way.

Kyle Olson:
Well, I think that the Red Skull versus Captain America is always an interesting thing, because the Red Skull desperately wants to be Captain America on the one hand, and also cannot understand why Captain America isn’t on his side. Like, you are the Aryan ideal that I’m looking for, and yet you’re fighting on their side. Just cannot.

But now we come down to, Pierce is the central villain of the — I mean, Winter Soldier, even though he’s in the title, is sort of the hired gun in this situation. Pierce is the villain. Is there any part of the two of you that is annoyed or upset that Captain America doesn’t get to punch out the villain? Cap is doing a completely different thing and does not even know this is going on. He does not know what’s happening with Pierce. He does not know he’s defeated. He won’t find out until the debrief, a couple days or a week later or whatever.

Matthew Fox:
I definitely was aware of that. And granted, I’m not sure what is happening on Pierce’s phone, but at the moment that Nick Fury shoots him, unless I’m forgetting exactly what’s happening on that phone, he is not posing an immediate danger. Fury can just point the gun at him and say drop the phone, and resolve things. I don’t think Fury needed to kill him.

I think it is 100% believable that Fury would kill him, and that Black Widow would go along with that. And I think if you’re gonna do that, Cap can’t be there. I do wonder how much of that is because the writers thought this is what Nick Fury would believe, versus the writers wanted to take Pierce off the table so that we weren’t going to think about him coming back in a future movie the way, if Cap had just captured him, might have been a thing.

But I think it is effective and intentional that in the moment, you don’t think twice. It’s like, yeah, Fury killed him, good. And then later you’re like, wait, wait a minute.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. This only occurs to me because we’re doing this. We’re doing the dissection.

Matthew Fox:
Yeah, later you’re like, wait, did Fury have to do that? Was he an immediate threat in that moment?

Pete Wright:
It’s funny, you actually resolve both the Doylist and Watsonian approach to the scene, right? There was no way we’re gonna have Redford again for another movie. We have to take him off the table. That’s the super practical production approach.

But I stand with your other point. I think Fury is living up to his name. I think he’s mad. I think he sees this guy as a true villain. I think he’s bitter about the “I took a bullet for you,” and then Pierce says something that I find a bit mysterious.

Kyle Olson:
“You have,” yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right. “You have, and you will again when it’s useful.” I don’t know what that means. That’s like a weird, I can’t think of a better line and these are the words that are coming out of my mouth kind of a sequence.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. This is maybe the most James Bond this movie gets, just clearly homaging James Bond through all of it.

Pete Wright:
Yes. “And you will again when it’s useful, Mr. Bond.”

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. He fully is in the Doctor No thing of, oh, I’m gonna escape. His whole energy is like, well, I’ve got a captive now, she’s gonna fly me out of here and we’ll do this dance another day. And then Natasha does her thing where she basically sacrifices herself, as far as she knows. He fully expects that that is what is going to happen, and is very surprised that he dies. No one in that room is more surprised that he dies than Pierce.

Pete Wright:
Yes. I think you just said it. I think that is actually the Russos’ answer to that sequence. He’s about to get a monologue, a James Bond-style monologue, and the sort of action movie joke is to resolve it. This is Indiana Jones using the gun instead of the whip, right?

I mean, that’s what we have here. And it almost feels a shame that it takes us so long to think about that parallel — that we have to do a movie-by-minute podcast to get there — because I think it’s actually smart and satisfying in its own way.

And I think, Matthew, you’re right on. Captain America cannot be in the room when this happens. There’s already a rift at the top. He cannot be there when this happens. And that plays directly into the secrets we keep from Cap’s do-gooder nature that we started at the beginning of this movie.

Matthew Fox:
And for me, I think there’s two key things here. One is that — just to get a little more cynical, but I think it is not from an evil place — Fury fundamentally believes that he wants his country and his world to be safe, and that he has to be the one to do it. And so him being taken down is not acceptable, because he needs to do that.

And if he has any hope of saving Shield, the trial of Pierce, where everything gets aired out, is not gonna be what you want.

Pete Wright:
Oh, good point.

Matthew Fox:
Whether that’s how much Fury had to do with Insight, to what happened in Columbia.

The other thing I think is that it also, to me, highlights how much Pierce is not just ideologically, but literally physically the antithesis of Red Skull. And it’s such a weird villain for Cap, because Cap at the end of the day punches the problems till they stop being problems. He can inspire people, he can mobilize people, but he is a physical, in-person combat person. Pierce is not. Pierce can maybe pull a trigger on a gun. He doesn’t know how to throw a punch. He’s an office drone. And he shot the maid, but—

Pete Wright:
He shot the maid.

Kyle Olson:
But his power is in manipulation, and in hiding in plain sight, because he organized all of this. Let’s not forget that every person that was on the strike team — the inside Hydra agents inside Shield — were handpicked by him. He has another superpower. It’s just not in this situation.

Matthew Fox:
But if it ends with Pierce trying to kill Captain America, the two of them fighting in an office, that’s not gonna be a fight.

Kyle Olson:
That doesn’t go a whole long way. Like he gets a big green Hydra battle suit and — just Redford’s head on top of a big CGI body, like the end of The Wolverine.

Matthew Fox:
Oh God. I hate Mecha Lex Luthor so much. I don’t want Mecha Pierce.

Pete Wright:
We already had Mecha CEO in Iron Man, lest we forget, right?

Kyle Olson:
And that was not that far along from when this takes place.

But the only thing I feel like in this scene that doesn’t exactly work is, I feel like this is a big move for Black Widow, and because of the editing and because the movie is moving so fast, you kind of blow past it and miss it. It’s so cool, and it’s a big character moment for Natasha, and it happens just that fast, and people go, what? And then boom, boom, double tap. Hey, looks like Fury’s been watching Zombieland. Just to make sure. And we just move on.

I wish there had been more of a thing. Rather than — the minute actually starts out with some full-on ship-on-ship destruction. It’s just battleship porn for a while.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, for sure.

Kyle Olson:
But I wish they had made more of a thing of it — that she took out one of the stingers that she’s used earlier in the movie, that we knew, so we could go, oh. And then we think she’s gonna throw it at him. But instead it’s just click, click, click, and then she’s down. And you go, but— And then boom, boom, and then everything is fine.

It was like, okay, so she pulled out one of her own stingers, hit herself with it to make sure that she would not be the victim. She did not know if that would work, if that would disrupt the pin. She was fully trusting that Nick Fury would take advantage of the situation.

She was not going to let herself be a hostage. And so she’d rather take the chance of either electrocuting herself, or being shot while she was down, or activating the pin and killing her, rather than be the victim, rather than be the hostage. And it happens so fast that I just wish they had found a way to linger on that a little bit longer, to show that this is a big thing for Natasha, to be the team player, to take the sack. This is her doing the sacrifice play. She literally puts herself out there with this very, very, very high possibility that she is going to die here, but she would rather that than be used as a pawn, as a hostage, to be the chauffeur to take Dr. Evil away.

And it’s awesome, but it’s click, click, click and we’re moving on.

Matthew Fox:
And it’s funny, I think I have the same feeling. And granted, this is the kind of thing where if we think about it hard enough, it starts to unravel a bit, and that’s maybe why we shouldn’t think about it so much.

This is the one part of the Pierce character that I think doesn’t fully line up, because as we just discussed, he is a master manipulator. To do that, you have to know people. But everything that happens in this scene is because he doesn’t know people. Because he thinks Nick will be on his side. He’s wrong. He thinks Cap will be on his side. He’s wrong. He thinks Natasha will so value her own life that she will help him get away rather than endanger herself.

All of this is about him misjudging people. And maybe that’s intentional, in an idea of like, that it’s his hubris. But it also just feels like it doesn’t quite fit — even to the point of him thinking Bucky’s allegiance to Steve will be overwhelmed by the mind manipulation stuff.

Kyle Olson:
I think it tracks, though. Because it shows that he assumes everyone sees the world the same way he does. If you just show them the math, if you just show them stuff — he can’t fathom a world where people are actively good, that they would not act in their self-interest. They would not see the bigger picture.

Because all the people that he can’t figure out are the ones who are doing something altruistic. Even Nick Fury’s bloody-hands altruism. In his mind, he is trying to do a good thing. But yeah, all those things — the reason he gets brought down is because he doesn’t anticipate people doing good, and going out of their way to do something that might hurt themselves to help someone else. Because he would not do that.

Pete Wright:
Right. Meanwhile, meanwhile, on floor forty-one.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. We have these high emotional stakes and stuff too, and meanwhile there’s Falcon running for his life. That’s different stakes, but just as important.

Pete Wright:
Well, here’s my big question with Falcon and Rumlow. Who wins the fight, do you think?

Kyle Olson:
I say the person with more situational awareness, because of the two of them, one of them does not get a building dropped on him.

Pete Wright:
That’s fair. But I am looking at it more from the perspective of, if the building did not drop on them, where do we see Sam in this matchup against Rumlow? They’re both in their sort of comic book action hero fighty-fighty development saga. Rumlow is not yet Crossbones, Sam is not yet Cap. He’s barely Falcon, right?

Kyle Olson:
He’s barely Falcon at this point, yeah.

Pete Wright:
We just get to see them pummeling each other. And then the building falls. If the building doesn’t fall, who do you think has the upper hand?

Matthew Fox:
I mean, I think Rumlow.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, my money’s on Rumlow. I love Sam, but fist to fist.

Matthew Fox:
You said, who wins the fight? My answer is the building. And I think that they intentionally don’t make it that he’s doing this like, actually I’m super smart and manipulated you into a place. He just gets lucky.

And it kind of reminds me of the “I am better than you, I am smarter than you” — “Yeah, but I’m taller,” from the end of Speed. He just gets lucky. And that’s how fights happen sometimes.

So much of the Hydra Insight idea is control. And maybe actually, here’s the part that — Kyle, what you were saying about how Pierce’s actions make sense — they really think that if they have all the information and have all the weapons, they can have total control. And they can’t. And that’s Rumlow. Rumlow’s like, I got you, I’m better than you, because he thinks he’s on solid ground when clearly he’s not.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and also he does not have anyone supporting him. His strike team are gone. There is nobody coming to help him. So it’s the same situation — if he takes out Sam or whatever and then jumps out the window, there’s gonna be no one to catch him.

Pete Wright:
Right. That’s a good point. Sam has a helicopter to jump into.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And this is different, between an ideology and an army, I guess, because he’s a soldier, so he knows the members of his unit are going to be there to literally catch him when he falls. Because he does.

Pete Wright:
I do love the last line we get—

Kyle Olson:
We bag on all the CG stuff, but my God, this is incredible. I mean, I’m sure it’s just running across a green floor or whatever too, but the building coming down and the helicarrier coming through, and then him leaping out and turning sideways to make sure he doesn’t hit the blades of the helicopter. All great, all great.

Pete Wright:
I’m totally in it. I’m in it too.

Matthew Fox:
It’s funny, because when he does that — I totally agree with everything. Part of me is like, wow, what’s the budget of this movie? Did they really blow up a building? And of course they didn’t, but that’s kind of it, because it looks like that. It doesn’t look like it’s super CGI’d.

And when he does the leap into the helicopter, my brain wasn’t like, oh, that’s super CGI’d. It was, come on, there’s no way he lands and survives that impact. I was treating it as though that was a completely legitimate thing for them to film. That wasn’t the issue. It’s the believability of, would he live through this? Which is a credit to it — it was well done.

Kyle Olson:
And this is the quintessential Russos and Markus and McFeely, is that Sam jumps out of a window, the helicopter’s below him, so Natasha has to turn it to the side so he can go in. They go in and he goes almost through it. They grab him and pull him back in as they right it. And the first line is, “41st floor. 41st.” He’s not like, oh my God, I just died, or thank you for saving me. He’s so annoyed, like, I told you very clearly.

And then Nick going, “They don’t put the numbers on the outside.”

Matthew Fox:
And I will say, I have once seen a building that did, and to this day I have no idea why. It wasn’t huge — it was like a thirty-story building. I think it was in Cleveland. Somewhere in the Midwest. But to this day I’m like, did they do that because of the movie? Because I thought it’d be funny when they built it? I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
Well, all of this leads us to minutes 119 and 120. Minute 119, we’ve got Cap and Bucky and they’re trying to further resolve their differences. And at this point, they are under the surviving helicarrier, as they have been, and Steve is saying, “You know me.” “No, I don’t.”

Cap keeps naming him — Bucky, James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky keeps refusing it. And now we’re trying to capture humanity in these two, and rediscover humanity in Bucky. Do you rediscover the humanity alongside?

Kyle Olson:
I think that at this point you can see — this is what I think is great about Sebastian Stan — you can tell the difference. You can tell in this that it is Bucky. You can see that it’s not Winter Soldier. You can see that there’s a difference in just the way his facial expressions and what he’s doing. You can see that something has changed.

And so then you have that great moment as they’re facing off. Here’s the big thematic: Cap drops the shield to help his friend. There’s some beautiful visual metaphor right there, of he literally gives up, drops it down, and maybe never sees it again. I mean, it goes right into the Potomac. And is gonna stand there and take the lumps. Like, I’m here, I’m with you — obviously, until the end of the line.

Pete Wright:
The end of the line. There’s an interesting thing — and Matthew, you missed it last week. We were talking about the fight itself, and there is a point where Bucky has the blade, the server blade, the chip in his hand, and Cap is behind him and is restraining him and holding the cybernetic arm. And Kyle asks the question, what is Bucky’s mission? Because all Bucky had to do was squeeze, right? Crush the blade, and the movie ends. There’s nothing left.

Here we have a bit of a resolution and an answer to that question, right? “I’m not gonna fight you,” Cap says. “You’re my friend.” And Bucky says, in full James Buchanan human emotion, “You’re my mission. You’re my mission,” as he’s throttling Captain America.

Does that recontextualize Bucky’s actions four minutes ago?

Matthew Fox:
I think so, but not in any way about Bucky. I think what it tells me is the short-sightedness of how they’re using Bucky. It’s that kind of, you don’t program the robot to take for granted what you take for granted. Because I can imagine them saying to Bucky, look, we need to stop them from putting these blades into the helicarriers, so your job is to stop Cap. And what they think they’ve just told him is, your job is to not allow the blades to go into the helicarriers, so stop Cap from doing that. But what he hears is, stop Cap. And the blades are irrelevant.

Pete Wright:
This is the AI paperclip maximizer thought experiment, right?

Matthew Fox:
Exactly.

Pete Wright:
You’ve got to be very clear when you’re programming a machine with those instructions. Because it does a little bit, to me, feel exactly like that. He’s got the blade in his hands, but that wasn’t his job. His job was to stop Cap. He’s gonna keep fighting just Cap.

Kyle Olson:
So just as your AI paperclip thing made me think of a real life story, in a very short — essentially, this is a friend of a friend told me a story that someone at a very high level decided they were going to train an AI bot to organize their incredibly overfull inbox. They had their email — it basically had thousands and thousands of emails they needed to do it. So they created a simulator, they let it go to work on it, and it did great. It sorted everything, it contextualized everything, and it was fantastic.

Then they let it loose on their actual inbox, and then something happened, which is it saw that it had millions, maybe hundreds of thousands of things, and then realized, hey, it’d be easier for me to organize if there were less of them. And so it just started deleting emails en masse, because it’s a lot easier to sort through a hundred things than a thousand things.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding, yeah.

Kyle Olson:
So I was like, yeah, that’s work smarter, not harder.

Pete Wright:
Mission accomplished.

Matthew Fox:
Yep. And that’s how we get Ultron, ladies and gentlemen.

Pete Wright:
Right, right, right. It’d be greater if there were less humans.

Kyle Olson:
That’s right.

Matthew Fox:
So I want to flip this around and ask a different ethical question. Because I think with superheroes, one of the questions that I think is most interesting is, if you are claiming a mantle of “I am here to help others, and that’s why it’s okay that I have these powers that would otherwise mark me as very dangerous” — so there’s some level of public trust that you’re asking for — is there an assumption that you will put aside your personal biases in order to help the public? That’s the general framing.

Here’s the specific question. If Cap says, “Bucky, I’m not gonna fight you,” Bucky then knocks Cap out, and then Bucky goes on to kill a bunch more people — is Cap responsible for those deaths?

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, that — this is Batman and the Joker. This is the classic conundrum.

Matthew Fox:
I mean, now it’s Obi-Wan and Vader. How many damn times can they have Obi-Wan walk away from a mostly beaten but still alive Vader and be like, nah, you’re fine. You won’t do it again.

Pete Wright:
See, I think the ethical response is, Cap has chosen the way forward that he thinks will best defeat Bucky’s immediate intentions. And he could fight. That would be the obvious way to do it. But I think Cap’s making the case, by taking this action, that this is how he’s going to get through to Bucky and stop it. And it is just as valuable a path forward as if he just raised his fists and kept fighting.

My sense is, maybe there is in Cap some belief that he is trying to renegotiate with his friend, but I also think he’s probably saying, I think I can end this fight in a smarter way.

And there’s a line in the last Widow’s Bay — you guys have done Widow’s Bay? You haven’t seen it. There’s a line at the end where they’re talking about the trolley problem, the famous trolley problem. And he’s talking to this woman, he says, what do you do? Do you throw the lever? And she says, don’t ask me if I’m gonna throw the lever. I’m the lever in that scenario, right? I’m the lever. I can’t pull the lever. Because life happens.

And I think in this case, Cap is sort of exhibiting the lever. And that makes it a more interesting sequence to me. It’s not Cap going soft. I think it’s Cap making a choice. That’s my take on it.

Matthew Fox:
See, and to me, I’m looking at things through a gambling metaphor a lot these days — check it out on my Superhero Ethics podcast — because my co-host is a professional poker player. Because I think it’s a good metaphor.

And I think one of the things we talk about a lot is, if you choose to gamble what belongs to you, you can take whatever risk you want. The thing is, if I gamble my wife’s savings without telling her, there’s a problem there.

And I think that beating Bucky down with your fists till he stops moving — we know that will stop him. It is a gamble that he is taking to say, I think I can get him to stop wanting to do it. And to me, the question is, he’s not gambling with his life, he’s gambling with all of ours.

Pete Wright:
The question is, Matthew, though — and I would push back on one point — do you really think that his gamble is that he thinks there’s another way? Or is his gamble that he thinks there’s the only way? It’s just as much of a gamble to try to fight Bucky. He’s been fighting Bucky, and they’re pretty even-handed. This scene, he’s doing for the first time something different, something Bucky cannot do.

Matthew Fox:
Yeah. I’m not saying he’s clearly wrong. I’m just saying that I wish that they acknowledged more of the risk of it. And I think part of why I think about that is because to me it’s kind of similar to, no, don’t nuke those people, I believe that this small group of plucky adventurers is gonna defeat the Chitauri. To me, Nick Fury makes the exact same gamble, and it works. I don’t know if he made the right choice.

I’m not saying I think Cap is wrong. I just think it’s an interesting question.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, totally is. And of course we get, after the “You’re my mission,” we get the “Then finish it,” Cap says, “because I’m with you till the end of the line.”

Ugh. Do you hear them playing your heartstrings?

Kyle Olson:
And a thousand memes were born. Calling back to Captain America: The First Avenger — like once again, cold shot, like from way back. Beautiful.

Pete Wright:
It’s beautiful.

Kyle Olson:
Absolutely beautiful.

Pete Wright:
And that leads to the dome collapsing out from under Cap. Bucky is hanging from the rafters like the “hang in there” cat, the hang-in-there kitten on the Scholastic posters. And that’s the end of our minutes.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and once again, very much an Empire homage. There we have the big confrontation between the two, and one falls while the other is above. And what would have happened if they hadn’t been able to hang on? We will never know.

Pete Wright:
We won’t know.

Kyle Olson:
But you’re right, it ends on that fantastic shot. It’s one of those beautiful — maybe the most beautiful of the cuts of our minutes — where it’s this slow-mo of Cap falling. And once again, Cap falling, doing the noble thing, falling from above into water, to possibly not survive.

Pete Wright:
Possibly.

Kyle Olson:
Parallelism.

Pete Wright:
Yep. We didn’t — I mean, specifically on the helicarriers and their relationship with gravity — they sometimes do fall straight down.

Kyle Olson:
Remarkably. We were joking about it, but yeah, sometimes helicarriers do fall straight down.

Pete Wright:
There is one sequence where the helicarrier falls back down on the barrier between helicarrier bays in the Potomac, and its back breaks. And I find that an enormously satisfying effect sequence.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And the water comes rushing in to fill up the thing.

Pete Wright:
It is beautiful and it makes me very happy. So, any final words as we wrap this up?

Matthew Fox:
Just — and again, I think it’s just because I’ve now seen this movie many times and I absolutely love it, I promise — I’m sometimes not overcome by the “to the end of the line” moment, because it’s been so memed. And that’s why I think about the ethics instead.

Him falling is a beautiful scene, but also confirmed something from earlier that I noticed, which is, when you have two people who are genetically modified such that falling damage will probably not kill them, and they are trapped between a very heavy metal thing they cannot escape and a glass floor — just break the glass.

Kyle Olson:
Well, we don’t know if it’s glass.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I hope it’s not glass.

Matthew Fox:
Well, it seemed to — I mean, they break it later, and that’s why Cap falls.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, no, it breaks. But who knows? Maybe it’s transparent aluminum.

Pete Wright:
Transparent aluminum.

Matthew Fox:
I’m just saying, I think breaking it could have been easier than lifting off the metal thing. But there we go.

Pete Wright:
This was — I will say, when we started this process, we had ten major sequences. We had “On Your Left,” Lemurian Star, Nick Fury’s car attack, the elevator fight, Steve and Natasha on the run in the mall, the Camp Lehigh Zola algorithm moment, the highway battle, Steve visits Peggy, our emotional core, and “I’m with you till the end of the line.”

These five minutes represent the ninth, the penultimate, major sequence. That means there’s one more major sequence yet to come. I wonder which one it is.

Kyle Olson:
I wonder.

Pete Wright:
Find out.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, and just as a callback to previous Marvel Movie Minutes — that’s a picture wrap on Robert Redford. Thank you, Robert.

Pete Wright:
It is also on Rumlow, right?

Kyle Olson:
Well, that’s true, that’s true, yeah.

Matthew Fox:
For this movie, yeah.

Pete Wright:
He’s done for this movie. Picture wrap on Rumlow.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. On Frank. Picture wrap on Frank Grillo.

Pete Wright:
Frank Grillo, yay!

Kyle Olson:
Let’s hear it. Woo!

Pete Wright:
Okay. So I’m very excited for what’s to come. Things slow down fairly dramatically. We only have four episodes left of this particular season of this show, and we’re excited for you to stick around with us as we do it.

On that, make sure you head over to marvelmovieminute.com if you’re interested in supporting the show. We take members — members who jump in, they get the shows ad-free and a week early. I did read a comment in our comments. I rarely do the mass comments. One of the comments was that they hated the ads, and if there was only a way to support us and pay for it to get rid of the ads, they would do it.

Matthew Fox:
Oh gosh. Can there be a way?

Pete Wright:
And so, there is a way at marvelmovieminute.com. There’s a way you can actually do it.

Kyle Olson:
Would there be, if there was a way?

Matthew Fox:
There’s a way? Oh my, I’m so excited.

Pete Wright:
That person is probably not listening, because they were so mad at the ads. But anyway, there is a way. We sure would love the support. And thank you very much for your patronage.

On behalf of Kyle Olson and Matthew Fox, I’m Pete Wright. Check out theethicalpanda.com, check out Craft and Chaos for Kyle’s stuff, but mostly check out The Swashbuckling Ladies Debate Society. We haven’t pitched that in a long time, and it’s really great, y’all. It’s really great. I think I’ve died twice as a participant of the voice cast. I think I’ve had two lines and died twice.

Kyle Olson:
I think so.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. And we will catch you next week, right here on Marvel Movie Minute.

Kyle Olson:
Enough said.