Kyle Olson:
Welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast in which we disassemble a film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe into five-minute segments and examine it in obsessive and occasionally hilarious detail. I’m Kyle Olson.

Pete Wright:
I’m Pete Wright.

Matthew Fox:
And I’m in mourning for Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. I’m really hoping there isn’t a third.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I couldn’t take it. So today we’ll be sorting truth from lies as we examine the final minutes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier from 2014, directed by the Russo brothers. From visual effects coordinator Christian Anison to digital imaging technician Jojo Zovoka — and yes, those are the first and last members in the crew listed alphabetically — we’re looking at the hardworking team that helped make this fine film behind the screens. Plus, is it possible we got our Bucky back? We’ll see.

Pete Wright:
Who’s Bucky really anymore? Whose Bucky belongs to whom, Kyle? How do we even know?

This is it. This is the final set of minutes. And sometimes we play games. We play name games. That’s one of Andy’s favorite things to do. I don’t have a game planned, mostly because I’m deeply interested in thinking through some of the overriding lessons of this film as a result of its place in the MCU.

Where it stands in the canon — it sits at a very interesting point, kind of a decision point for movies to come after it. And now that we’ve gotten through every minute, I’m really interested in where you guys stand on some of those bigger questions. That’s what I want to get out of this conversation. What do you guys want?

Matthew Fox:
I mean, I like the question so much that I recorded 450 episodes of a podcast about it.

To me, the central issue of this movie is a commentary on all that’s gone before. One of the questions is always: is the superhero a cop? Is the superhero part of the military? Is the superhero part of the institutions of law and justice, or do they run contrary to it? And do they run contrary to it just because they think they’re better at it, like an Iron Man? Do they run contrary to it because they think that it’s corrupt, like Batman and Gotham?

To me, until now, the furthest we’ve gotten away from that is Tony Stark — you’re fundamentally good, but you’re fuddy-duddies, and I want to be cooler while I do it, and I’m not going to be as controlled. This to me feels like Batman has entered the chat, because the Batman ethos is always that you can’t trust the institutions, because all the cops in Gotham are either too corrupt or too scared of the bad people who are doing all the corrupting that they won’t take action. And this to me is that moment of innocence lost — this is the moment when we realize there’s just as much of that corruption here. To me, this is kind of like Washington as Gotham.

And I think for me, as I now look at the whole of the MCU, I disagree with some of the answers that it comes to, but I love that we’ve been wrestling with these questions in some way or another for however many movies since then. Even if some parts of it now, especially in light of other things, I’m like, oh, I see where you’re going, I don’t love that. But like what we talked about with Black Widow and what she says to the Senate — it’s asking questions. To me, this is sort of saying, okay, cool, we gave you a whole bunch of MCU movies with a lot of cool explosions and cool characters. Now let’s start diving into the stuff that people like Matthew love. So yeah, for me, this isn’t giving us answers. It’s just opening the door and saying, okay, let’s do a 301 of superheroes now.

Kyle Olson:
That’s interesting. Yeah, because the last time we saw SHIELD at its most prominent was in The Avengers, where they were a little bit complicit in trying to launch a nuke and destroy New York. But in the end of it, Avengers and SHIELD were sort of synonymous. It was like, okay, the Avengers are the leading thing, but SHIELD is their support organization that’s doing all the stuff. And we’re not that far from that, and all of a sudden this whole thing has fallen away. It is kind of metaphorical.

I wish there was a smarter person that’s probably done this, but thinking of the fact that the age of the superhero has then taken over from the age of espionage — this is really one institution destroying another to take its place. And then that institution will itself be destroyed by another one in just a couple of movies. But it does bring up a lot of interesting ideas.

Also, from the outside of it, looking at just the MCU part of it, filmmaking-wise, this begins a real hot streak with them, where they found a way to take the superhero tropes and take another genre and meld it together and make something interesting with it. Because we have a typical ’70s spy thriller, James Bond kind of thing, and then put Captain America on top of it, and it’s the Asian fusion. You wouldn’t think these would work together, and yet they do.

And we’re going to see it with a heist movie with Ant-Man, and we’re going to see it with Guardians in terms of spacefaring adventure — all these different things where they do that. And then I feel like now, in the age that we’re currently in, they have sort of lost the thread of that and are just making derivatives of derivatives, as opposed to taking elements from other things and bringing them in and doing them in a Marvel way. They’re sort of Marvel-ing the Marvel.

Matthew Fox:
There’s an extent to which our discussion about that part of the movie made me particularly sad when I heard Wonder Man was canceled. Because to me, Wonder Man is where that idea fully breaks containment and they say, we’re not even going to do a superhero story at all. We’re just going to do a story about struggling actors in a world where one of them happens to be a superhero. To me, that’s absolutely the culmination of what you’re talking about here with Winter Soldier.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. I mean, as much as I celebrate the fact that the action grammar changed dramatically as a result of this movie — and at the time it was absolutely fantastic. This handheld, close-quarters, contact-heavy, really quick cutting, but still visually accurate. It didn’t feel like we were losing track of what’s on screen if you compare it to the second and third Jason Bourne movies, where you just lose it.

This really changed the action grammar of MCU movies in a very positive way. And I would say you can map what the movie was trying to do — mapping this action hero model on top of the ’70s paranoia thriller — to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where we actually have a superhero movie that’s also a wuxia. They’re doing some incredible things in that movie that I hope are a mark of lessons maybe learned. I don’t know, because I’m so bearish on the multiverse strategy that I don’t know if those are lessons learned yet.

But I do love, back to the paranoia thriller angle, that this movie defines the model that institutions are not corrupted from without, they are corrupted from within. Because that ends up really surviving this movie into the arc of movies to come. And it is a perfect setup for Civil War — this whole angle of freedom being traded for security isn’t something that you make once in public. It’s something that you made probably in a basement somewhere many years prior, and here it is, part of the institutional rot that we get with Hydra. And I think those intellectual pursuits in this movie absolutely outshine the already fantastic action that has been captured on film.

Kyle Olson:
So, action. What I was thinking about too, when you were talking about that, in terms of taking it out of comic-booky and talking about it in terms of action movies — which is another one of my passions — this is also at a crux point where from this and then another movie that comes out the same year, John Wick, there was something where stuntmen and the visual people were like, we need to do something different. And instead of going deeper into more elaborate, faster cuts, all that thing — like you were talking about Jason Bourne, I started thinking about Taken versus Taken 2 and Taken 3, which becomes almost a parody of itself just because of how awful the action becomes. Sorry to whoever was working on that thing, but it took eighteen shots to get Liam Neeson to climb over a fence. That’s ridiculous.

But this and that happening in the same year of, okay, more grounded action, more intense, longer shots, give it a chance to see the choreography, what the people are doing, boots on the ground. It’s all for the better, because there was a way it could have gone that was so much worse — the people who tried to be Michael Bay, but only Michael Bay can Michael Bay. And now this gave a whole new landscape. So we had a lot of mediocre action movies that come out of this that are very well shot and very well choreographed. And now I think we’re getting ready for another revolution too, because now it seems like people have forgotten what this is. But this was so good.

Matthew Fox:
Well, and I’d say there’s a third part to what they’re balancing, which is that you’re asking important questions through the plot, and you’re also having really good action sequences, but also the action sequences make sense as an outflow of the plot.

Because to me, I think the superhero movie that does one of the best jobs of asking really good questions and giving us so much to talk about is Eternals. But Eternals gets to a point where it says, we have set up all of these different questions, but we’ve kind of forgotten to tell a coherent story. So let’s throw it all in a mix and give you the biggest, baddest something-is-emerging-from-the-earth in violation of all the rules of geology and water physics, and have a big fight that’s all CGI and makes no sense.

And to me the action itself is not very good, but also the action makes no sense. Whereas here, every fight has stakes. Every fight has a reason why I care about it and a reason why I feel like there’s a genuine chance that either side could win in this fight.

Pete Wright:
Well, and look at how that manifests. I think that’s a really great observation, because so much of this movie is deeply personal. It’s on that personal register. The fact that Steve’s greatest allies are no longer SHIELD — his greatest allies are Natasha and Sam, these two individual people.

And that grounds the movie in a place that the prior movies had already exploited the alternative. I think you said it already: this movie sets up the end of Captain America’s blank-check trust of the American ideal. And that is a deep, intestinal blow to the Captain America aesthetic that I think the movie handles really well.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, from Cap in the bright blue suit of The Avengers, standing in front of Grand Central Station and giving orders, to the paragon who eventually will be canonized in a statue that Spider-Man will crawl around. He’s also about to become a villain, in the sense that very soon he will be on the run from all these organizations that he is supposed to be the pinnacle of. So this is also the beginning of that disillusionment with those systems. Even the person that is literally wearing the flag on himself will then have to go through a whole process to come to terms with that and then really step away. Not to come back strong and be like, yes, I am the new Captain America, but to be like, no, that was it.

Pete Wright:
Yep, that was it. Because I’ve just learned over the course of my time in this movie that the real villain is an idea and not a guy with a red face. Not somebody I can punch. And the idea, it turns out, is much more dangerous.

Matthew Fox:
And I would even add, I think one thing that makes it all work is that the stakes of this movie are relatively small. They’re not small — there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives are going to be at stake if these carriers go live, and many more if they continue to go live. But this isn’t Thor possibly ending the world through dark matter or whatever the hell that is. This isn’t Guardians of the Galaxy facing those worlds being destroyed. This is a couple of thousand people who are particularly useful for the kind of things we want people doing are going to have their lives at risk. That’s awful.

But to me — not to give any kind of major spoiler, but I think it’s out enough that I can safely say this — that’s kind of equivalent to the end of the new Spider-Man movie, in terms of, yeah, it’s big stakes, it’s not just personal, it’s not just him, but it’s a couple of thousand people in one particular geographic area. That sucks. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of the galaxy. It’s much lower than Avengers was, than Dark World was, than Guardians of the Galaxy was. And I think that also really helps, because it makes it much more relatable on that level.

Pete Wright:
That is a really interesting lesson of this movie, when we’re about to enter the era of the galactic heroes and the galactic villains. And it turns out what we hearken back to the most is a movie about a guy who’s upset that his country is kind of criminal and that his institution is kind of criminal.

Matthew Fox:
Well, one particular agency in his country, yeah, exactly.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Meager potatoes, it turns out. That might make a better movie.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, but they made a lot of great choices here. MCU-wise, franchise-wise, storyline-wise, they make a lot of really, really good choices here. To have this end in a big victory for Team Good — they blew up the things that were going to murder a bunch of people, so we get explosions and all that stuff too, and then having Cap’s thing be, oh, the fight is that I’m not going to fight you. And then he ends up getting what he wanted, which is he essentially gets his friend back. We’ll find that out down the line, but that’s what the post-credit essentially was, setting us on that path.

But instead of — because the next time we see them all together, at the start of Avengers: Age of Ultron, they’ve already done the mopping up. It would seem like it would be hunting down all the cells and taking down all the people. All that happens off screen, which I think is a really smart way to do this, because by the time that we get to the start of Age of Ultron, that’s the last of the Hydra things. Obviously Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is dealing with its own stuff, but—

Matthew Fox:
Right. It happens off the big screen. It happens on the little screen on SHIELD, but yeah, I see your point.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. So we have a big victory here, and then there’s a lot of organizational stuff that has to happen. There’s a lot of filing that needs to happen to totally put it to bed. But we don’t need to see that, because that’s not superhero stuff. So it’s a nice way to clear the deck for the Age of Miracles.

Pete Wright:
So, just a brief sidebar, because I know both of you. I think one of the lessons that come out of this property — not least of which is that the Russos become an architect of the future MCU. But one of the really important lessons is that genre flexibility is an important model. And the properties that do that well tend to have more cognitive staying power. I think we get that in the first Ant-Man — we get our heist movie.

But most of the genre swings that indicate there was a lesson learned from this movie happen on the smaller screen. And I’m curious about your thoughts on that. I’m thinking about WandaVision, I’m thinking about Loki, I’m thinking about the shows that embrace and extend some of the practical filmmaking lessons from this movie. Where do you stand on that? Is that a fair assessment?

Kyle Olson:
Wow. Yeah, it is. Because I like the fact that they can sort of take that. Wonder Man’s a good example. There’s an episode of Wonder Man that doesn’t have Wonder Man in it. And for a first season, and now it turns out the final season of a show, that’s bold.

That, to me, is always such a big swing. And it used to be — as all of us have watched Supernatural or all these things that have gone on and on and on — you don’t get to get “The French Mistake” until you’ve done 20, 30, 40 episodes of regular meat-and-potatoes stuff, and then you can take a chance. The MCU allows them to take bigger chances faster, all for the good. I think of the Wonder Man episodes, but all the stuff in WandaVision and in Agatha All Along, all these wild ideas that they’re allowed to play out longer.

And yet when they go in to try to even emulate this movie, it doesn’t really work. Because of all of them, I love all the characters and stuff too, but when you have Sam sitting in a bank going, oh yeah, I don’t get paid to be an Avenger, I’m like, why are we doing this?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, what character motivation is that supporting?

Kyle Olson:
There are so many choices in that particular Falcon and the Winter Soldier that were strange to me, because what I keep coming back to on the latter Marvel stuff is: what does this get you? But I deviated from the point. I’m with you on that. I like the fact that they allow them a larger palette to try different things.

Matthew Fox:
I disagree with you on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but putting that aside, I actually want to push back on the main idea, because I’m looking at the list of movies here and I see a lot of genre breakers. Because after Winter Soldier, we have Guardians of the Galaxy, which is space adventure. We have Age of Ultron — that’s genre. We have Ant-Man, which is a heist movie. We have Civil War, which is the team versus the team, which is in the genre but still a decided shift. We have Doctor Strange, which is kind of genre, but also much more mind-bendy, alternate-reality kind of stuff. And remember the way it ends. It does not end with a big fight. It ends with a logic problem.

Pete Wright:
Right. And the next Doctor Strange is a horror movie.

Matthew Fox:
Is a horror movie, but before that we get Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is a teen rom-com as much as anything else. Thor: Ragnarok, which is a straight-up comedy in a way we haven’t really seen since maybe the first Ant-Man.

Then we get Black Panther, which is a Black take on the genre. Infinity War. Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is kind of a buddy-cop take on the genre. Captain Marvel, which is a woman in the genre as the genre. Endgame, Far From Home — yes, those are straight-up genre. But then Black Widow, which is putting it more into the girl-power side of it, however successful that was as a thing. Shang-Chi, which is a kung fu movie, straight up.

Pete Wright:
There he goes, another one I would definitely say.

Matthew Fox:
Eternals. To me there is a lot of genre bending that happens in the next ten movies.

And I think once you get past Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we start to get back into trying to do retreads. Thor: Love and Thunder, I think, is an attempt to do Ragnarok again that doesn’t work as much. Wakanda Forever is a special case, because there was just so much that happened around that movie. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — who the hell knows what was happening there? Guardians of the Galaxy, genre, but a very good genre. The Marvels was attempting to break genre, it got attacked by a bunch of sexist idiots and never really had a chance. So I guess I’m just pushing back on the idea that it became — I think there was a lot of genre breaking on screen.

Pete Wright:
I’ll give you that. I think we might quibble on some of the specific movies, but the ones that are in there that are just locked in after Ant-Man, like the horror movie and the kung fu movie — those are super obvious mashups. I think you’re right. I get stuck on the small screen because we get so much more time to explore and experiment, and take more risks. WandaVision was an incredible risk that they took.

That thing — the first three episodes were “what’s in the mystery box.” And then how it played out, critics disagree, but still it was a big swing. What are they going to do to finish the trilogy with Vision Quest? I am deeply curious about that property as a result of the risk that came before.

Matthew Fox:
I mean, you all pulled me onto a podcast network and community about the glory and wonder of film. And I fundamentally believe TV is a better medium for storytelling than movies right now. So I’m not arguing with you.

Pete Wright:
Well, I just think in terms of lessons learned from this movie, I go back to this point in our fractious universe. And Winter Soldier represents the fork to some of the best and some of the worst of the genre that came after.

Kyle Olson:
True. And speaking of best and worst, I would say, having seen almost everything that the Russos have done, this is the best movie they’ve ever made.

Pete Wright:
So far, maybe.

Kyle Olson:
So far, I will say. But I feel like they also learned a bunch of lessons from this, and sometimes they’re not the right lessons.

Pete Wright:
The right lessons.

Kyle Olson:
I like the fact that in this, everything is so bright and clean. At time of recording, they have just put out a trailer for the Endgame encore. They’re showing Avengers with new footage to link to Doomsday, and they basically show the final battle. It’s incredibly — you know, a huge moment — and I look at it now and go, it’s so brown. So brown.

And I look at this movie and I don’t feel that at all. I don’t know when it started to get so muddy, but even this is more grounded and real, but colorful.

Matthew Fox:
Well, and I think one other factor is that we talked before about how — or at least I talked before about how — in this movie it feels like they’re opening the door to a whole lot of questions. I think the thing is that everything after that has to now start exploring those questions. And that’s a lot harder to do and requires an awful lot more nuance.

And so take something like Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In Civil War, they kind of answered their question about authority by saying, if you think you’re right and everyone else thinks you’re wrong, you say “no, you move.” That presumes that you are right. In Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I think there’s a lot of stuff wrapped up in all the things it tried to do, and I think it tried to do too much. And of course, the political situation had to fundamentally change the way the show was shot, all those things.

But I think on some level what they were trying to say is, what do you do if you believe that if you’re right, you don’t move — and now you see someone else saying “no, you move,” but you think they’re wrong. Because to me, whatever the heck they were called — the Flag Smashers, whatever the group they tried to set up — that actually was much more believable than they wanted it to be, so they started killing people for no reason. I have political thoughts on that show.

But it felt like they had the exact same conviction of “we think we are right,” and just like Captain America told us to, we’re not going to move. And now Sam and Bucky are going, ah, but we don’t agree with you, so what do we do? That to me is a great way to take that question, but it’s really hard.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Matthew Fox:
It’s really nuanced, especially when at the end of the day, the show doesn’t want to take a firm stance one way or the other. And at some point, if you’re going to go deep into the questions, someone has to offer an answer.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. If you’re going to write yourself into a corner, get ready to write yourself out of it.

Matthew Fox:
And I think this opened a door that in some ways the MCU was afraid to go into.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. It is interesting when you look at Sam in particular — and then we need to talk about our post-credit scene. Sam arrives in this movie as an ancillary character, but fully formed. VA counselor first, wingsuit second. And that is really great. And it does make you long for those days when we see how thinly many Phase Two characters are introduced into the canon. That treatment of Sam Wilson allows us to have a Sam Wilson that is a decade-long character run.

And the same thing with Bucky. I mean, the Winter Soldier — it’s on the tin for this movie. He shows up late. And yet here we have the overriding lesson for me in the last minutes of this movie, the last, I don’t know, forty seconds. He’s back at the museum and he’s looking at the old crew. That’s the same place. This is the mirror experience of where Steve had looked at himself when he was gearing up a little while ago.

And this movie reminds us that identity is often defined by what other people remember about you and what is put on the posters. Bucky has to go to a museum to be told who he is. And Steve kind of had the mirror problem — Steve had to reject the museum’s version of who he was in order to assert who he is. And I think it is a quiet post-credit sequence, but I think it has a deceptive amount of import.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, because honestly both of these men were genetically, chemically, mechanically, whatever, created to serve the agenda of a certain power — one willingly and one unwillingly. And now we get to the point where they are both at a place where the organizations that created them and aimed them are no longer pulling the strings. That’s a lot of metaphors together, but you understand what I’m saying.

And so now we have two free agents essentially out there. And what’s going to happen when we meet again? Well, we know, but it’s a really interesting thing, because the support organizations for both of them have now been dismantled.

Matthew Fox:
So I agree about the import, but actually I kind of disagree on the meaning of that scene. And I’m going to start with, Pete, what you said about how it’s a quiet scene. Because to me, I think it’s anything but, and I’m going to mean that somewhat literally. The score of this is so jarring compared to what just came before.

And especially because the movie ends on this incredible — the actual movie, before the last scene, is on this very triumphalist note, the resolution of that chord in exactly the way you think it should. And I remember getting to that point. I went into this movie a dirty casual. I didn’t know many of the details. I thought for sure the movie was going to end with Bucky and Steve walking into the sunset as buddy cops, ready to go do all the things they’re supposed to do.

Kyle Olson:
Or even facing off. They meet and they’re just standing in a room together, and that’s where it ends.

Matthew Fox:
Right, but with a clear invocation of the deep programming of Bucky that will now begin to move to its obvious conclusion.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I see what you mean.

Matthew Fox:
And for me, it didn’t feel like that. What I heard in that music was that it changes abruptly. It starts with this kind of percussive beat, building and building, but not in a triumphal way — more in an “action is about to happen” way. And then there’s this metallic screeching that comes in that at first I actually thought was someone screaming, and then realized, no, it’s just some kind of metallic noise. And that’s what it closes on.

And to me, that noise is the chaos in Bucky’s head. It’s not that he’s like, okay, this is reminding me who I am. It’s that he’s looking at it going, was that guy right? To me, he is much earlier in that process of “I don’t know what the hell’s happening right now.” And it’s funny, I just watched Civil War. I think if it had been that kind of quiet, “now I get it, this is who I am, I see the museum,” where he is in Civil War doesn’t make sense. But the way it is presented here — that there’s chaos in his head, we don’t know what the hell’s going to happen next — allows it that by the time Civil War comes on, a part of me believes he might have actually done that bombing.

Pete Wright:
That’s an interesting take. I’ll see your loud scene. I get that. The chaos in his head — I absolutely see it. But I also think the importance of looking at this as a transitional forty seconds, where he gets to be reminded of who he was in order to become who he needs to be, is important, because he ends up being the reluctant hero at every turn from here on out.

Even when he is the senator. He is a reluctant Senator Barnes, it feels like to me. Maybe that’s just how he’s playing it, and comically he was a good politician. I don’t know. Kyle, was that an MCU thing?

Kyle Olson:
No, no. There’s a whole thing we get — no, nothing like that. He ends up working for the Watcher on the Moon. It gets strange.

Pete Wright:
Oh, okay.

Kyle Olson:
He was Captain America for a while, and that didn’t really keep either.

Matthew Fox:
So let me ask you this: were either of you a little surprised that the reconciliation between the two of them hadn’t further progressed? Or were you expecting that all that’s going to happen is we start to crack the brainwashing, with clearly most of the work happening in later movies?

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I mean, as a third take, I guess, when you see him there, you know that he was not sent there. So that’s part of it too — there’s no way by his programming that he would go back to the bank vault and be like, hey, I didn’t accomplish my mission. Because those guys are still alive. Nothing ever showed us that anybody in that room besides Pierce died. So he should go back to his handlers to say, what’s my next mission?

But this is clearly him making a choice for himself and then reading over that, so it shows that bit of freedom. This is when the MCU stuff is great, because it does make you want to go — and it worked on you, that you went and watched Civil War again just because you were in that headspace and wondering what happens next. That’s pure Marvel, ending on the thing so you’ve got to buy the next issue. This is exactly that — you’ve got to buy the ticket to see what happens next.

Matthew Fox:
Yeah. Well, even just the words, “Captain America will return in Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Winter Soldier isn’t mentioned. And it’s funny to me to think, it is not the next time. In Age of Ultron, I think Captain America talks about wanting to go after Bucky, but—

Kyle Olson:
And they have been. That’s the idea — when Sam shows up, there’s that little conversation to be like, oh yeah, we’re still working on that. Nobody forgot. That is happening still.

Pete Wright:
I’m in a place right now where every time we mention Age of Ultron, there’s a giant black hole in my consciousness. There are so many details that have just evaporated from that movie. As we lead into our next Avengers approach, I don’t remember how we get there from here. I need to hit that again.

Kyle Olson:
Well, honestly, it just jumps to it. That’s the thing — there’s a whole missing period. Honestly, you could do an eight-episode television series with any of the characters about what happens between this moment and that moment of them fighting in the snow. That would be interesting. But that whole thing is just, and then they fight Hydra a lot.

Pete Wright:
Hawkeye’s story until footage in the Hawkeye Christmas series.

Matthew Fox:
Right. And among other things, by that point, Black Panther and Captain America are somewhat working together.

I am an Age of Ultron defender. I think I’m one of the biggest fans of the movie out there, and I know it is universally thought of as one of the low points, and I think it is — with one glaring exception of an incredibly sexist interpretation of the whole “why Black Widow can’t be with Hulk” thing. I just hate the writing of that. Otherwise, I really like the movie and I think there’s a lot of great stuff happening. But you’re right, a lot of it comes out of nowhere and a lot of it kind of goes nowhere.

Pete Wright:
Well, do we have any other open points as we close the book on Captain America: The Winter Soldier?

Kyle Olson:
You always come out of these things with a different perspective than you came into it with. But for this, pulling it apart and then putting it back together, it still holds up to me as one of the best MCU movies, one of the best action movies. I’ve done Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3. There are good and bad points to those movies too, but I would say for this, the majority of it is rock solid. And there are just a couple of little quibble points along the way, whereas the other ones — like Age of Ultron — you could really have a lot of back and forth and both sides be right. This is universally beloved for a good reason. And from my perspective, it remains as beloved in my head after doing all of this.

Matthew Fox:
Yeah, I agree with that. And to me, this is what really kicks it off. Granted, it comes after Thor: The Dark World, so it’s got a lot of room to run in terms of how much better it can be. But the streak it gets on then — Guardians, maybe you don’t love Ultron, but Ant-Man’s amazing, Civil War, Strange, Homecoming, Ragnarok, Black Panther, into Infinity War. To me, this is the high watermark of the MCU, just banger after banger, year after year of getting incredible movies.

And I think Winter Soldier is very much a part of that, because granted, at this point they were scripting things out a couple of years ahead, but this is the most morally complex and the most talking movie that the MCU had really ever done, in terms of that espionage, in terms of, can these people be spies instead of soldiers? I think if this movie tanked for whatever reason, I don’t know if we get half of the movies that are coming.

Pete Wright:
It did not tank. I think it approached 800 million at the box office worldwide. It notably did not crack the billion-dollar mark, as far as I know, on its initial release. And yet it is still, I think, one of the — if not the most — well-reviewed critically films that Marvel has released. But it is seriously a top pick in the series and a great starting point.

Matthew Fox:
Also, just one more thing, I think it’s worth pointing out that — not that I don’t think all the other movies were for guys only by any means, but this was one of the first, I think, to really take seriously looking beyond just making it a guys’ movie that some women will enjoy. I think the more espionage, the fact that Black Widow exists — to me, this is the first movie where she isn’t really being seen through Tony Stark’s gaze as much. And so she just gets to be a much more, less sexualized character.

And in terms of the girls, gays, and theys, if you ask them for the images that come to mind of why we love the MCU, the Steve Rogers biceps as he holds onto the helicopter and holds onto the top of the building is probably one of the most enduring, memeable images that’s going to come up. And I think that image becomes a big part of the way that part of the world is talking about these movies and the appeal of them. These are big muscular guys, but that’s an appeal that’s so different from the way a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone was being positioned. That gets into a lot of male gaze / female gaze stuff that’s just way too much for the three of us to get into, but I think it’s an important moment to take note of in terms of the MCU and its broad appeal.

Kyle Olson:
But that’s not in this movie. That’s in Civil War.

Matthew Fox:
Isn’t the— okay, so—

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Just not to undercut your point, but it’s literally not in this movie.

Matthew Fox:
No, that very strongly undercuts my point. I think this movie starts a lot of that. But yes, no, that moment is not in this movie. You’re correct. I am going to hang my head in shame now.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, but there is the bathroom scene, where Cap’s got the tank top on. That was where I thought you were going with it. There’s that very much “ooh, a thousand fanfics are written right in this moment.”

Matthew Fox:
Oh yeah, that’s there. Well, and the Bucky-Steve stuff that also launches — that’s a huge part of it too.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah, exactly.

Pete Wright:
The other thing that does not happen here, but does happen with Age of Ultron, is the hashtag Where’s Natasha scandal. So we’re entering the era of being able to say two things at once: isn’t it great that this movie handles Natasha Black Widow well, and then, oh my God, what have they done with Natasha Black Widow in subsequent films? That is definitely coming. That conversation is coming.

Matthew Fox:
There’s a reason. I think this movie sets a bar that Age of Ultron — where Natasha’s biggest problem is the lack of a reproductive system — utterly fails to clear. And it makes it much more glaring. As well as the “who else besides Natasha.”

Pete Wright:
Right. Well, hey, this has been great. This has been a salve on our Marvel Movie Minute experience, coming out of Thor. And I’m thrilled to have been able to hash this one out with you both.

Kyle Olson:
Thank you for inviting us along, and thank you for editing all of these things and removing all of our ums and ahs and all the times we go wildly off topic. And thank you, Pete, for building this mechanism that allows us to talk about the thing that we love, and for doing all the hard work behind the scenes, including all the show notes and things, which we don’t touch. We just record and then we’re out of there. Pete then has another couple of hours afterwards. All glory to our overlords.

Matthew Fox:
We may have had three co-stars, but we also had one director, producer, cinematographer, editor. And if nothing else, for editing out my keyboard noises — which were, I will say, more than a majority me looking up things like the MCU movie list, but worse, sometimes me checking the Met score or making sure my wife was picking up dinner — I definitely appreciate it.

Pete Wright:
Noted. Thank you.

And in terms of what comes next — you know what, technically it’s Guardians of the Galaxy. That is next on the list. We are going to take a little break. If you didn’t notice, we came off of Thor and we did not take much of a break after that. And I know at least for me and Matthew, we need a little bit of time off. So we’re taking a break, and we will be back with updates on what is to come and how it is to arrive in the coming weeks and months.

Thank you so much, all of you, for hanging out with us, for your time and your attention, for being a part of our community, for being supporting members at MarvelMovieMinute.com. And stay tuned for more updates soon.

Matthew Fox:
And because I can never actually let someone have the last word, if I can give my own little plug: you’re Marvel fans. Marvel is great. Marvel is wonderful. Marvel is mother. Marvel is father — if you’re a Babylon 5 fan. But DC does some things pretty decently every now and then, too. If you’re a fan of genre breaking and you want to know what true detective superheroes look like, big recommendation for Lanterns — but also, self-servingly, Superhero Ethics. We’re doing some pretty in-depth coverage of Lanterns. Go check it out.

Kyle Olson:
I would second Lanterns. I came in once again from a different perspective. I really disliked the first episode, because it felt like they were intentionally disrespecting these characters that have been around for longer than a lot of the writers have been alive, and I felt very angry about that. And by the second episode, they then reintroduce all of the ridiculous — and I say that with love — Green Lantern lore, and they treat it with such seriousness that I was like, oh, you guys do know. Okay, you actually do know what you’re doing. All right, I’ll give them a little more leeway. So for those of you who were turned off by the first episode, I think they’re doing something interesting. It’ll do while we’re waiting for Vision Quest to come out.

Pete Wright:
I could watch Coach Taylor recharge the ring every day, all day. “In brightest day, in blackest night.” It is so grudging.

Matthew Fox:
Oh god, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Okay. Not a Lanterns show. All right. Thanks, everybody.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, okay, love said.

Matthew Fox:
Bye bye.