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. In this, our ninth season, we are looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I’m Pete Wright.
Kyle Olson:
I’m Kyle Olson.
Matthew Fox:
I’m Matthew Fox.
Pete Wright:
And today we’re talking about minutes 61 through 65, which begins with obtuse questions and ends with impossibility. Here we are. This is — I mean, we all know what we’re getting.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, we’re back in New Jersey.
Pete Wright:
We’re in Jersey. When we last were in Jersey, and now we’re in the basement. Well, we’re not in the basement yet. Now we’re cruising through memory lane. Natasha and Steve are hanging out in a world that I think is still black and white, and they start at the wall of heroes. We’ve got Natasha saying, oh, there’s Stark’s father.
Kyle Olson:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Howard. Steve knows him.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Fondue.
Pete Wright:
And it opens with the obtuse question. But I don’t know if it’s an obtuse question. You tell me — don’t you think Natasha, given her role in the universe of SHIELD, might know who Peggy Carter is by sight?
Matthew Fox:
The kids today, they just don’t care about history.
Kyle Olson:
I don’t know. I mean, it’s an interesting moment because would that have been relevant to her? It’s just another of many probably directors and bureaucrats that have been through SHIELD. She has only been with SHIELD for a couple of years at this point. We don’t know exactly how long, but I think it’s somewhere in the early two thousands or something that she’s supposed to have defected. So I don’t know how much she would actually have dedicated to learning about the history of World War II from the organization that she’s in.
Matthew Fox:
Think about how many TV shows do we have about people who get recruited by the FBI and they convert and become sort of pseudo-FBI agents. Would they all recognize a picture of J. Edgar Hoover? I don’t know if I would, and I think of myself as a pretty big Cold War historian.
Pete Wright:
Well, you know what, that is actually probably great perspective, because I just feel like she knows a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. And it just seems to me that, given the fact that Peggy is still alive at this point, that maybe there would have been a connection. I am clearly overthinking this, and I acknowledge it.
Kyle Olson:
No, I caught on that too. I was so like, would she really not know?
Matthew Fox:
I think there’s two factors here. One is she might have met Peggy Carter forty or fifty years later, and so she wouldn’t recognize her when she’s younger.
Pete Wright:
Would she recognize her as a young person?
Matthew Fox:
And B, it is entirely possible that an organization like SHIELD, like every other human-made organization out there, does a pretty bad job of acknowledging the women who were an important part of its founding fifty years ago.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. In spite of the fact that it’s Peggy’s picture on the wall of heroes right next to Howard Stark.
Kyle Olson:
Honestly, the weirdest picture on that wall is Tommy Lee Jones, the general who didn’t really have that much to do with the formation of SHIELD. I don’t think he was involved in SHIELD at all. I think he was gone by the time the OSS transitioned to SHIELD. But it was that sequelitis, that “hey, remember this?”
Pete Wright:
It’s sequelitis, but not even fan service.
Kyle Olson:
No, not really.
Pete Wright:
Like, who cares? Oh my god, that’s Tommy Lee Jones. Nobody cares.
Matthew Fox:
One of the things to remember is this is a wall of heroes in a facility that’s clearly been mothballed. This has been closed down for twenty years or whatever it is.
Kyle Olson:
Or more, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
So it’s just one more thing of, this may not represent —
Pete Wright:
Right. And maybe that picture was hanging there back when he was an active person on the base. We don’t know. Who knows?
Kyle Olson:
It could have been that they shut the base down officially in the fifties or whatever, when it’s still making that transition. Because I mean, it is SHIELD on the wall, it’s not OSS, so we know approximately when this isn’t.
Pete Wright:
Something happened. We then move to Steve loving a breeze, and he finds the hidden elevator behind the bookcase. Would you get on this elevator? This is an elevator of horrors. Who knows how long since this elevator has been maintained? They sure do lean in on the creaky wire sound effects. I loved it.
Matthew Fox:
I think if I’m Steve, I’m kind of thinking, I’ve had my bad elevator experience for this week.
Pete Wright:
This is the elevator from hell.
Matthew Fox:
You know?
Pete Wright:
That’s a good point. That lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place kind of an experience.
Kyle Olson:
The story is taking place in 2014, but now we’ve gone back and Steve’s had a flashback to the forties, and now we’ve seen SHIELD in the fifties — but no, we have the standard trope of the bookcase sliding away, and this is a seventies elevator. So we’re moving forward in time. It’s an interesting sort of backwards-forwards thing we get as they get into the basement.
Pete Wright:
And they go into the basement and find — speaking of traveling through time — a USB port, which is awesome. And it just so happens to be the USB port for the thumb drive. All of this is great. This is the Cold War-era server room, just full of reel-to-reel mainframes. I love it. I think it’s very cool.
And we now understand that Natasha was introduced by someone to WarGames. WarGames is canon in the MCU.
Matthew Fox:
It’s a great movie.
Pete Wright:
That’s delightful. Because that opens up an entire world. Matthew Broderick is canon in the MCU.
Kyle Olson:
Matthew Broderick, yeah.
Matthew Fox:
I tend to think of that movie as somewhat of a cult classic. I think a lot of our generations know it, but I don’t think someone would be like, oh hey, you want to understand the early eighties, here’s a movie to watch. So the fact that Steve Rogers has also seen it tells me that someone who was introducing him to things — I have some hope that The Last Starfighter probably got onto that list. He has Back to the Future.
Pete Wright:
You know it.
Matthew Fox:
And probably —
Pete Wright:
Let’s say, I mean, Breakfast Club. Now that Matthew Broderick is in it, the floodgates are open.
Matthew Fox:
Did Steve Rogers watch Matthew Broderick having an experience he literally lived through in Biloxi Blues? The mind is just all over the place.
Pete Wright:
This is fireworks, you guys. This is incredible. Okay, shall we play a game? I saw it. Then we get — this is why we’re here. We’re kind of moving straight in here so Kyle can start talking about Arnim Zola.
Kyle Olson:
Well, as you’re moving through the UNIVAC, the giant things, and then have everything covered in dust, except that someone has then attached a brand new modern USB port to it, and you can see the dust has been cleared away. Someone has been down here recently. So this isn’t just — even when they did the little scanny thing on the keypad to get in, someone has been here and recently.
Pete Wright:
Recently.
Kyle Olson:
So we’re not doing this whole “this is an artifact, this is a tomb that they’ve uncovered.” It is, but —
Pete Wright:
Right. This has been maintained.
Kyle Olson:
Yes, someone else has been coming here on a regular basis and wiring up new technology to hold. So then when the big reveal comes —
Matthew Fox:
I have a question about Herr Zola, and I don’t know if I should ask it now to help frame what you’re going to talk about, or if I should wait till the end.
Kyle Olson:
Go ahead. If you got it on deck, let it fly.
Matthew Fox:
So one of the thoughts that I had the first time I saw this movie, and then I went back and watched the original, and I still have this thought every time I watch it: I think this version of Zola is fascinating and great and chewing scenery and just villainy McVillainy, and it’s wonderful. It doesn’t, for me, match the character we saw at the end of the first movie, where we see Zola basically kind of trying to get away from Red Skull and thinking Red Skull and Hydra are kind of nuts, and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. If I remember, he kind of turns his back on him or tries to get away from him. So I’d be curious, as you’re telling us more about Zola, how does that match up with this one who is clearly ten toes down for Hydra?
Kyle Olson:
That is a standard Marvel problem. They want to get to the thing that people know, so much that they skip over all the stuff that went into the character to get there. I think of Psylocke from the later X-Men films. Olivia Munn shows up with a psychic katana and slices a robot in half. You’re like, this is awesome. But Betsy Braddock was a meek British girl who had telepathy and was always in trouble because she was way out-weight-classed.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
So there’s always this hunger to get right to the thing. I feel like there’s a whole missing chapter in there. Maybe if Agent Carter had been allowed to continue on as a series, we might have seen some of that. But it does seem like a big swing. I guess you could do it as the shorthand of, well, when your head goes into a computer, then you lose your humanity — the standard trope. But it does seem like a wasted opportunity to have that “I came around to their way of thinking” as it went through.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, okay. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one who thought there was a discrepancy there.
Kyle Olson:
No. But yeah, he gets to deliver this big villain speech, so how fun.
Matthew Fox:
With that being said, let’s now discuss the awesome character of Zola Mark II.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. So Arnim Zola, as he mentions, is Swiss, not German. That’s very important to him. But that being said, he is a full-on Nazi. His first appearance was in Captain America and the Falcon number 208 from April 1977, created by the King, Jack Kirby, who is both writing and drawing the issue at the same time. That is also an issue where Captain America fights a monster who has not made the leap to the cinematic universe — the Manfish. So not every Marvel character or villain gets to have their own solo Morbius-style fanburst.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding. Nailing it, Marvel. Nailing it.
Kyle Olson:
Manfish-style will stay on the comics. But Arnim Zola essentially is — I guess Dr. Frankenstein is the closest thing. His whole thing was more genetics than they have here, which is much more computer. But he did also do androids, so I guess that kind of bridges that part in between.
His big piece of tech he came up with was a way to essentially download someone’s personality and then upload it onto something else. So he’s done this with Red Skull a bunch of times. And then when he was being pursued by a bunch of heroes, he did it to himself, so that he could be in a much more superior body than his little tiny human one. So there wasn’t this whole illness thing. It was more like, oh, they’re at the door with the pitchforks. I need to do something — and put himself into it.
And so what he decided to do is redesign the body. He made it like a giant six-foot frame and put the brain inside the chest so it would be more protected. And that’s what you see.
Pete Wright:
Well, that’s the most protected part.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, exactly. You got the most mass around it.
Matthew Fox:
You can’t kill him with a headshot.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
That’s pretty upsetting.
Kyle Olson:
Right. And then put a little sensor on top, 360, so he could always be getting data. And then had a screen that would project his face onto it. So that is the image you see most of the time if you Google Zola.
He’s one of those persistent pests that every time they destroy the body, he just uploads himself into another one. So he’s always body-hopping and showing up. And also making other people body-hop. He created a clone Captain America and put Red Skull’s brain into it. It’s a whole thing. But he’s the perpetual mad scientist that’s always serving Hydra’s interest. I believe he even cloned Hitler’s brain at one point and put it into a guy who became what’s known as the Hate Monger. So we were playing with some potent stuff back then there.
Pete Wright:
Oh, nice. On the nose. I did not know much about Arnim Zola apart from the runs that I have read. I did not know, for example, about the horrific Dimension Z run, with some artwork that is just brutal — of Arnim Zola still in screens in the chest, like erupting from flesh in real people somehow. There’s some really crazy interpretations of this character.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it gets pretty bonkers.
Pete Wright:
Do you find that through these runs you become a Zola sympathizer? Is he ever someone to count on as, oh, he really had a rough time, we’re going to understand him?
Kyle Olson:
No, he’s pretty — you have your Lokis, people you’re like, oh, I kind of see where he’s coming from. And the sort of these guys who are like the troubled — you know, the Punisher, whatever — you get where they’re coming from. But there is a place, especially in these things, for just full-on villains. And he is a full-on villain. I like him.
Even they did more sympathetic stuff with Kang, but Kang for a long time was just like, oh man, this guy again. This perennial evil of, oh crap, this force of nature is going to show up. So it’s not about nuance, it’s not about trying to understand him or talk him down. It’s literally like, I’m going to throw my shield at this guy as hard as I can because I want to knock him the hell out.
Matthew Fox:
And I do think it’s worth mentioning that this is one of those — we are taking something into SHIELD and Hydra that a hundred percent happened in the real world. There were a number of Nazi scientists, primarily rocket scientists, but also some others, who we just said, you know what, don’t worry about it, because you can help us. One of the main people who was a key part of our early space program was a guy named Wernher von Braun, who —
Kyle Olson:
“The rockets go up, I don’t know where they come down.”
Matthew Fox:
“That’s not my department,” says Wernher von. I’m going to quote that exact thing by the Tom Lehrer song, because he also was the one who designed the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which were basically the first rocket attacks on civilian targets in warfare. But the Americans were like, well, yeah, but you can help us beat the Russians and get someone in space. So this idea of, wow, no American group would hire someone like Zola to work for them — absolutely yes, they would, and they did. And we went to space for it.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, they sort of do an alternate history of that in For All Mankind, where they have von Braun as sort of a hero, and then people then find out what he did. So you could sort of see the fall from grace, as opposed to how we experienced that time, which is, oh, we did what?
And from what I can tell, Jack took inspiration from Émile Zola, who was a French novelist and journalist. I think he just liked that name and did a play off it. But I always find it interesting because I think of Zola all the time, because on my way to work, I drive by Émile Zola Drive all the time. Every time I see it, I’m like, oh hey. So there’s an Émile Zola Drive, not Arnim Zola, but close enough that it makes you think of it.
Pete Wright:
Oh, no, he has a street. What is the adjacency relationship to MODOK? Because it feels like this was of an era where we’re just putting faces in the middle of bodies of things.
Kyle Olson:
Yes. Well, he was a mechanism designed only for killing. So shout out to the Marvel fanboys out there. Yeah, that was another one who wanted to experiment on himself. So yes, we were very much in the silver-age mad scientist. I think he was much more like a Nick Fury that sort of came from. But yeah, big head, giant arms.
It was the same kind of thing of making — this was a time when, as opposed to now, even as we’re recording this, the Daredevil season two finale shows up, and most people are just still wearing black leather. We’re back to that. I liked in this period when it was like, okay, when you see the silhouette of MODOK, you know it’s MODOK. And when you see the silhouette of Zola, you know it’s Zola. As opposed to, yes, that is a guy. Okay.
Matthew Fox:
So I have another question about Mr. Zola, and I don’t know if we should talk about this this week or next week, because obviously my question is deeply affected by what Zola knows is going to happen in a few minutes that gets revealed next week. But during this speech, Zola is like, you know what, Bond villains don’t go anywhere near far enough in stupidly telling Bond their plan.
I remember watching this and going, there’s no way this is true. Zola is just screwing with them, because why in the world would you give Cap all the information he needs to stop your big secret plan? Now, we’re going to later find out — sorry, spoilers for a movie that’s many years old — that Zola expects that all of them, including himself, is going to die. And so maybe he has this ego need, but again, that’s not something that’s ever been established by the character. Wouldn’t you rather just completely lie to Cap at this point? And get him to think, yeah, Nick Fury has always been our leader, or convince him Natasha has been working with them. Why go Bond villain here?
Pete Wright:
My read on it is, he’s not lying because he’s unafraid.
Matthew Fox:
No, I know he’s not lying. The question is, why would he tell the truth?
Pete Wright:
Well, I think you said it. He has — I don’t even know if it’s ego, but it is unafraid of what’s happening next, because everything is happening for the reason. He is stalling because he knows there’s a missile inbound. But he also is driven by the pieces that he still feels like he’s in control of, or he has been in control of.
But it does lead to an adjacent question, which is: how autonomous is Arnim Zola now? Because Natasha had to turn him on. She had to type “Y-E-S means yes” for spells, yes? So could he just turn himself on and process stuff when he’s not? Could he have more agency in this world than he does? Or shouldn’t they — the wheels and the reels — have been spinning when they got down there? Because that’s the thing that flies in the face of exactly what we’re talking about. If he is really so smart and he’s so ahead, shouldn’t his processors have been running this whole time?
Kyle Olson:
Well, I think we know that he has been running, because he was actively on the drive trying to stop her. So he is a program that is living on the drive. She said someone is trying to stop me to do it. So that was happening at the same time. I think this is — well, I think you’re bringing it back to the original one.
Pete Wright:
You’re right. Then why does she have to turn him on?
Kyle Olson:
As soon as she connects it, I think it basically gets the update. She plugged it in and then said it connected back. This is where it started, but I don’t think this is where it ended.
Matthew Fox:
Right. Well, because certainly Zola as a human being would have no idea who Natasha was, because she wasn’t born yet. Clearly someone is using those things to upload data as much as to download it.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. So I think he’s been running. Maybe not continuously, or maybe it was all for dramatic effect too. We do see him being really dramatic about all this stuff. So maybe it’s, shh, guys, guys, shut it all down.
Pete Wright:
It’s like surprise party rules.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I get it. It does make me think, he’s flash memory now. He’s everywhere.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I’m sure he is. I really wish they had sort of brought this into the Ultron conversation of, hey, there’s already this thing you could bring over.
But I also think maybe he’s just glad to finally tell somebody. This has been this big secret for so long. He’s like, oh man, not only do I get to tell somebody, but I get to tell Captain America that the group he’s been working for this whole time has been us. Oh, man. Let me at it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think that’s why — I mean, we know this is an exposition dump from a Doylist perspective, but I think internally it does make sense that he’s calling himself a living agent. He has needs. And one of his needs is to peacock, is to be proud of all that they have accomplished.
I do think, especially after reviewing the parade of Zolas in comic history, this is the coolest one. Are you satisfied as a reader of the comics, understanding where he’s come from? Are you satisfied with the implementation of Zola on screen?
Kyle Olson:
I was so pleased that they brought it into the sort of working metaphor of Captain America: The Winter Soldier this way. If he had walked out as a robot with this green screen on the chest, I was like, ooh, that breaks it. That goes against all the — even the hyper-fighting we’ve been seeing has all just been bullets and guns and leaping around. Once you introduce a robot android body with a face, the game changes.
So they were smart to put him on a screen this way. As soon as that screen came on, I figured out what they were doing, and I was so happy. I was like, oh, they’re actually doing the thing. So yeah, I think it works in this. I wish there had been more. I wish we had seen that he’d survived, or had been brought back at some point. The fact that this is sort of the one and only scene we get of that is kind of a bummer, but at least we get this scene.
Matthew Fox:
And I will say, having the very pixelated, monochrome monitor version of his face, I thought it was all very effective, and it’s very much taking us back to the WarGames kind of computer era. And I will say, as much as I’m joking about it, on behalf of Mr. Kubasko, who cannot be with us right now because his priorities are correct — he’s trying to get into Star Wars Celebration — I don’t think the “wow, this seems an awful lot like a Bond villain level exposition” is coincidental. Following what Rob has said, that this movie is constantly paying homage to the spy thrillers and the action movies of the seventies and eighties and nineties, Bond movies fall very much in that. And what he is doing is a very well-known trope of Bond movies of, I’m sure you’re about to die, so as you said, I’m going to peacock and explain my whole plan.
Pete Wright:
And that’s pretty much it.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. We only get a little bit of the plan, and in the minutes we see, we’re just going to go all the way back to World War II. And then we end on Natasha asking, well, how were you able to do this? How would people not stop you? And he says, “accidents will happen,” and they show a picture of Stark.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
Whoa, what?
Pete Wright:
What?
Matthew Fox:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
What happened to Tony’s dad? How is this connected? I’m sure this won’t cause a major problem in a future film. I mean, this is just exposition, right?
Pete Wright:
Surely not. It’s just exposition. I think it’s interesting just how far ahead we get to be from Natasha. Going back to that opening question of, wouldn’t she know Peggy? Well, she doesn’t even know what we know about where they are right now. When she ends on, “SHIELD would have stopped you” — surely there haven’t been any clues to Natasha that something is wrong in SHIELD.
Kyle Olson:
Right. She assumed it was just normal world-empire bureaucracy nonsense. It turns out, no. There were heads growing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That’s where we are. So we’ve got a little bit more of this, and then something big falls on our heads, and so we’re excited about that.
Matthew Fox:
That does, though, raise a question for me. Is the idea that Hydra killed Tony Stark’s parents — is that something the MCU came up with, or is that something that already existed in Marvel?
Kyle Olson:
No, this is pretty much an MCU thing.
Matthew Fox:
Okay. Then my next question being — I just don’t remember the timing — do you think they put that detail in here already thinking about Civil War becoming a movie, that they were going to use it in some movie as a way to build tension between Tony versus Steve and Bucky? Or just that they put it in here because it’s relevant to this, and then later when the Russo brothers are writing Civil War, they’re like, oh yeah, you remember that seed that was dropped — let’s take that and use that as the basis for a really good conflict between Steve, Bucky, and Tony.
Pete Wright:
I like to think that they can see around those particular corners, and that that was in fact placed. Because that’s not a thing you just casually drop into this movie as any sort of Easter egg and then expect not to use it later. That feels way too intentional.
Matthew Fox:
And I was trying to remember, had there been any establishment that Tony’s parents had died tragically in some kind of — I mean, we knew they were dead, we knew he was an orphan, but I don’t think it had ever been established that they had died in like a car accident.
Kyle Olson:
No, just that they were gone.
Matthew Fox:
But listeners, if I’m wrong —
Pete Wright:
That’s where we are. I don’t think this was the meatiest of meaty minutes. It was Marvel monologuing, and now hopefully we’ll get back to work.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Because I’m sure nothing bad is on the way. I mean, just three old pals having a casual conversation.
Pete Wright:
No, truly not.
Matthew Fox:
Certainly not a Wernher von Braun reference.
Pete Wright:
That’s right. Maybe they’ll go outside, have a catch.
All right, everybody, thank you for hanging in for this quickie right in the middle, right before we get back to the real work of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your time and attention. Don’t forget you can find out all the ways you can connect with us and support the show at MarvelMovieMinute.com. On behalf of Matthew Fox and Kyle Olson and Rob Kubasko, who hopefully gets into Star Wars Celebration this year, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll be back next week on Marvel Movie Minute.
Matthew Fox:
“Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown. ‘Nazi schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
