Kyle Olson:
Welcome back to the Marvel Movie Minute, a weekly podcast where we disassemble a film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe into five-minute segments and then examine them in obsessive and occasionally hilarious detail. I’m Kyle Olson from the Craft and Chaos Podcast.
Pete Wright:
I’m Pete Wright.
Matthew Fox:
And I’m Matthew Fox from The Ethical Panda, the Star Wars Generations podcast — I mean, the Superhero Ethics podcast — a New York Mets fan, but most importantly tonight, because we have the chance to win our first championship in twenty-seven years, a New York Knicks fan!
Pete Wright:
Oh my god. Coming in hot.
Matthew Fox:
Well, Pete didn’t want to introduce himself as anything, so I —
Pete Wright:
It’s sports, Matthew.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I’m just excited about the new God of War game they announced, but we all have our fandoms that we’re excited about. They showed twenty minutes of gameplay. But anyways, back on to what we’re here for. I like my spies Russian and my suplexes German, as we examine minutes 81 through 85 of Captain America: The Winter Soldier from 2014, directed by the Russo Brothers. We rejoin this in mid-fight. Natasha has gone a bit Tarzan, Cap has caught a bus the hard way, and Sam’s set to do maximum damage with a minimum knife.
Pete Wright:
Okay, my first question, across the entire MCU — and yes, I’m even suggesting movies that have not yet been made — is this set of minutes the most shieldy of Cap?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it may be.
Pete Wright:
I think he uses the shield as a shield more in these minutes than in any other Captain America property.
Kyle Olson:
It may be, because I feel like in Civil War it gets taken out pretty quickly. And I guess maybe the final fight in Civil War is very shieldy, but this may be the most shield — especially being used as a shield proper, as opposed to a frisbee.
Pete Wright:
As a shield, that’s what I mean. Mostly he’s tossing it around, right? Sliding on it. Here he’s literally protecting himself as a shield. I took note of that.
Matthew Fox:
I feel like in Civil War there’s a lot of punches against it and a lot of Iron Man things, but this is definitely the most bullets it has reflected. It does lead me to a question, though, because again, I have not read the comics. In the comics, I imagine that Hydra, and that these Hydra folks within Shield, have their own certain technology. And so I’m wondering, what is the counterbalancing factor? What is the bonus that these weapons the people from Hydra are using has, that balances for the fact that you can’t turn the barrel downward?
Kyle Olson:
Like, he’s got legs.
Matthew Fox:
The shield is not as big as his body. It would be cool to see him constantly moving the shield around to block the bullets, but no, they just keep firing in a straight line.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, that’s the Wonder Woman effect.
Matthew Fox:
Like, one of you shoot high, one of you shoot low.
Kyle Olson:
You see her deflecting with the bracelets every time. It gets even more ridiculous as they start doing that with Winter Soldier, where he just uses his arm.
Matthew Fox:
The shield can’t protect all of it.
Pete Wright:
Shoot his feet.
Kyle Olson:
And I was like, that’s not even most of you. There’s so much more of you than that. I guess everyone’s trained to go straight for headshots. But we do see Cap go full turtle. He really puts himself all the way down.
Pete Wright:
So shieldy.
Kyle Olson:
And that such a video-gamey move of redirecting the bullets from one into the next guy — that was really good. Haven’t seen that before.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding. I’m so glad they did that, and I think that probably came from the video game we talked about earlier in the season — which, again, is absolutely worth watching the YouTube walkthroughs and not playing it. But it looks just like this movie and it looks just like this fight. It’s really, really good.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, so we start out, and Sam is in mid-action as the minute picks up, and cuts the strap off of the guy’s gun as he then launches the guy off the side. So for those of you who know, you know. And then he gets to — we sort of don’t know where he goes after he does some stuff, and then he sort of disappears.
So I do like that at that point, this is when a car just explodes out of nowhere, and then you find out that Bucky has a second grenade launcher. The man loves his grenades. And this is one of those cool cinematic things where as it explodes, then everything goes quiet. So it’s almost like our ears have been blown out, and so everything is very muffled. But I have a friend with tinnitus, and she hates when they do the thing where they play the little sound-effect ringing. So they don’t do that here, which I think was a good move. But it’s everything quiet, and then the sound starts coming back up as we’re recovering from this explosion.
Pete Wright:
You know what I do love in this moment as we recover from this explosion? There is a really great, very brief shot of Bucky walking into people dispersing. This is not a cleared scene. And I think that adds a lot to the fact that this is still very intense, and the guns that they have are very large, and there are still people running about hither and yon. It is scary. Meanwhile, Bucky’s walking toward Captain Last-One-Out.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. We hear — well, we think, because they had split up already, so they had already decided what their targets were. So the Winter Soldier is going after Natasha, going after the Black Widow. And so he hears her voice off to the side and then starts heading in that direction. And once again, Bucky doesn’t hurry. This is that same determinist, straight-on thing. He’s like, the bullets are faster than me, so I don’t need to run. He’s very quickly going over there, and then figures out where she is — listens, hears her voice — and then takes out a little rolling grenade and rolls it on there. But we find out she’s taken one of her widow gauntlets and has recorded herself calling for help and left it down there.
Pete Wright:
Now, tell me about this. The thing that has a little screen on it — what is that?
Kyle Olson:
I believe that’s one of her gauntlets.
Matthew Fox:
Oh, okay. I thought it was a weird shape for a phone. I was trying to think back to where phones were.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I think it’s round because it’s supposed to go over her arms. We never really get to see them properly as she does it, so I think she has two, and this is one of them. Because in a moment, as he’s then distracted — as another car explodes; it’s a bad day to be in the minivan — she comes leaping out, and then has the cord from the other one, probably the same one she used to rappel down underneath the highway, and has it wrapped around his neck. But he catches it just in time to stop it.
Pete Wright:
Right, as a garrote.
Kyle Olson:
Which, once again, would have been a good move. She’s right there. She’s so close to taking this guy out, just like she shot him in the goggles before. Any other human who didn’t have the fast reaction time, she should have had him. But he’s just fast enough to stop the wire from getting to his throat.
Pete Wright:
And he is very strong, and she is diminutive, and he tosses her like a rag doll. She hits that car hard. Heidi Moneymaker.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. Here comes the moneymaker. Once again, showing off why she is the queen of this stuff. That’s a hard hit.
Pete Wright:
Who was — can we talk about the guy for Steve, his stunt double, Hargrave? We talk about Hargrave, we talk about Heidi Moneymaker. We don’t talk about Bucky’s double, James Young.
Kyle Olson:
James Young, that’s right. Because the two of them — Sam Hargrave and James Young — are gonna get into it here as the minutes go by. We don’t talk about him enough. This was his first Marvel thing, but from then on he’s become not only Sebastian Stan’s stunt double — Stan, ha ha — up to and including current stuff. He’s also a stunt coordinator for Marvel, so he’s done a bunch of work there. But this was his first major thing for them.
Pete Wright:
That’s awesome. He’s great.
Matthew Fox:
I think one thing I love here — even though in the end it doesn’t really work out — is that there’s always this weird tension of, you have these literal demigods walking on Earth. You have Thor, you have Iron Man, you have Captain America, and then you’ve got Hawkeye and Natasha, who are a guy who’s good with a bow and arrow and a woman who’s good with bracelets. And I love moments like this because they remind you why they’re on the team — because smarts will defeat strength most of the time. And she doesn’t win, but she certainly gets an advantage for a moment, enough to change the place of fighting and get more of a — be able to fight more on her own terms.
And it is one of my favorite scenes because it’s such a nice way of — yeah, as you said, Pete, he is just straight ahead. He hears the voice, he’s going to go to it, because he assumes he’s going to win any fight. And that’s generally a good assumption, but the idea of trickery is just not a part — I think a lot of other people would be like, why is this person making noise when they know I can come find them? But it’s a nice reminder from Bucky: that’s not it. It is just straight ahead. I have an order — kill — follow the order.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And like I say, she gets pretty close, and then after he knocks her into there, he’s about to pull another weapon, about to shoot her, and then she throws out the taser discs, which we have seen originally in Iron Man 2. So once again, coming back to that, and immediately throws it onto his metal arm and disables his metal arm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, she gets a little EMP action.
Kyle Olson:
I think it was one of those throw-and-pray moments for her of, man, I hope this works. Will it actually disable the armor?
Pete Wright:
At this point you start to hear mechanics in his arm — that soundscape for his arm, that tonal theme of electricity and machinery and gearing and servos and stuff. We have to highlight this sequence, because especially in a couple of minutes, when that fight happens and you hear him wield the arm against Captain America, you’ll hear it again, and it’s extraordinary. And that starts right here, as the arm is briefly debilitated. It’s very cool.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I wanted to shout out the entire sound department. I was going through it, and their sound effects team is huge. So I don’t know exactly who to thank, but I’ll just say, for all of them, they did some incredible work. Because I also love the sound effect of the bullets ricocheting off of Cap’s shield into someone else, and how the tone changes as he moves. It does this escalating thing up as he’s moving it.
Matthew Fox:
Yeah, the Doppler effect thing.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Kyle Olson:
What a great sound effect, that tells you exactly what that is. In the history of the world, no one has ever fired a minigun at a vibranium shield and launched another person. But you listen to that and you go, yes, that’s exactly what that would sound like. It is perfect.
Matthew Fox:
Well, and this is gonna sound weird, but there’s a moment where I was distinctly aware of the lack of a sound that I should have had. And I think it’s because of how much the rest of the sounds were making sense. There’s a moment where Bucky punches the shield, and now the shield has the physics that it’s supposed to have, where no vibrations go through. And there’s no sound. There’s no wrong, you know — like you just punched something against the ground. And you can clearly see Bucky’s surprised by that.
It’s one of those things I don’t think you even notice unless you really slow it down the way we’re doing, but you definitely have that — it is an incredibly clear moment. It’s half a second in a fight, but he punches the shield, nothing happens the way it should happen, and Bucky is definitely thrown by that. And the way all the other sound happens, and yet there’s no sound on that other than just the thud, is so effective.
Pete Wright:
It’s a good thud, though, too. There are a couple of layered effects in that very moment. The first one is, we have a tight shot on Natasha, who’s on the floor. She does not know where Winter Soldier is. Winter Soldier leaps up onto the hood of a car far, far out of field. He’s behind her, and he knows where she is, and there’s a scream. It’s like a Halloween scream. As he hits that, when he comes down, it’s Cap that jumps in the middle and holds the shield up. He comes down and hits that while the scream is still going. And it’s like a church bell thong, right? And it is definitely not the sound that I would expect to come out of those two substances meeting, and yet it’s the perfect sound. So yeah, you talk about the sound team — this is a completely manufactured soundscape, and it sounds so good.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and in that, this — it’s not a big Iron Man armor sort of sound. It’s just a little bit of, you can hear the mechanics of it working.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Kyle Olson:
So it tells us that it’s not an exoskeleton. It’s not something over the top of his arm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, there’s definitely something inside.
Kyle Olson:
It tells us that it is an entirely artificial limb, which is capable of punching the shield and not having every bone break, because there are no bones to break in that one.
Matthew Fox:
I will just say, as an amputee who has dealt with prosthetics all of my life, while I would not expect this — this is not good representation of amputee prosthetic life. There is nothing in the world about this that — and again, it’s Hydra science, and that’s great, and I would not want it to be. I love the character of Echo, in part because the actress is an amputee.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Her prosthetic works the way a prosthetic does, and it makes sense. His shouldn’t, and it doesn’t. But just to be very clear, there is nothing — like, your friend who has really good insurance and the VA is totally helping them is still not getting anything like this. Because among other things, the amount of nervous system this has to be hooked into to have all those moving parts be controlled is —
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
We’re working on it. We’re getting a little bit closer. But no, no, no, no, no.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and we did discuss this in the previous segment, but the reason the Winter Soldier character design has that is because, famously, in the panel where Bucky is killed, his left arm is caught in the bomb that Zemo has launched. And so that’s why, when he shows up, you make that connection of, oh right, the last panel you see is him with his arm stuck in.
Matthew Fox:
And it’s a great way of showing that this is a person whose body took incredible damage, who has been through some stuff. And also that this would be a part of, you know, brainwashed cyborg assassin — part metal, part monster, part man, part robot — whatever. It totally makes sense.
Kyle Olson:
I watched a video I found, which we’ll put in the show notes, of a couple of MMA fighters who went through this fight. From their perspective of, oh, here’s this punch — and they would stop it and go, okay, this is the kind of thing. So they would talk about the Superman punch, which is where he launches himself in the air and comes down with the punch. It’s a big wrestling move. Or the flying knee. It was interesting to hear from their perspective of, here’s what Cap is doing, and here’s what Bucky is doing, in terms of the strategy of the fight.
Pete Wright:
Oh, that’s cool. So they move on.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Speaking of the shield, we see the shield change hands like we saw before, like Bucky caught it and dropped it. But now — look at that — Winter Soldier is now wielding the shield. There’s a little bit of, that’s a fanboy moment right there of, oh, eventually he’s gonna be Captain America.
Pete Wright:
Right, and looks menacing. He makes that sign of goodness look absolutely menacing. It’s great.
Kyle Olson:
And he does that little Captain America peek.
Pete Wright:
I can’t get over that mask.
Kyle Olson:
I love that they hold the shield up and then the little top of the head comes out, and he does the exact same thing here.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Matthew Fox:
Well, and in the MCU especially, it’s a nice way to throw us. Because if we stop and think about it, we know that the shield is not Mjolnir. It is a completely different thing. But this shield is to Cap as Mjolnir is to Thor. And we’ve now spent two movies, plus The Avengers, talking about how only Thor, or only someone worthy, is worthy of Thor. We actually had a whole scene about who can pick up Thor’s hammer, and even Cap can make it move an inch but he can’t do anything beyond that. And so I think that is somewhere in the back of the lizard brain when you see Winter Soldier use it. Because you’re like, no, he’s not — oh no, wait, it is actually just a shield. Anyone can use it.
Pete Wright:
That’s a really good point, because you do have that feeling. Like, there’s something deeply wrong about this frame.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. And then immediately he uses that metal arm to launch it right back at Cap, and Cap barely gets out of the way, and you see it embed itself in the van behind him. And then it’s time for some fisticuffs — but, you know, knife to see you. Bucky’s got his World War II knife.
So apparently there’s a bonus feature on the Blu-ray — I think it’s on Disney Plus as well — like a stunt featurette about this, and they go into more detail. I also found the pre-viz that I sent to the group, where you can see them put that together. We’ll have that in the show notes as well. It’s really good. I love those things. I wish they put more of those out, to see what the stunt performers’ original concept for the fight was, including editing, and then to compare it to the final version, just to show how much work they put into all of this.
So it wasn’t just the Russos going, okay, I want you to — no, they have a dedicated stunt team that goes, all right, then he would punch here, he would block there, he would hold this. They have all the stuff. They call it the dance. All of this is planned out so that nobody gets hurt and it looks awesome. And they said Sebastian Stan apparently was really good with that knife. All the stuff you see him doing — at one point he even throws it in the air and grabs it with the other hand — all that.
Pete Wright:
Flipping it around in his fingers.
Kyle Olson:
That’s not CG. He really did all that. And they said he would walk around set just twirling the knife, spinning the knife, holding the knife. He was just a knife prodigy.
Pete Wright:
It’s extraordinary, because he does that flip in the middle of swinging his fist the other way. It is incredibly complicated. I could watch it again and again and again. It’s extraordinary.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it’s so fast. There are very few fight scenes like — in this one we’re gonna have another big one coming up, but then after that there really aren’t any, and it’s sort of like, oh, I almost kind of miss it, because they’re so good at fighting each other, just as two physical performers. James Young and Sam Hargrave, and Chris and Sebastian. It’s that wrestling thing in me where I just want a rematch. I want to see it again.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It does make me wonder, at what point — what kind of impact would it take me to get to the point where I could push a blade into the side of a van and then, like a can opener, slice down the entire side of a panel van with a knife? What would that take in terms of just raw muscle and bone?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Even just the initial stabbing through.
Pete Wright:
Just getting it in. How do you stab a van?
Kyle Olson:
What does it take to stab a van? That’s the question.
Matthew Fox:
I mean, the fact that we didn’t get a product placement on the knife makes me feel like there probably isn’t a knife that can do that without breaking. Because if there was, there’s a lot of —
Pete Wright:
They’d have monetized it.
Matthew Fox:
This movie — oh my god, would they want you to know that that is that kind of knife.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s true.
Kyle Olson:
And maybe they couldn’t get a sponsor that would be willing to have, like, Dunkin’ Donuts, and have the knife cut through it. Like, oh, we don’t think that’s part of our brand portfolio.
Matthew Fox:
I like it. I like it. I have a kid who’s waking up from a nap pretty soon, so I’m gonna need to go. So can I just jump ahead to the one moment I really wanted to talk about? The reveal of Bucky.
This was a moment that, for me — we’ve talked in the past about how Marvel is kind of teaching us how to watch franchise movies. And this is the moment that, for me, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who had a similar feeling, told us that we’re now at a point where if you’re gonna watch a Marvel movie, the fun thing to do, and the helpful thing to do, is to do your homework and watch the movies that came before it. Because I saw it and I was like, oh, okay, who’s that? And my friend sitting next to me went, oh my god, that’s Bucky. And it was because one of us had watched the movie two days before, and one of us hadn’t.
I remembered that, and that’s a big part of why I started — okay, a new movie’s coming out, let me go watch the other stuff. Intervallic homework. Because these are fun movies to watch, but being able to — if you hadn’t seen that first movie for three years, I don’t think I’m alone in not recognizing that it’s Bucky. Yes, we saw a little bit of them earlier, but so much is happening.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, the museum scene, I think, was supposed to remind us.
Matthew Fox:
But yeah, I think it was just a nice way of saying, you know what? Do some homework. Because yeah, it was in the museum scene as well, but I’m not alone. I know I’m not alone.
Kyle Olson:
No, you’re absolutely not alone.
Matthew Fox:
Some other people didn’t recognize it either.
Pete Wright:
You’re definitely not alone, but I think it’s safe to say by this point in the movie, you probably knew. Is that fair?
Matthew Fox:
My memories of this scene were them having an impact on me, so I think I hadn’t really put it all together yet.
Pete Wright:
That’s awesome. I’m a little jealous. Because I had just enough going into this movie that I knew kind of what we were in for, and I was excited for it. So this reveal — my gut reaction was, oh, finally Captain America gets to know what we all know already. We get to take off the artifice and let him be shocked and go through the process of grieving his friend, and then the absolute stunning awakening that his friend is alive. We’ve known it all along. It’s time for Steve to get it.
Matthew Fox:
And I should be clear, I was very much a casual at this point. I had not watched trailers, I had not noticed that Sebastian Stan was in the credits and wondered what that means. So that’s kind of where I’m speaking from.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matthew Fox:
Anyway, I gotta run, because I got a baby. But enjoy, everybody.
Pete Wright:
Okay, we’ll write you out.
Matthew Fox:
TheEthicalPanda.com. Let’s go, Nets.
Kyle Olson:
I also like that it’s minute 83 where this information is revealed. So now we’re all on the same page. By here, that is the turning point where now, okay, now we’re with the heroes. We now know who the villains are. We’re with the heroes. Obviously things are looking dark for them, too, but now we’re all on the same page. And that was the moment for me where I’m like, oh, okay, good, now we’ve got that out of the way. That was the lean-forward moment for me of, okay, what happens next? The point of it isn’t that it’s Bucky, it’s, now where does the story go?
Pete Wright:
Is this the first time we hear him speak? I think it is. He hasn’t said anything yet.
Kyle Olson:
We heard him speak in Russian earlier, but this is the first time in English, yeah.
Pete Wright:
But we haven’t heard him use Stan’s voice. And he says, who’s Bucky?
Kyle Olson:
Yes. Who the hell is Bucky?
Pete Wright:
Who the hell is Bucky? It’s a good line. It’s a good line for Bucky.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, it is. This is, once again — the whole thing, my Tumblr username should be Chris Evans Face, because Chris Evans Face, man. Him absolutely floored, in the middle of combat. Like I say, I make the joke that he does a full German suplex and flips him backwards. And during that process the face mask comes off, and that’s when it comes, and you can see him going — not in his wildest dreams, after all the stuff that he’s seen, seeing a whole — aliens pouring through over New York — this is the thing where it’s just like, I don’t know how to go on. Everything changes for him. And the soundtrack does a great job of that, too. And then, of course, that’s when Falcon comes swooping in at that point, with a bit of a rough landing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it looks like he’s about to take a digger right in the pavement, and he recovers, which is good.
Kyle Olson:
Right. Natasha found the grenade launcher, so then that comes in.
Pete Wright:
Natasha, who has been shot at this point, right?
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. During all the fracas, she’s got a shoulder wound. So she got herself in position and fired. Once again — so close. If just a little bit off to the side, she’d have had him.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
And then during all this confusion and fracas, Winter Soldier disappears. But — oh good, the shield is here! Oh, wait.
Pete Wright:
Wrong shield, yeah.
Kyle Olson:
Wrong shield.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so Rumlow leading the charge of his goons, and actually showing a modicum of diplomacy as they take down —
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. There’s the target. The whole point was to kill Cap, but he realizes that the world is watching. There’s a news copter above them, and he realizes that maybe a Shield agent shooting Captain America in the head on live television is not the best for the plan — for Project Insight. And so, you’re right, he shows a bit of restraint. You’d think, having been punched by Cap earlier that day, you’d have a bit of a grudge.
Pete Wright:
He shows no welts. He shows no bruising. He looks pretty good, Rumlow. And they take him down. And Cap, who — I have to imagine, if we armchair it, Cap, not having just met Bucky, would not have gone quite so gracefully. This is a Cap who takes the knee because he is in a moment of shock.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and Natasha and Falcon kind of just follow his lead. There’s that movement of Sam sort of like, are we fighting our way out of this? And then he sees that Cap is absolutely frozen and goes, oh, okay, I guess we’re doing this a different way now. And then all of them — Tasha, all of them — like, sure, take us in, because, ow.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. There’s gotta be a universe where there’s a camera crew that’s on Sam after he’s on the bridge, and just follows him to where he finds his little briefcase of the wing suit and has to put it all on.
Kyle Olson:
Right. That’s after he cuts the strap off the guy, and then it’s just running down the highway to find the flipped-over, on-fire car, and tear open the thing and put it on, like, oh, I hope everything’s going well down there.
Pete Wright:
Now what?
Kyle Olson:
Okay, let me just — all right, quick flight check, system check, all right, everything’s looking good.
Pete Wright:
Sometimes we get these little cutaways that I think would be really delightful, and that’s one of them. At least we know exactly how long it takes Sam to find and put on his wingsuit. It’s the length of this fight.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. It’s from minute 80 — that’s when he switched it, and we don’t see him again — and then here it is at mid-83. So it takes approximately three minutes.
Pete Wright:
It took him three minutes to sprint down the highway, find the thing, fly up, and get back.
Kyle Olson:
To get the suit on, fly up, and then land. Yeah, if we’re assuming this is real time.
Pete Wright:
Right. So they take him in.
Kyle Olson:
By now, in 83, the fight has sort of come to an end. One of their signature set pieces. We have come to the end of this incredible fight. Doing a show like this, when you have to step back and go, man, the amount of people you would have to have to do this — not only our principal actors, stunt performers, background performers, and then all the different camera. Somebody flying a helicopter. You can see how these big things get exponentially larger. Every single one of those shots is, you know, an hour just to set up.
Pete Wright:
Hundreds of people, yeah.
Kyle Olson:
And then over the course of five minutes, or whatever the entire fight lasts.
Pete Wright:
It’s quick. And the fact that we’re just on top of — what was it, fifteen minutes of movie time ago that we were in the elevator? We’re at the extraordinarily paced section of the movie. Things are moving, and this is major set piece after major set piece, and more major set pieces to come.
Kyle Olson:
Right. Because then the last minute of this is them in the Shield van. They’ve been taken captive. They’re all just sitting there together. And I think this would be the point where a lesser movie would do an exposition dump. This would be where he’d be like, well, let me take you back to the World’s Fair, 1941, or whatever.
Pete Wright:
Right. We was eating Coney dogs, I tell ya, Coneys.
Kyle Olson:
And Bucky brought around these two dames.
Pete Wright:
We don’t — they are captured. They are in some extraordinary handcuffs.
Kyle Olson:
It’s almost like they planned this.
Pete Wright:
You might think. And they’re in the van, and we don’t see a lot of setup for this. It’s a rather muscular van. We see that Cap’s mouth is working, but he’s generally non-functional with grief and uncertainty at this point, and will need to be shocked back into action.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. And then he says the one word that we’ve been enjoying: Zola.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, here you go, once again.
Kyle Olson:
He’s gone, but not forgotten. Like, Arnim Zola must have done something to him to bring Bucky back.
Pete Wright:
That’s right. Beeps and boops, Bucky.
Kyle Olson:
So when they found him — when they rescue him, they were doing some experiments. If you go back and watch that footage from the first Avenger, he’s hooked up to some stuff. They were doing something. So they were prepping him before that, before the fall. This is what happened. And so now they have their own Captain America on retainer, that they can thaw out and send away. And now Cap has been reunited with his best friend, but not in the way he would want.
Pete Wright:
At what cost? Yeah. It’s good. It’s good. A lot of uncertainty to come.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, and a nice breathe-out after a big battle.
Pete Wright:
Everybody looks good. Everybody’s fine. Natasha’s fine, nursing her shoulder. And we cut away in the middle. We do not get a perfect Winter Soldier set. We cut away in the middle, but something’s happening with the shadowy figures at the end of the cabin there.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right. They are being very tightly monitored, so there are a couple of Shield agents in there with them to make sure nothing goes wrong. And I’m sure nothing in this prisoner transport — this routine prisoner transport back to the Triskelion — will go wrong. It’ll be fine.
Pete Wright:
Totally routine.
Kyle Olson:
It’ll be smooth. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Hey, can I change gears for a moment?
Kyle Olson:
Absolutely, yeah.
Pete Wright:
On a recent episode as it aired, we have a comment going back a few weeks about Atwell’s cameo. This is from the good and kindly Steve J. Rogers in Discord, who says this regarding Atwell’s cameo: “Had a debate over what actually is an official cameo appearance in a franchise in a Godfather group on Facebook.”
Kyle Olson:
So Steve is crossing the streams here.
Pete Wright:
Apparently.
Kyle Olson:
I’ll say, let me further cross the streams. Look forward to a future episode on Make Me a Nerd about The Godfather.
Pete Wright:
Ooh, well done. Look at that. Cross-promotion of TruStory FM, right?
Kyle Olson:
That’s right.
Pete Wright:
That’s synergy. That’s branding synergy. Apparently, says Steve, the sudden appearances by James Caan, Abe Vigoda, and Gianni Russo in the final flashback scene of Godfather II are not considered cameos, despite all three actors’ characters dying. I always assumed these cameos were unannounced quick appearances in a project. Is this not the case? What is your stance on using the word cameo for a case like Atwell?
Kyle Olson:
That’s a good question. The first thought that comes to mind — and you can say if this works for you or not — is, I consider a cameo to be a one-scene character. Like if someone shows up, like Mel Gibson in Casper, or even Clint Eastwood, if we wanted to be slightly less controversial. It can’t be that it’s literally one shot, but it’s one thing. Or, like, Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop — I don’t know why I’m going back this far. They don’t really do this as much anymore. But if it’s self-contained, like one scene, that’s what I think of as a cameo. If they show up in multiple scenes, even if they’re short scenes, I sort of consider that more of a small role. What are your thoughts?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I’ve always considered Atwell in Winter Soldier as a cameo, for exactly those reasons. The only thing that would maybe push me a little bit is the absolute investment that they put into this cameo, to make it just an extraordinary visual effects treatment — the fact that they have multiple actors playing this teeny tiny little scene to age her. And so I guess — I’ve never seen anybody talk about a cameo as something that is gauged against monetary investment. I’ve never even heard of that. But it does feel like it’s something that is brief, it is emotionally isolated to a single sequence, and it is a little bit, maybe, longer than what we might think of as a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. I don’t know.
Kyle Olson:
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Rundown, where he literally walks past Dwayne Johnson and says, “have fun.”
Pete Wright:
That’s it.
Kyle Olson:
It’s just that.
Pete Wright:
Or all of the cameos in Deadpool — the Deadpool versus Wolverine, right?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, or Chris Evans in Free Guy. That is one hundred percent a cameo. It’s just, cut to, and there’s Chris Evans sitting there going, “what the —”
Pete Wright:
There are all kinds of those. For crying out loud, man, we have it right here. Stan Lee! Stan Lee cameos in all of these movies. That’s a cameo. That’s a one-liner. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll miss it, but if you do, it’s lovely. That’s what makes me think Hayley Atwell’s performance could be pushed outside of cameo tolerances.
Kyle Olson:
I would agree with that.
Pete Wright:
So.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, because if it had just been the World War II — the museum, the talking head — that’s one hundred percent a cameo. But then they cut to her in the bed. So it’s her now, catching up the time. That’s where I sort of — oh, this crosses over into just a small role, as opposed to what I would think of as a cameo.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s what I think. Although I still think the world, by and large, considers Hayley Atwell’s performance a cameo. I think maybe it’s not. It’s heavy cameo. Maybe cameo needs modifiers. Cameo Ultra.
Kyle Olson:
Maybe. Or maybe someone needs to figure out the mathematical formula for how long a person is on screen versus the running time of the movie, to be considered a cameo versus a small role.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. And I don’t know if I would want to fight with those Godfather people.
Kyle Olson:
I’m not the person to do that math.
Pete Wright:
Oh, man.
Kyle Olson:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I don’t want to go into that territory.
Kyle Olson:
I do not want to sleep with the fishes.
Pete Wright:
I know. We’ll not sleep with the fishes. But it is interesting. I think I would be on — I think I would be on the part that these maybe aren’t cameos. But now I’m not remembering their final scenes in Godfather II as clearly, so I don’t know that I can weigh in.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I’m trying to think — if that’s our category, in this movie, what would be considered a cameo? I guess Danny Pudi coming up. That’s a cameo.
Pete Wright:
Doesn’t he have multiple cutaways?
Kyle Olson:
That’s a one-scene — I guess we’ll find out. That’s a reason to stay subscribed. No, no, he comes later.
Pete Wright:
Haven’t we already seen him? We didn’t see him in the first —
Kyle Olson:
No, I’m saying, unless my memory is failing, he comes during the Triskelion, the big fight, Project Insight.
Pete Wright:
I thought he was in the control room when Pierce comes in and says, “we’re after Captain America.” He’s one of the people on the —
Kyle Olson:
No, I think that’s later. It is that control room, but it’s later, I think. Or if not, we’ve just spawned a whole thread of comments that we’ll talk about.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So get ready. Thank you, Steve J. Rogers.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That’s a great place to comment, in the Discord. You can get in there and just let us know — there’s a free tier, you can get into the Avengers Tower, you can comment in the free channels for Avengers. And if you become a member, you get access to the Triple Secret channel. There’s also a button on the website now, and you can comment there. We would love to have your comments about this film and the show. Kyle, thanks for driving today.
Kyle Olson:
Hey, I was happy to do it. These are some of my favorite minutes of the thing, so I’m happy to do it. And I love shouting out the stunt performers, who I don’t think get enough recognition — now we’re starting to. We’re even crossing the streams over to The Mandalorian. Pedro Pascal has been very clear about the fact that he is not the only person who is the Mandalorian. There are two other people who are just as important to the role as he is. I love seeing that kind of stuff. I love seeing the people, so whatever we can do to shout out and let those people know that we see their hard work and we appreciate it. In addition to all the other — and then the incredible sound team. This is why I like doing the show: to get that macro deep dive in and go, okay, whoever did that, whoever slaved away quietly in a soundproof area with giant headphones on to try and get that just right — your work was appreciated and necessary and noticed.
Pete Wright:
Yep, for sure. Thank you, everybody, for hanging out. But I gotta say, Kyle is doing a mad run on Make Me a Nerd with Mandy Kaplan, as yet another —
Kyle Olson:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We just released our Fantastic Prince episode. That was episode 100.
Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah. You and I got to talk about His Royal Badness.
Pete Wright:
His Royal Badness. That was super fun.
Kyle Olson:
That was a lot of fun.
Pete Wright:
And you’ve done Doctor Horrible coming up. What else is coming?
Kyle Olson:
That’s right, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
Pete Wright:
You keep being dragged back.
Kyle Olson:
I do. In the past, she’s wonderful to ask, and we’ve gotten to the point now where she has crossed that level of nerdom where she’s finding out about stuff and going, oh, what is that? Who can I talk to about that? And so this was a command performance. She said, I want to know about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. And so she invited the amazing Chrissy Lenz and myself to come on the show and talk about it. They got to dig deep into that fandom from way back when. I’d forgotten — when I watched it, I knew every word of every song. I was like, oh, it’s buried deep.
Pete Wright:
It’s amazing how quickly it comes back.
Kyle Olson:
Exactly. So that’ll be coming out pretty soon, so look out for that.
Pete Wright:
Links in the show notes. MakeMeANerd.com. MarvelMovieMinute.com — that’s where you can find out more about this show.
Kyle Olson:
Craft and Chaos.
Pete Wright:
Craft and Chaos.
Kyle Olson:
Fun.
Pete Wright:
Fun. We’re in a bit of a hiatus there, but that’s another place you can go see us. Anyway, there’s the whole universe of shows that we’re a part of over at TruStory FM. And we would love to have you wherever you may land.
Kyle Olson:
At what point do you think they tuned out during all of the promotional stuff? Like, do you think it was with —
Pete Wright:
I don’t know, man.
Kyle Olson:
—
Pete Wright:
Nobody’s here anymore. We can say whatever we want.
Kyle Olson:
Okay. Captain America: overrated?
Pete Wright:
I’m leaving the show now, Kyle. I’m done. I’m officially done.
Kyle Olson:
Well, in that case — enough said.
