Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)


Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writers:    Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Cast:         Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford


As Steve Rogers struggles to embrace his role in the modern world, he teams up with another super soldier, the black widow, to battle a new threat from old history; an assassin known as winter soldier.

Am not really familiar with Captain America character and the Marvel universe. I decided to watch this since it got good reviews last year along with X-Men DoFP  and I found the latter to be really great. I didn't even know the actor who was playing the Captain America role and it seems he was the guy who played the lead in 'Snowpiercer'. I found the character Captain America to be really boring and the entire films was a turgid watch. The interactions between the main characters are really forced because of the clunky script and there is no real chemistry between any of them. Expositions are laughably bad. The basic premise of the film was interesting in the post 9-11 homeland security/patriot act US since the conflict in the film is between freedom and security. I have always found modern Utopian kind of future as depicted in films from these days, where you are already aware about the capabilities of CGI, to be quite uninteresting. It was interesting when they did it in Bladerunner where non-CGIed modernity is juxtaposed with Dystopia. But in films like this you get bored pretty quickly with it. I was also not familiar with the previous work from the directors and that is always a bad sign. The directors who have made some worthy films in this area are the ones who have come through independent film background with some strong films: like Bryan Singer (Usual Suspects), Gareth Edwards (Monsters), Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), Doug Liman (Swingers) and Christopher Nolan (Memento). You really need some strong heads to actually have some gravitas to stand their ground against the studio heads. On the other hand studios prefer novice directors since they can have a control over them. In this film I guess it has been the latter case and it shows in the film.

Overall it is a turgid watch and I really don't know how it got such good reviews. I must be really missing something. I haven't watched the first film in this franchise but I don't think it would have changed anything even if I caught up with that. The only saving grace in the film is some of the action sequences which is interesting basically because it is very physical in nature instead of being a CGI shitfest.

Rating: 1.5/5  
                                                                              

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