i know this won't be the most popular opinion but i felt quite disappointed by captain america
winter soldier now i have my reasons before people jump down my throat i do have my reasons
um but i will say there are things about this film that i really like that i will talk about
this was released in 2014 this is obviously a sequel to captain america and this comes
however much time after the avengers so there won't be any spoilers in this for this film
i can't promise there won't be any spoilers for the other films there definitely will be a spoiler
for the first captain america um released in 2014 directed by anthony rosso and joe russo
and of course stars chris evans as steve rogers are captain america brilliant casting as always
samuel l jackson scott johansson kobe smulders hayley atwell great stuff across the board so
credit where credit is due that ticks the box other things i loved special effects sound
effects lighting makeup costume all of the technical aspects of cinema i thought worked
really well and i really enjoyed that and that is something that marvel does exceptionally well
the narrative is kind of where for me it falls a little short um i'll read the description from my
mdb and then i'm going to say why i haven't put this in my own words and this reads as follows
as steve rogers struggles to embrace his role in the modern world he teams up with a fellow
avenger and shield agent black widow to battle a new threat from history an assassin known as the
winter soldier i liked the reveal of the winter soldier i liked finding out who this person was
i think the character is quite interesting what i found about the narrative that didn't work for
me though is how confusing it is and this is something that i've always felt with marvel
i should point out if you're not aware of this i have i have watched i'm currently watching
every marvel film for the first time so i'm watching them in order this is as far as i've got
and what i've found with marvel is that the films are quite complicated because they're dealing
with a lot of jargon and the narratives are never that linear there's a lot of going back and forth
there are a lot of different characters there are a lot of kind of easter eggs as well maybe they're
not quite as hidden as easter eggs but a lot of references to other things from other films that
you will only pick up on if you've seen those films and that's usually the case with a marvel
film i do have to pay a lot of attention but i found more than ever that with winter soldier
this was a film made for the marvel fans now should a film be made for fans or made for
the general public art should be made for the artist when you are a million probably billion
dollar company trying to sell as many tickets as possible i feel like the films should be a
little bit i don't want to say a little bit easier to follow because i don't want them to dumb down
the narrative but i think they should bear in mind when they're explaining things or showing things
that not everybody has seen the previous films 100 times marvel fans are very die-hard marvel fans a
lot of the time and they retain the information much better i had to look up quite a few things
while watching this to be able to fully comprehend what was going on had i seen this in the cinema
i would have been lost and as i said i feel like this is the case with all marvel films the
deeper i've got into it the more complex things seem to become because they keep bringing in
new agencies and new people and then they're continuously referenced as the universe expands
but it kind of relies on you having fully absorbed every aspect of the previous films and the average
film goer is not going to do that the person who watches the film then spends a lot of time
being a fan reading about it talking to other people about it getting fully immersed in the
fandom fantastic but marvel shouldn't just make their films for those people i mean they can if
they want that's absolutely fine if they want to do that but you will alienate a lot of audience
and there are a lot of people who i know who don't watch marvel because of that very reason so did
i enjoy this i enjoyed the technical aspects i thought as a production it was beautiful to watch
as a narrative i thought some lessons in storytelling need to be delivered because
it doesn't explain things very well and not just because it's a sequel i don't just mean you need
prior knowledge for the first captain america film i loved i've seen that film twice thoroughly
loved it really found that very easy to follow it definitely was not a problem with that film
but with this one and how you know developments with shield from previous films
you need to be able to fully remember everything about every character and what they've done
and i didn't so i will say don't expect an easy comfortable journey not just because
it's action-packed it is action-packed the action is great but the narrative is really poor it's
very poorly delivered and that means that when the exciting things do happen and we're told a little
bit of information that's perhaps interesting or something about a character is revealed the kind
of big reveal the momentum is lost because you're kind of going okay well who is that should i know
who that person is rather than being flabbergasted that that's who that person is i hope that
makes sense so for me i found the narrative just so complicated and all over the place
that it's not they could have done a better job it's very very messy it's a very messy narrative
the dialogue is sometimes witty and i like that but when they're talking with all of
these acronyms they need to remember now i'm not saying that they suddenly stop and
go shield which stands for xyz and remember you met this in the last film but i think recapping
should be the case in everything every sequel has recapping moments to the previous films
this doesn't and i found that with previous films i find it really easy to follow with thor with the
thor sequel because i think it's quite separate it's a lot more mythological which is quite
separate to the rest of marvel but with iron man i found that with iron man 2 to particularly be the
case but iron man 3 i think explained things very well so maybe it just depends on who's writing it
and which marvel film it is or which character we're working with but for me the winter soldier
despite the fact that captain america is a film that i loved the sequel here kind of disappointed