Counter Culture

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger. It stars Chris Evans as Steve Rogers (Captain America), Scarlet Johansson as Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, and Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes (The Winter Soldier). This sequel takes up from where the previous film left off. Steve Rogers, in the previous film, crashed into the Arctic and and he ends up being frozen and asleep for nearly 70 years before being found by SHIELD (an organisation). The character of Nick Fury has more screen time in this sequel, and I think rightly so, as he adds a lot to the film. For similar reasons, I believe Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow was added to the mix to make the film more appealing, especially after the success of Avengers Assemble (also featuring Johansson as Black Widow).

Interestingly, the UFC’s George St Pierre appears early on in the film as Georges Batroc . He has an interesting fight with Captain America. I was a little confused by this as Captain America is actually superhuman and would normally dispatch any foe who isn’t also similarly enhanced in some way. Nonetheless, it was enjoyable to see one of the best martial artists in the world (St Pierre) in a well choreographed fight scene in a big Hollywood movie. This trend of seeing big name mixed martial artists in films, I think, is set to continue.

There’s great use of Captain America’s shield as a weapon. He hits people with it (of course), uses it to deflect a great many bullets, and most fun of all, for me, is when he throws it and it ricochets off of objects in amusing and helpful ways. One has to, of course, suspend disbelief during these kinds of fun scenes.

The film’s main antagonist is the Winter Soldier, who has a metal arm, and also seems to have super strength although it may just all be in down to his metal arm – it’s hard to tell. He too is from the same time period as Captain America, and similarly, he has been frozen in order to be preserved and then resurrected in the present to do various missions and defeat Captain America. There is a slight twist to it all and it involves mind control and advanced secret technology much like the first film but I won’t give it away.