Revisiting the Winter Soldier

Ivy isn't going to like hearing me disparage her country.

My wife and I decided to rewatch Captain America: The Winter Soldier on Monday night. Life has been busy but I wrote down these notes right after the movie after a series of epiphanies and hopefully I can publish this post tonight - but if I'm honest with myself it will be likely tomorrow. It's 9:09 pm already and I'm still in line to get some books signed by Cory Doctorow (!) after a phenomenal talk promoting his latest novel - although I somewhat suspect the book is a pretext for him to preach his ideas to his conclave of likeminded folks - so I think that even if I just get the rough draft written now and have this published tomorrow (I do sometimes hae drafts instead of hitting publish immediately you know) that is still enough for me.

Oh hey look at that it's 10:03pm. It's time for me to stop rambling and to get to the meat of what I wanted to talk about.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a movie that I absolutely loved when I watched it back in theatres in 2014. I liked it so much that I went to go see it AGAIN in theatres, back when I was still in my final year of university. I've seen it two or three times since then, but I don't think that I've rewatched it since Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019. That means that it's been at least 6 years since the last time I saw it, and with the release of Captain America: Brave New World I figured that it was well past time for me to watch it again and see if it still holds up. Was it really as thrilling, action-packed, character driven, and thought-provoking as it was as when I was supposed to be studying for my finals?

It was. It was also so much more politically charged than I had picked up before. I honestly don't think that this movie could have been produced today, in 2025, in today's American political climate.

The new Captain America - Sam Wilson's Falcon - is very different from Steve Rogers. Rogers and Wilson both signed up to help their country, but while Rogers was defined by his spurning attempts to be wielded as a political weapon Wilson is an extension of American political and military power. In Brave New World Wilson responds to the beck and call of the President of the United States, involving himself in geopolitical tensions for control of rare minerals and standing by the President even if he didn't agree with him. This is in contrast to The Winter Soldier where from the very beginning - before the reveal that SHIELD has been the new form of HYDRA - Rogers rebukes Fury for building a mass-surveillance system and is strongly entertaining walking away from it all (which he later does in Civil War, but that's another discussion).

In Winter Soldier America as it is is another bureaucratic system that threatens people - both citizens within and people without - in the name of "protection", "safety", and "stability". Rogers' Captain America rejects his namesake country and acts on helping people live free and fulfilling lives. Wilson's Captain America goes along with the plans, even when it's for resources out in the Indian Ocean where the USA doesn't have any conceivable actual geographical claim to, aside from the fact that control of said resources would give the country more leverage to wield against friend and foe alike. Rogers' movie would not be made in 2025 because it would be considered too un-American for rebuking America's hand in shaping the world.

Even the title The Winter Soldier is telling of this. When I first watched the movie I thought that it was likely an anti-soviet title, because the titular character - Bucky Barnes - was a black ops assassin that was killing prominant American heroes like JFK and Harold Stark. However, Barnes was being wielded as a tool of the American security apparatus, ordered by the Secretary of Defence to eliminate targets. The term "Winter Soldier" is a reference to the 1971 anti-Vietnam war protests where American war crimes and atrocities were revealed. Bucky Barnes is the Winter Soldier because for the last 70 years he has been committing assassinations for the American security/imperial complex.

Other notes:

The plot is that the American political and institutional system has been systematically taken over from within by facists and Nazis. In 2025 the Nazi-takeover of the GOP and the House, Senate, courts, and Presidency is complete.
When Fury is initially attacked, he isn't suspicious because he thinks that it's just white cops giving a black guy a hard time again. This is something that I only realized after the BLM movement stemming from the George Floyd protests of the early 2020s. I doubt Disney would want to draw attention to racial relations with the police force in this day and age.
The movie's heroes spend a lot of time discussing how they resent being tools for the system, and how the army and government has discarded them after they want out. The opening scenes has Rogers lamenting being Fury's cleaner, and Wilson and Rogers have a conversation about walking away from it all in order to support those who truly need it. Wilson works as a counselor for the Veteran's Association to help those that the government has used up and discarded.
Other countries, when offered to be a part of Project Insight, turn down the opportunity not because of a moral high ground but because they don't want to be subservient to American Imperialist "protection". Since then the American administatration has been caught discussing quid pro quo agreements to help out allies like Ukraine while also discussing invading neighbours such as Canada or Greenland.
Imagery of air vehicles crashing into a multi-tower complex equivalent of the Pentagon (a 9/11 two for one!). This would likely be too unpatriotic now.
The surveillance/security apparatus of SHIELD is ultimately dismantled by the Black Widow pulling an Snowden and revealing all of the American war machine atrocities to the public domain. Today oligarchs tightly control means of disseminating news and launch spurious lawsuits to keep activists quit. Disney's oligarchs wouldn't want to deal with pressure from the oligarchs running the country.

10:41pm. That's not bad for a write-up.