CATWS critical
Jul. 12th, 2015 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkFor a long time, I've resisted talking about my problems with Captain America: The Winter Soldier in any public place with actual traffic, because (1) I did not want to deal with the numerous die-hard fans who would go "how dare you hate this brilliant masterpiece of a movie," and (2) while I criticize a lot of fiction, I'm not the type of douchebag who wants to purposely ruin other people's enjoyment of fiction. So I stayed quiet on Tumblr, and just griped once in a while over here, on my LJ.
But you know, I'm starting to become a devoted DCCU fan, and the ludicrous kind of hatred DC gets—merely for being different from Marvel, or because people who know a little bit about Superman are upset with what DC did with Superman—mainly from die-hard Marvel fans, it seems, is making me extremely bitter. So I'll come out and say it.
In my opinion, CATWS is overrated. It's nowhere near the level of perfection people always claim it is.
And here, IMO, are the major problems with CATWS:
- The fight scenes do not make much practical sense. The Winter Soldier is portrayed as superficially terrifying but he actually has a 0% success rate in the movie, in terms of killing the people he's supposed to.
- Along the same lines, there are MASSIVE civilian casualties in CATWS, yet the movie almost doesn't show any of them. (And I think it's stunningly hypocritical of Marvel fans to criticize Man of Steel for having too many civilian casualties, which you're at least shown and meant to feel bad about.)
- It is very different from the original Winter Soldier comic arc in certain ways, and personally I was tremendously disappointed by some of the changes they made to the source material. It's a problem, to me, that they decided to make Bucky even more victimized than he was in the comics, and his portrayal in CATWS has now become the dominant interpretation of his character.
- As some smart people on Tumblr have pointed out, CATWS has some troubling implications in terms of accountability. Essentially, five people decided to dump all of SHIELD's information on the internet—potentially causing harm to a number of SHIELD employees by publicly exposing them. Steve Rogers doesn't show up to the congressional hearing that's about the massive damage SHIELD has wreaked and the information dumped on the internet, which is a stunning display of disrespect for the government and the law. Natasha flips off the government's legitimate concern about SHIELD and Hydra by essentially saying "You can't hold us accountable because you need us."
- Steve makes it sound as though Fury has gone too far in trying to protect the world—but the distinction between Fury doing questionable things in the name of freedom and Steve doing questionable things in WWII in the name of freedom is fuzzy at best.
- And in any case, the initial promise of a movie that explores gray morality gets completely dropped when Hydra enters the picture. Because with Hydra, it's no longer a story about gray morality—it's about clearly delineated Good Guys and Bad Guys, the only problem is being able to tell who's who when the Bad Guys are masquerading as Good Guys (or have co-opted the Good Guys, as in the case of Bucky).
But you know, I'm starting to become a devoted DCCU fan, and the ludicrous kind of hatred DC gets—merely for being different from Marvel, or because people who know a little bit about Superman are upset with what DC did with Superman—mainly from die-hard Marvel fans, it seems, is making me extremely bitter. So I'll come out and say it.
In my opinion, CATWS is overrated. It's nowhere near the level of perfection people always claim it is.
And here, IMO, are the major problems with CATWS:
- The fight scenes do not make much practical sense. The Winter Soldier is portrayed as superficially terrifying but he actually has a 0% success rate in the movie, in terms of killing the people he's supposed to.
- Along the same lines, there are MASSIVE civilian casualties in CATWS, yet the movie almost doesn't show any of them. (And I think it's stunningly hypocritical of Marvel fans to criticize Man of Steel for having too many civilian casualties, which you're at least shown and meant to feel bad about.)
- It is very different from the original Winter Soldier comic arc in certain ways, and personally I was tremendously disappointed by some of the changes they made to the source material. It's a problem, to me, that they decided to make Bucky even more victimized than he was in the comics, and his portrayal in CATWS has now become the dominant interpretation of his character.
- As some smart people on Tumblr have pointed out, CATWS has some troubling implications in terms of accountability. Essentially, five people decided to dump all of SHIELD's information on the internet—potentially causing harm to a number of SHIELD employees by publicly exposing them. Steve Rogers doesn't show up to the congressional hearing that's about the massive damage SHIELD has wreaked and the information dumped on the internet, which is a stunning display of disrespect for the government and the law. Natasha flips off the government's legitimate concern about SHIELD and Hydra by essentially saying "You can't hold us accountable because you need us."
- Steve makes it sound as though Fury has gone too far in trying to protect the world—but the distinction between Fury doing questionable things in the name of freedom and Steve doing questionable things in WWII in the name of freedom is fuzzy at best.
- And in any case, the initial promise of a movie that explores gray morality gets completely dropped when Hydra enters the picture. Because with Hydra, it's no longer a story about gray morality—it's about clearly delineated Good Guys and Bad Guys, the only problem is being able to tell who's who when the Bad Guys are masquerading as Good Guys (or have co-opted the Good Guys, as in the case of Bucky).
