SHIELD and the Winter Soldier

The title of this is correct and a correction for part of what Marvel Studios did wrong, this was much bigger than just a Captain America film, it took in so much more of Fury, SHIELD and beyond.

This is where they should have already begun the television series, Agents of SHIELD, so that it could tie directly into this film and the rest of the MCU.

The film begins with Steve Rogers, literally running circles around Sam Wilson (The Falcon) at the Capitol Plaza in DC.  Each time Steve passes Sam he says, "on your left", which remains an ongoing line between the two to the end of Endgame.  It begins a bond that doesn't begin to touch the one they had in the comics, and should have already happened and been expanded, but I digress...

Widow picks up Cap for a mission, rescuing hostages onboard a ship that isn't where it should be, with Batroc the Leaper as the primary villain in the ships capture, a formidable matchup with Cap and they have a great fight scene.  Meanwhile Widow has her own mission, obtaining data the ship was carrying and we start to get hints that all isn't well in SHIELD.  

If you've followed the MCU and Agents of SHIELD, you know where this goes, Cap, Widow, Fury & Falcon take down most of Hydra and SHIELD as well, but Coulson and others carry on SHIELD's fight in the series.

One of the most interesting parts of the film is when Doctor Zola (Toby Jones) reappears as a living computer, who tells Cap & Widow how Hydra survived and grew inside SHIELD.  With the way computers can transfer data, we have to wonder if Zola is really gone, or will he pop up on another computer screen someday?

Of course the great spin/twist in this one is that Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is still alive and going by The Winter Soldier for the last 30-sum years as an assassin for hire, only the most important of targets.  He does an excellent job setting up and showing us who the character has become, the reprogramming scene is pretty intense, even one of the worst of the Hydra guys seems to almost feel sorry for him.

Nick Fury is killed, sorta, then comes back, and it must have been right after this that he went off world and was replaced by a skrull, went out for some intergalactic R&R I suppose, he'd earned it.

Like a lot of films that hit this order of an ongoing story, one has to ask, where was Iron Man and the others?  When all hell breaks loose in the nations capital, why don't other heroes come running?

Overall it's a pretty good film and finally brings Falcon into the MCU, but it was still to use this as a Captain America film.  Chris Evans needs to just accept his fate, he IS Captain America and should be willing to come back for whatever the MCU needs.

There is a lot more to this story, parts of it mirror real life, with a twist, but the writing is pretty obvious about it, I'll talk about it somewhere else, but not this page.

.... on your left! 😉