Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2014, Paramount. Directed by Anton and Joe Russo. Starring Chris Evans, Scarlet Johannsson, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Redford.

Super serious hero films where everything is dark and gritty and apparently shot with a Nokia 360 torch are now officially out of fashion. Thank God.  Did anyone really feel the need to explore Batman’s psyche when really we wanted the see him Batmanning about the place like a rich man with time on his hands? Was it truly necessary to witness the rise of Superman in agonisingly dull detail, only for him to simply murder someone? 

If Hollywood had a naughty step for bad movies, these two would still be sat on it.

Hell no, the public cried, and as collective we fed the Marvel machine, giving money hand over fist to bright, cheerful films about improbable people doing fun things. Massive blockbusters should be like this – you’ll hear no complaints about the Thor franchise from me – but in the bright lights of these new franchises spawning across The Avengers universe, Captain America: Winter Soldier works as a cautionary tale of where these fun superhero films might begin to fail.

And it’s not because of his stupid helmet, even though it is incredibly stupid.

It goes something like this: Cappy discovers that SHIELD, the shadowy, secretive organisation that hosts secret operations within secret operations, might not be that moral. Using pre-emptive blanket security measures, SHIELD is now apparently the NSA with knobs on, with Robert Redford lending a veneer of 70s conspiracy to a modern story of security over personal liberty. The problem is, unfortunately, that Captain America himself is just too dull to handle this kind of intrigue.

Try, if you can, to separate the old school Hollywood, infinitely charming and delightfully hench Chris Evans from his character. Cappy is a 1940s piece of propaganda who fought Nazis that spoke with comedy German accents, and he’s not been allowed room to adapt his worldview to that of the 21^st century. He’s always good and always makes the right choice, which is perfect for guiding a country through a global conflict, but not that interesting when you’re watching a film about the grey area between protection and freedom. Though Chris Evans tries to play within these boundaries, he’s given very little to work with and the seeds of development scattered throughout the film are never allowed to grow. Cappy’s fears that he’s an inadequate leader in a modern world? Dropped. His worries that he’ll spend life alone? Goes nowhere. Bouncing from one set piece to another, Cappy doesn’t have what you might call a story arc and this film is crying out for just a tablespoonful of the dreary character moments which made Man of Steel so long winded. There is a middle ground between pretention and nonsense, and Winter Soldier didn’t find it.

Or it may have done – it’s hard to tell since the story is strangely incoherent. The best example of this is that the Winter Soldier doesn’t make an appearance until about 45 minutes in. Casting back to The Dark Knight (and my loathing of Rises is directly inverted to my love of this film) it was abundantly clear that the Joker would be the head villain in a story of mob warfare and police overreach because he’s introduced in the first 5 minutes of the movie. You knew that Batman and the Joker’s story would take precedence because the Joker had a badass entrance and a cool soundtrack, and you discovered everything you needed to know about him through his actions, not because someone sat Batman down and gave a chronological history of his skills and experience.

 

Fun fact: the academic name for a villain is the Agent of Destruction, and 

as far as I know that isn't already a registered character name.

You would be forgiven for thinking that Captain America: The Winter Soldier would have a similar arc, since their names are right up there in the title. Nope – the Winter Soldier comes in, blows up a car and breezes out, leaving Scarlet Johannsson to tell everyone who he is and what his ideal date would be. It pushes it over the edge of silliness to incompetence and it’s frustrating to see this much talent go to waste.

On the positive side, Evans and Johannsson are as watchable as they are impossibly beautiful, the action is well paced and it does have a lot of humour about itself (Cappy’s list of things to do is quite funny) and there were even moments which were quite moving (Steve Rogers talking to ‘his best girl’ had me reaching for a hanky) but it’s nowhere near the standards that Marvel has set for itself. There was too much going on and not enough of it about the two title characters; too many explorations into a character’s mind makes a film unwatchable, too little makes our heroes unknowable. Come on guys, this should be easy by now.  

 

Escape from Planet Earth (otherwise known as ET Gave Us WiFi)

Escape from Planet Earth, 2014, Rainmaker Entertainment. Directed by Cal Brunker. Starring Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rob Corddry.

So I’m going to break some rules and talk about a film I’ve not seen and have no intention of watching anytime soon, Escape from Planet Earth. Apparently it’s okay, a bit of fun on a Saturday for you and various small people you have lying around, but there’s something about the trailer that annoyed me. It’s around 1.40 in:

If you can’t be bothered watching it (understandable) one scrappy alien says to the other scrappy alien, ‘Who do you think invented the internet? Cell phones? Social networking? We did! You think humans could build this stuff? I don’t think so!’

Since I first saw this trailer I couldn’t put my finger on why this line bothered me so much; not to the point of sleepless nights and cold sweats, but certainly to the point of eye rolling and consternated humming. ‘Human’s are too dumb to invent stuff, it must have been aliens’ isn’t a new joke by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s been used in Men in Black, Paul  and even Independence Day (remember how it made almost no sense that a computer virus could destroy an entire alien fleet? It turns out that in a deleted scene, all computers came from the alien ship that was found in Area 51, so take that, logic fans!) TVTropes call this ET Gave Us WiFi and in previous examples, it’s been a fun little aside and an acknowledgment that humankind isn’t the apex of civilisation in the universe. So why did it irritate me when a silly kid’s film did it?  

There’s something about Escape from Planet Earth that seems too cynical to pull this joke off with any real warmth or affection, and I think it might have something to do with the way it’s being told. It’s not just a funny throw away gag, it’s the entire plot and the reason why the aliens want to escape – they’re being forced to create things for human. So there’s part of the fun sucked out (slave labour isn’t normally a rich field for comedy) but the other part is the Neo-Luddism undertones of the film, declaring all technology must be alien made and therefore untrustworthy. Writer and director Cal Brunker picked the internet as something that human’s couldn’t have created because we’re too stupid to have conceived of it. Ignoring the fact that it’s common knowledge that it was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee working with CERN, it’s interesting that the web was only invented 25 years ago, and yet it’s become such an integral part of modern human life it’s impossible to imagine a world without it. So impossible in fact, that it’s difficult to see how someone could be clever enough to invent the internet without using the internet. 

Tim Berners-Lee is like Prometheus, but instead of stealing fire from the gods, he made the fire

 using his own mind and gave it to the world for free. Apparently he makes a really nice cup of tea too. 

Rather than comprehend how a human being who probably bites the inside of his cheek every so often could achieve such a thing, it is easier to disassociate oneself from the marvel of the modern age and flippantly dismiss everyone who was involved in these inventions as extraterrestrial and weird. It’s as though the creators of the film thought, ‘I don’t know how to make and internet, you don’t know how to make an internet, even Steve from HR doesn’t know how to make an internet – it must be some bizarre alien space magic!’

But Steve can barely dress himself, so I wouldn’t trust him 

with coding the Super Info Highway just yet

The trouble with this attitude (and basing an entire film around it) is that it makes creating wonderful things seem unattainable for human minds. People like Berners-Lee are placed high up on pedestals, so far out of reach that for all we know, they may as well be aliens. But it’s important to remember that he didn’t wake up one morning and invent the web; it took years and years of hard work and creativity to just get to Oxford – more work and effort after that to get to CERN.  Berners-Lee is a remarkable human being, but a human being nonetheless. The same is true for all inventors throughout history, including the Egyptians who built the pyramids. Remember this guy?

Hey look! It's that guy who's a joke to his friends
 and a shame to his profession!

He’s famous because he said aliens built the pyramids. Not civil engineers, not royal architects, aliens. And this was broadcast on the History Channel too! 

 

My point is that turning human progress into something that is given to us for free by aliens is a troubling, because it dehumanises the wonderful inventors of the past and present and impedes potential inventors of the future by telling them that they can’t be like these guys, these guys were probably brought up in pods somewhere outside of San Francisco (even the Ancient Egyptians). Well I say nuts and boo to this and the cynical idea that all people are as thick and unimaginative as aliens man up there. We need our inventors to be as human as possible to show ourselves that maybe, with enough hard work, intelligence and creativity, we could create something wonderful too. Am I reading too much into Escape from Planet Earth? Probably, but I'm still not going to watch it.