I completely agree with your comments about the twist ruining the themes of the film. As for the plot holes, I know you're restricted to 400 words, but ca you please elaborate in the comments here? I'd be interested to find out some.
1: three aircraft carriers cannot conquer the world, no matter how awesome they are (and they were FUCKAWESOME). 2: America, despite what rednecks may think, is not the de facto political power. They do not run the world, and would be stopped quickly by various foreign militaries the moment those heavily armed flying battleship/aircraft carriers left American borders. 3: the belly mounted guns, designed to destroy any threats to a regime change, are too big for pinpoint killing in crowds. Say goodbye to the street and house they're on. 4: BLOWING UP THE WHITEHOUSE AND THE PENTAGON IS A FUCKING RETARDED MOVE AND WILL NOT MAKE THE WORLD FALL IN LINE LET ALONE AMERICA! 5: The bad guys list the recent terrorist attacks and evil throughout the world as reasons why they should take over, but before the big monologue that the bad guys claimed responsibility for more than half of the problems. 6: I don't care how big your underground bunker is, a square kilometre of Betamax tapes from 1960 does not have the capacity to hold a human mind. 7: YOU CAN"T INFERFACE DIGITAL AND ANALOG TECHNOLOGY JUST BY PLUGGING IT IN. 8: Three stolen next gen helicarriers are not a match for the US air force. 9: the US air force, marines, army, and navy do exist, and they react very poorly when a UN organization decides to open fire on crowds. 10: The amount of shit that is pulled never hits youtube on crappy phones including: cop chases through DC business districts with use of military hardware and non standard issue weapons, running gun battles with guys with clear non-American wanted-terrorist incography alongside American and UN forces,and civilians being fired upon by aforementioned American and UN forces alongside said terrorist. 11: No one noticed or cared about cops violating police procedure to turn a car into mince meat in a public street when it was stated that no cops were even there according to police networks. 12: A great American hero is declared to be a traitor with a pathetic nonsensical reason given and everyone goes with it. 13: Bad guys in SHIELD uniform do whatever they want in violation of international law and civil rights and no one gives a shit, including actual SHIELD operatives. 14: A single commando has the authority and capacity to override an entire launch bay from the tactical control room of another department. 15: No one cares about unauthorized UN operations on American soil. 16: No one shat themselves when a UN organization fired a long range cruise missile on an American city (that military base was in city limits). 17: Another organization was able to gut another without anyone catching on, all starting from a single man known to be a former Nazi scientist and current Nazi supporter.
^ I feel so stupid for missing all of those. But now they you've got me thinking here's another one: once those helicarriers got in the air and started killing everyone, who's to say that they wouldn't run out of ammunition? Granted, the people launching them were pretty confident they would wipe out all potential resistance, but opposition to the helicarriers would probably increase exponentially after they essentially commit political genocide (killing of those with different political beliefs).
You should check out the Cinema Sins YouTube channel. They just love to pick out all that stuff.
And this isn't a plot hole, just something to think about: did the climax of the film seem eerily similar to the final mission of Saints Row III to you? I'm not saying The Winter Soldier ripped it off, but let's look at the similarities. You A) have a battle involving one or more flying aircraft carriers B) that are owned and operated by paramilitary organizations C) headed or manipulated by people whose idea of order is discovered to be/comes to be massacres of those who oppose them D) that takes place in a city and E) is the climax of your story.
I know there are a lot of differences (such as SHIELD being more secret and STAG being more public) and the head of STAG getting carried away with his ideals versus the leadership of SHIELD being infiltrated by Nazis, but you do have to admit that's an oddly specific idea to have occured independently to two different people.
See the SR mission here if you want to see it for yourself:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DroqCnJRvG0
Let me try answering those "plotholes".
1. Three aircraft carriers that can kill 20 million people at a time can definitely be used as a vessel to take over the world. 2. America's one of two confirmed superpowers. 3. It wouldn't work EXACTLY as intended, but it would still complete its purpose (although, how DOES it pinpoint 20 million people at a time when there's no guarantee that all of these people have anything that the identification system can pick up on?) 4. I didn't notice that part. Please explain. 5. I think they're Machiavellian philosophers. 6. Schizo Tech. Point there. 7. Is this referring to the fact that there was a USB port in a room that hasn't been used since the 70s? If so, point there. 8. How about helicarriers with world class ammunition on PE Ds? I'm not sure if the government knew exactly what these helicarriers would be used for, and I don't think they would have been told. 9. Did I see this point already? 10. Either that or they don't devote any focus on that in favor of the plot. I guess it's a subjective thing to want to see the external ramifications of happenings in the plot (I like seeing that too in certain plots), but I don't think a plot like this can bother focusing on extras talking about something that we just saw unless such reporting is actually necessary for the plot. 11. Oh, I think the people in that area noticed cops doing the exact opposite of one of the things that they're trying to prevent. This ties in with #10. 12. Kind of like how you don't question terrorist or bomb threats. You don't have the time. 13. Because HYDRA already corrupted SHIELD to that point, but until the climax, the corruption wasn't out in the open so nobody really noticed. 14. Meh? I don't think it's so far out left field for him to be knowledgeable of hacking. 15. Expain? 16. Point taken; we should have seen people reacting to that. Maybe. But wait, the UN shot that missile? 17. What?
The USB port was clearly a later addition.
This is turning into a discussion, so I'm not going to answer any more after this. Shield is a UN organization in the comics, the carriers were targeting the pentagon and the whitehouse, and the guy who was in those Betamax tapes (a known nazi scientist and supporter) said that he was able to corrupt SHIELD from within,.
What does it mean when a review has been flagged? This one is.
It means someone thinks there's inappropriate content, either in the review or in the comments.
Or possibly someone thought this was such a troll opinion review, that they reported it
I'm not saying it is, but that could be another reason why it happened
I don't think this a troll review, but I do think that being disappointed by a 12A comic book movie because it was lacking complex political themes is akin to being disappointed by a video game because it didn't taste very nice.
I don't think that's a fair thing to say. This film was trying to include some level of complex political themes, it was deliberately placing itself in a genre famous for complex political themes and it was deliberately referencing films with complex political themes.
At some point 'it's a comic book movie' starts becoming an excuse.
Btw I'm not commenting on whether I believe Cap 2 was successful with it's themes or not. I'm just saying it's totally a valid area for criticism. Personally I think the super villain thing was stupid but I don't think the wider Hydra part really undermined what it was doing.
The important thing is that Cap's criticisms weren't based on the prospect of Nazis but that a system like that is exploitable and open to corruption. The fact that in the end the source of corruption was extreme to the point of possible ludicrousness doesn't take away from the idea, that yes something could go wrong and no-one would know about it. I don't think Steve rejected Fury's middle ground on the basis of Nazis but because he'd decided the moral dangers of an organisation like Shield were an unnecessary compromise
Sorry for the third comment spam, but it's worth mentioning that I'm also a massive hypocrite. With Frozen I hated the twist because I thought taking a reasonable caution and then making it have an absurdly extreme outcome totally undermined the original message. Human brains are weird like that
Your brain must be the opposite of mine. As seen in my review, I disliked the Evil All Along reveals in this film because it felt at contrast with their previous personality, but didn't mind Frozen's because the villain was actually shown to be a good actor in-universe.
Though on the topic of morality in this film, I think part of its message is that there's a point where gray areas become black, whether one likes it or not. Pierce thought he was doing good but in reality was creating a dystopia. Fury thought he was doing good but then discovered he was just furthering an evil plan. At some point you can't keep claiming evil for the sake of good if you just keep creating more evil than good.
And on the topic of "Nazis" being involved, part of the danger of history is that we assume it's all in the past and won't happen again. That's why Germany teaches its citizens so hard about the dangers of fascism, because they know it's easy to fall back into it if we're careless. Likewise HYDRA's reveal is a shock that the world really hasn't changed and that we still need to keep our eyes out for the beginnings of dictatorships, because history repeats and people who assume it's all done for now will repeat the same errors.
That's a point which films need to make more often. It doesn't quite come off here because it's not Nazis, but NAZIS! so the aspects that were evil in real life are played down in favour of supervillain hiijinks
Oh man thanks for pointing out how dumb this movie is. I'm not just saying this as a nitpicker but this movie was supposed to be about the intelligence services and the premise is destroyed by such stupidity.
A wish is never free.
I thought at first that the twist ruined, or at least severely hampered, the complexity of the security vs freedom/privacy debate... but then I had a second thought about it.
The theme of the film is really the counter to the implicit assumption of the security vs freedom debate, the assumption being "The people subverting our security are well intentioned extremists that are trying to protect us". Fury is certainly in that camp... but that assumption runs headlong into "Are we sure the people in power are looking out for our best interests?"
Lets be honest here: There's plenty of instances of people granted this power that end up abusing it. NSA agents spying on romantic interests, politicians outing American spies for political reasons, the office of the Presidency being used to shield political agents from investigation... those are all things that have happened in our world.
The debate, in the end, feels less like whether or not we need to sacrifice freedom for the sake of security, but instead that we can't afford to sacrifice these freedoms... because someone will come up and take advantage of it.
The film probably didn't sell that message well enough, but it did seem to be there, at least.
Yeah I'd agree with that in some ways. I think the idea is 'How does anyone know whether the intelligence services are trustworthy or not?'. So the idea isn't so much that Hydra might be infiltrating them, but the point that we don't know who these people are. We have so little effective regulation that these people could be frigging Nazis and we wouldn't find out. They're 100% certainly not, but then the Secret Services chief in Britain's statement of 'We're good people, you can trust us, isn't how it works either.'
It's not that our secret services might be staffed by supervillains, it's the idea that if they were, would we find out about it?
And there are plenty of times and examples of cases where the secret services have gone bad. The Dreyfuss affair was an incident in France where the entire military intelligence wing found themselves in a massive conspiracy to destroy people's lives who tried to let others know that they were corrupt, simply because one anti-semite had let personal motivation affect his job at one point.
We had all that lovely red scare hunting in the US. We had people assuring us that their checks and balances were working correctly and the public didn't need more information, but as soon as more information about the NSA leaked suddenly it was required to have a serious think about the way people were operating.
I find it rather ridiculous to think that the entire concept is ruined by the fact the villains are a subset of a Nazi organization. They don't even resemble Nazis or Neo-Nazis in any way. Only one member of the entire organization is confirmed as having been an actual Nazi (Arnim Zola), and literally everyone else we see was recruited afterwards from normal american people.
Even their ethos isn't Nazi or Neo-Nazi. It's Neo-Fascist (as they have absolutely none of the racial elements or germanic nationalism), which plenty of people openly follow not only in the United States but in the entire world.
Literally the only Nazi connection they have is that they were founded by a Nazi and retain a Nazi-esque greeting ("Hail Hydra"). It's very shallow to say "they're all nazis lol" because of that.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
"this review has been flagged"
Revealing that Hydra was the major antagonist did annoy me, I'll admit. I'm more forgiving of it when I consider how the United States has, occasionally, helped to create and perpetuate its own worst enemies. A lot of Nazi ideology, for example, came out of the United States' eugenics "research." Or there's the support of the Mujahideen which, given what happened with Osama Bin Laden doesn't really need to be elaborated upon. And nations in South America certainly paid the price for a lot of the US's Cold War strategy when dictators were installed. It's sad but true. Hydra wasn't very well incorporated into the film, but it didn't ruin it wholesale for me either when I consider the aforementioned aspects.
@Red: You don't even need to look that far for real-world parallels. The film mentioned that Zola was brought aboard the infant SHIELD organization as part of Operation Paperclip, which was a real thing that happened after WWII.
@Wryte
Good point! I completely forgot that they brought that up in the film itself. I will say that I personally would have liked for the antagonists to stem from extremists in SHIELD itself rather than solely from ties to HYDRA. But at the same time I don't agree with this reviewer's characterization of the antagonists "IT'S NAZI WANNABES" for the reason you mentioned.
I personally would have liked for the antagonists to stem from extremists in SHIELD itself
...uh, then you got what you wanted? Hydra as it exists in the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is an extremist faction of SHIELD. Remember, Hydra didn't build the helicarriers. SHIELD did. Hydra didn't give them the ability to access people's private information for profiling purposes. SHIELD did. Hydra was going to use that knowledge and firepower to preemptively eliminate threats to societal order, but so was SHIELD. Nick Fury himself was on board with this plan. The only difference between Hydra and SHIELD was that Hydra cast a much wider net on who they considered threats to society, which is why Cap decided SHIELD had to go. Not just because Hydra had compromised it, but because SHIELD itself, for all its good intentions, was only a couple steps away from being Hydra anyway.
What matters in this life is much more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too. - F. Rogers.
Probably massively late to this party, but just putting in my two cents about the plot holes listed above:
1: How would you know? Helicarriers aren't a thing in real life, so their exact scale of power is limited by what is shown. And, what is shown, is that they're supposedly capable of taking out a few million people a minute.
2: They can try, but it'd be pretty hard if they're shooting down the people in place who could stop them. Again, as there's nothing in the real world that compares to them, we don't know how well other countries would deal with them.
3: Doesn't matter if its accurate, so long as it kills them. They probably don't care about collateral damage.
4: Why wouldn't it? Doing so would cripple the US military and political power, while people on the streets would be too busy trying to avoid being shot by the giant helicarriers to do anything to stop it.
5: I think you misunderstood what happened. They're not trying to take over because the world's a mess, they're trying to take over because they think the world will become a mess, and to show it, they created a mess. Its a False Flag Operation, that's the point.
6: You also can't power a high tech suit of armour using a tiny little battery in your chest, especially when said battery makes no sense from a scientific perspective. Its called Willing Suspension of Disbelief. On top of that, this is a world where they had laser weapons during WW2; Zola was kinda smart for his time.
7: You can when the tech is designed by the guy who gave the Nazis Friggin Laser Beams. Zola. Is. Smarter. Than. Real. World. Scientists.
8: You sure about that? Those things were designed to kill a lot of people; given they had weapons on top as well, they're probably designed to counter air force attacks.
9: Said UN organisation is apparently a lot bigger than them and has bigger toys, and their first attack is to take out the political infrastructure of the US; there wouldn't be anyone to give the orders to those divisions. On top of that, a large bulk of that military power is overseas; by the time they know about the attack happening, it'd already be too late.
10: Who says it didn't? Just because we didn't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
11: People very clearly did, they were all running away or trying to escape when the gunfire came towards them. It also happened really fast, so they wouldn't have had time to do anything other than run and scream.
12: No they didn't; SHIELD staff went along with it because those are their orders, and they were clearly not OK with it.
13: Yeah, people do give a shit. There's not a huge list of examples of them doing it, and they clearly avoid doing it when they see news choppers watching them because they know people give a shit about this. At this point you're just repeating yourself.
14: That never happened. The launch began after Rumlow typed in the order during the shootout in said control room. No commando overrided anyone.
15: Just because we're not shown it doesn't mean people didn't care. The focus isn't on the US public, its on a small number of people trying to stop a conspiracy.
16: See above. Just because we don't see the public reaction doesn't mean their was none. Not to mention, this assumes that SHIELD didn't manage to paint it as a justified move.
17: Zola was clearly not the only one doing so. There was other scientists as part of Project Paperclip, as in real life, and the Russians also did the same (its apparently how Winter Soldier was made). Remember SHIELD started off small and grew, and the infiltration started off from when it was first founded, and as such grew with it. On top of that, given how the Algorithm works, its very likely that it also works as a way to find new recruits.
So, not plotholes, nitpicks. You can nitpick any film, just remember that.
Words, words, words....
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Complete And Utter Dross
In the opening, this film tries so hard to be an edgy political commentary about security vs peace. The expectations I got was a clandestine civil war amongst SHILED as a more militant arm tried to take over from Nick Fury, to create a more aggressive and forceful SHEIELD. This was something interesting, and I got excited about the possibility of a sort of story where it's revealed that just because someone is against you doesn't mean he's evil. It was going to be, as far as I could tell, a sort of subtle film where good and evil got muddied up and Captain America had to try to decide between his mre peaceful methods, or more violent ones.
Nick Fury is not completely honest, and idealistic Captain America calls him out, but Fury responds with good, valid arguments! Intrigue within SHIELD which could mean a coup and the emergence of a more military SHIELD! Mysterious villains whose identities are unknown, who could be night Templars trying to create what they think is a better security agency! Assassination attempt on Fury by mysterious assassins posing as cops suggesting so much!
Then we got halfway though and WHOOPS! SORRY! IT'S NAZI WANNABES!
Any complexity went out the window, any political commentary went out the window and dear lord above did it get bad FAST. From cookie cutter bad guys with the complexity of a brick to action scenes that look as if they were directed by a subpar discount Michael Bay and polthole after plothole after plothole, the film quickly became predictable, boring, and stupid. I found myself more interested in my movie chocolates than the film, waiting for the snooze fest of a predictable and poorly written climax to be over so I could leave.
This film was given to good actors, a fantastic director, and CGI that would make a nerd cream his pants in awesome, but ultimately, the horrible script dragged it down into a mire making an ultimately boring and nonsensical film that I just didn't care about, and do not care to see again.
Go watch something else, and spare yourself the complete and utter drivel that is The Winter Soldier.