beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-04-07 04:04 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-04-07 04:04 am
Entry tags:
more Winter Soldier thoughts
still wanna see it again.
did you know there are international differences? it's just a small moment and it tells us more about people talking to Cap than it does about Steve, but it still complicates the concept of canon in interesting ways.
spoilers of course
(don't read spoilers, tis much more fun if you don't know spoilers)
for Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD together again. and the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which I saw right before the movie, right after seeing TAHITI this morning. Blue people. Was guy in the tank blue or just floating in blue stuff?
Winter Soldier: Someone on my reading list noted that the Senator who was HYDRA was also the guy in the Iron Man movies who wanted the USA to have the suit, thus setting up the trope where those who oppose Our Heroes are secretly evil. But I think he's the only Senator in the MCU who had lines? So he's kind of difficult to replace without a new character who would have even less impact.
Copperbadge said he wanted the reveals on HYDRA to be reversed, so you start with Sitwell and build up to the reel to reel AI. I see how that would be much dramatic, but it would also require a lot of different.
I want to poke at exactly what they knew and from who at the point where they decided to drop him off the roof a bit. I mean we the viewers knew that Hail Hydra had been said, but what did the good guys know? Enough to ... is pretending to kill someone like torture? Dropping people off buildings is certainly something supervillains have done. So, I would like better recall of exactly what they knew when.
... I hate it when the 'good' guys can scare data out of people, esp when it's mostly dramatic confirmation of what they already knew. Torture is an echo chamber, and not much use for intelligence; story doesn't always or even often seem to understand that basic principle.
Have seen many pointing out that we don't got many Sitwell looking people and now one of them is evil. Also using identity words for him that are not what I'd have figured from looking at him. I was thinking there were black guys and one kind of pale black guy turned out evil while two were on team mostly good guys. But if there's more different groups then that goes a bit wrong.
Have read someone not understanding how Sitwell could go from being a good guy to being horrible evil HYDRA. I thought it was obvious, because HYDRA don't think they're horrible evil, they think they're saving the world. I don't know from the comics, but just within this movie, it's mostly Pierce (sp? Redford.) making the pitch, but he's talking about the classic liberty vs safety dilemma being taken all the way over to safety. Because some day there'll be a bioweapon or a dirty bomb, and only absolute control will stop that. HYDRA's logic, in this movie, is simply an extension of what SHIELD already does. Sure, they'll kill a bunch of people, but after that, peace!
Which wouldn't work. Humans do not work like that. But evil is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of humans and the universe. I'm not good because I've got some glowy internal guiding light, I'm trying to be good because that's the version that works. Cause and effect. Save you from the second lion. Make your own enemies by treating them bad. Good works, evil doesn't, because evil has made a very grave error.
But from the logic of Lawful Evil, HYDRA's plan makes perfect sense. Absolute control, absolute power, at a price in death and pain.
SHIELD makes a career out of... you know, we haven't really seen much, but it's a job that employs a sniper on every team, and Tony refers to Widow and Hawkeye as assassins, so I'm going with the assumption there's a lot of death. A lot of fighting. Trying to stop the bad guys before they do anything, that was Fury's logic. That was the side of the line SHIELD was on, under Fury. Steve pointing out that usually punishment goes after the crime? That was not the institutional line. So Fury, alleged mostly good guy and leader of alleged mostly good guys, was building those platforms and planning to aim them at a lot of people, he was just going to draw the line in a slightly different place. Same actions, same logic, the difference being only in how far they'd take it.
This was not a movie about how HYDRA had secretly taken over SHIELD.
SHIELD looked in the mirror and saw they'd been HYDRA all along.
Which is awesome.
Especially in the political climate where arguments about automating death based on intelligence about possible threats is very, very real. This is a necessary story.
SHIELD now has to ask itself, when did we become the bad guys? When did I become what I thought I was stopping? And the answer will not be simple. There will be times when what they did saved the world, or nations, or crowds, or that one guy... but did they get there the right way? All the nasty methods we've seen used on Agents of SHIELD, all that telling their prisoners they have no rights and SHIELD can do anything to them, that was on every SHIELD agent we've seen. Even Coulson, who is still willing to reach out and befriend apparent enemies like Skye and Mike, is also willing to do a whole lot nastier. Like in TAHITI, killing people without knowing what side they're on, because they oppose what he has decided is a perfectly reasonable goal. He's demonstrating the problem with believing you're a good guy. SHIELD has believed they are the good guys, and so has HYDRA, because they're the same people using the same methods to the same goal, just some of them pull up short of mass annihilation.
... there are really good reasons to avoid mass annihilation. obviously.
Like, Tony Stark was on HYDRA's elimination list, as were the other Avengers, but Stark was the originator of some of the tech they were using to get that job done, and the Avengers had saved the planet. So what about next time? Maybe they believe they can handle it, but that's contrary to the available facts.
So, specific people:
Sitwell was HYDRA. Consciously. And he believed the plan would work, the guns would be aimed at all the troublemakers, all done in one move. And then law and order forever. So he decided that was worth the price.
Fury served HYDRA's agenda for decades. Without knowing it. But he built the same weapons with broadly the same goals, stopping the threats before they happen.
Natasha, same thing, doing Fury's personal bidding, did not know how that was adding up.
Steve? Is the only SHIELD agent in the movie who gets through it with a consistent moral position, standing up for liberty and justice for all. And he was in SHIELD because his lady love ran it once. His solution in the middle part of the movie, before HYDRA got mentioned, was thinking about quitting. He only tore it all down when it became clear the rot was all through it, but he always disagreed with how SHIELD does things, the secrets and lies, border violations and pre-emptive strikes. That was SHIELD business as usual, and Captain America did not like it.
So Steve didn't fall for the HYDRA line. But SHIELD, institutionally, did. Which makes it unsurprising when any SHIELD agent crosses that last line. Tragic and wrong, but not surprising. It's the logic taken out to its conclusion. Kill all the threats now and maybe they get to retire in peace.
Calling it HYDRA distances it. There's still room to think there's good guy sneaky spy assassins and HYDRA just got its agents in amongst them. But calling it HYDRA is calling the mindset by its true name. Here be monsters. But SHIELD agents knew that. They just thought they could be monsters in a way that kept the rest of the world clean.
So I'm really happy about this line of logic, because so many movies are, like, 'Look! Over there! A monster! Doing exactly what we do but for a different team! Kill it quick!' But this one was, like, 'Look, out there, a monster! Oh, hey, that's not a window, that's a mirror.'
So the HYDRA in SHIELD had to be someone we knew and were comfortable with, or we wouldn't get that effect at all.
I want to watch again and maybe make notes. I was watching for the whoosh boom but now I'm thinking about the talky parts and trying to recall details.
Winter Soldier could have been in the movie more. But he thematically ties it together, as someone else pointed out in someone elses comments thread, I really ought to keep links for stuff but I was reading all excited. But, Bucky was taken, made into technology, wiped and programmed, reduced to only a soldier, given no life outside of his function as a weapon. That's the ultimate result of the kind of logic that says you need agents to be killers. And on Agents of SHIELD Coulson was all 'trust the system', and I consider it an open question whether he was like that before TAHITI, but if all you do is trust the system then that goes very wrong because a system is made up of a lot of humans with bias and prejudice and power relations. If you just take orders because you trust the system, you act as empty and programmable as the Winter Soldier. And then there's how Steve treated Bucky - there was one point where he had to be stopped, where Steve was doing his absolute best to stop him, because there were millions of lives at stake. Right then, toppling SHIELD, aiming at his best friend, Natasha presumably doing the same to all her friends and co-workers, that was necessary at that moment. But immediately after he got it done, he was willing to reach out again. Stop them, then try and get them back. Microcosm of the SHIELD problem now it's gone boom. And it paid off for him immediately too, cause he got saved right back.
... if he'd killed Bucky when he was trying to get the chip back then that would have been kind of reasonable and logical under the circumstances but utterly not Captain America or Steve Rogers. So that paid off in immediate saving, though arguably only saving from Bucky. But I'd bet big that he'll turn out to be key to saving the world later. Which is the problem with killing people, you never know when you'll need them later. Each death diminishes the world and hence diminishes your own possibilities. Good works better.
Hawkeye: There was no Hawkeye. I want to know what his holding pattern is, what he's been doing between stories, and who they are in this 'verse that Black Widow wouldn't go to him, would say everyone she knows is trying to kill her. And I want to know this partly because all through the movie she was wearing a necklace with an arrow on it, and seriously, what to think of that as isn't Hawkeye related?
I don't mind at all him not turning up in this film, he could be anywhere in the world, it's always reasonable for people not to be in that particular mess if they're not called into it. Like the comic to explain where War Machine was in Avengers, he arrived in time for shawarma, because he'd been posted on the other side of the world and the battle wasn't really very long.
But I want to know Hawkeye, because comics guy is awesome, so I want to know what's been happening with him. Is he even still a SHIELD agent? ... at the start of the movie, I mean. Is he having a bad time the same way as Selvig? And whose agenda is served by pushing them that way? ... it's entirely possible it's coincidence, but the way this movie went, it is impossible to be paranoid enough.
It has been pointed out that Loki's 'freedom from freedom' line matched Zola's version of Hydra's basic agenda. What could be important is that both of them worked with the Tesseract. Is it in fact the glowy cube's agenda? It shows you thinks. Is the cube at root of the actions of Hydra and Loki both?
And what knock on consequence does that have for others exposed long term to it?
And there are consequences. See: scene in the middle of the credits.
HYDRA has the glowstick of doom, and its effects are... varied.
I knew Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch needed a new origin story if Magneto was stuck in a different universe, but given the existence of Scorch in Agents of SHIELD there are still people who are just born different, yesno? It's not a 100% madscience origin universe. But it was heavily implied that these particular two are now empowered by the glowstick somehow.
... I really really want to know what's up with Hawkeye.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is developing a consistent political stance. Bad guys use fear to justify the removal of liberty. AIM and the Mandarin, probably the ten rings, and HYDRA using SHIELD, they all keep everyone focused on the fear so they'll willingly hand over the power. And that puts an interesting spin on super heroes - they're embodiments of personal freedom, power fantasies, and they're standing up to that fear which gives organisations the leverage they need.
It's an interesting place to start. But, well, isn't it handing a lot of power to superheroes to leave it to them to protect us?
But then, Falcon. He's some random nice dude, and then Cap needs allies, and he steps up.
And Skye, the way she looked initially, random hacker girl who can. But if she was super special since birth then that's kind of undermined.
Darcy, in the Thor movies, very very ordinary, steps up to help save the planet.
In the MCU heroes are not born, and they're arguably not made or chosen, they make and choose themselves.
Captain America, 5' 4" before, 6' 2" after. He was chosen a little, but it was because he kept pushing to get the chance.
And Tony got born with all kinds of everything, but the becoming a hero part was him choosing at a moment he had nothing but his brains and education. (expensive education.) (and a cave full of weapons he'd already designed.) (okay, he had kind of a lot, but he didn't just sit in his tower being rich and inheriting SHIELD from his dad, is what I meant.)
Hmmm, my preferred angle is a bit shaky, oh well.
I want to watch the movie again and have big thoughts.
... watching will lead to having more whoosh boom thoughts, I know, but possibly also big thoughts.
... maybe.
[ETA for those linked here: My first reaction to Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD 1.14 TAHITI have related thoughts]
did you know there are international differences? it's just a small moment and it tells us more about people talking to Cap than it does about Steve, but it still complicates the concept of canon in interesting ways.
spoilers of course
(don't read spoilers, tis much more fun if you don't know spoilers)
for Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD together again. and the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which I saw right before the movie, right after seeing TAHITI this morning. Blue people. Was guy in the tank blue or just floating in blue stuff?
Winter Soldier: Someone on my reading list noted that the Senator who was HYDRA was also the guy in the Iron Man movies who wanted the USA to have the suit, thus setting up the trope where those who oppose Our Heroes are secretly evil. But I think he's the only Senator in the MCU who had lines? So he's kind of difficult to replace without a new character who would have even less impact.
Copperbadge said he wanted the reveals on HYDRA to be reversed, so you start with Sitwell and build up to the reel to reel AI. I see how that would be much dramatic, but it would also require a lot of different.
I want to poke at exactly what they knew and from who at the point where they decided to drop him off the roof a bit. I mean we the viewers knew that Hail Hydra had been said, but what did the good guys know? Enough to ... is pretending to kill someone like torture? Dropping people off buildings is certainly something supervillains have done. So, I would like better recall of exactly what they knew when.
... I hate it when the 'good' guys can scare data out of people, esp when it's mostly dramatic confirmation of what they already knew. Torture is an echo chamber, and not much use for intelligence; story doesn't always or even often seem to understand that basic principle.
Have seen many pointing out that we don't got many Sitwell looking people and now one of them is evil. Also using identity words for him that are not what I'd have figured from looking at him. I was thinking there were black guys and one kind of pale black guy turned out evil while two were on team mostly good guys. But if there's more different groups then that goes a bit wrong.
Have read someone not understanding how Sitwell could go from being a good guy to being horrible evil HYDRA. I thought it was obvious, because HYDRA don't think they're horrible evil, they think they're saving the world. I don't know from the comics, but just within this movie, it's mostly Pierce (sp? Redford.) making the pitch, but he's talking about the classic liberty vs safety dilemma being taken all the way over to safety. Because some day there'll be a bioweapon or a dirty bomb, and only absolute control will stop that. HYDRA's logic, in this movie, is simply an extension of what SHIELD already does. Sure, they'll kill a bunch of people, but after that, peace!
Which wouldn't work. Humans do not work like that. But evil is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of humans and the universe. I'm not good because I've got some glowy internal guiding light, I'm trying to be good because that's the version that works. Cause and effect. Save you from the second lion. Make your own enemies by treating them bad. Good works, evil doesn't, because evil has made a very grave error.
But from the logic of Lawful Evil, HYDRA's plan makes perfect sense. Absolute control, absolute power, at a price in death and pain.
SHIELD makes a career out of... you know, we haven't really seen much, but it's a job that employs a sniper on every team, and Tony refers to Widow and Hawkeye as assassins, so I'm going with the assumption there's a lot of death. A lot of fighting. Trying to stop the bad guys before they do anything, that was Fury's logic. That was the side of the line SHIELD was on, under Fury. Steve pointing out that usually punishment goes after the crime? That was not the institutional line. So Fury, alleged mostly good guy and leader of alleged mostly good guys, was building those platforms and planning to aim them at a lot of people, he was just going to draw the line in a slightly different place. Same actions, same logic, the difference being only in how far they'd take it.
This was not a movie about how HYDRA had secretly taken over SHIELD.
SHIELD looked in the mirror and saw they'd been HYDRA all along.
Which is awesome.
Especially in the political climate where arguments about automating death based on intelligence about possible threats is very, very real. This is a necessary story.
SHIELD now has to ask itself, when did we become the bad guys? When did I become what I thought I was stopping? And the answer will not be simple. There will be times when what they did saved the world, or nations, or crowds, or that one guy... but did they get there the right way? All the nasty methods we've seen used on Agents of SHIELD, all that telling their prisoners they have no rights and SHIELD can do anything to them, that was on every SHIELD agent we've seen. Even Coulson, who is still willing to reach out and befriend apparent enemies like Skye and Mike, is also willing to do a whole lot nastier. Like in TAHITI, killing people without knowing what side they're on, because they oppose what he has decided is a perfectly reasonable goal. He's demonstrating the problem with believing you're a good guy. SHIELD has believed they are the good guys, and so has HYDRA, because they're the same people using the same methods to the same goal, just some of them pull up short of mass annihilation.
... there are really good reasons to avoid mass annihilation. obviously.
Like, Tony Stark was on HYDRA's elimination list, as were the other Avengers, but Stark was the originator of some of the tech they were using to get that job done, and the Avengers had saved the planet. So what about next time? Maybe they believe they can handle it, but that's contrary to the available facts.
So, specific people:
Sitwell was HYDRA. Consciously. And he believed the plan would work, the guns would be aimed at all the troublemakers, all done in one move. And then law and order forever. So he decided that was worth the price.
Fury served HYDRA's agenda for decades. Without knowing it. But he built the same weapons with broadly the same goals, stopping the threats before they happen.
Natasha, same thing, doing Fury's personal bidding, did not know how that was adding up.
Steve? Is the only SHIELD agent in the movie who gets through it with a consistent moral position, standing up for liberty and justice for all. And he was in SHIELD because his lady love ran it once. His solution in the middle part of the movie, before HYDRA got mentioned, was thinking about quitting. He only tore it all down when it became clear the rot was all through it, but he always disagreed with how SHIELD does things, the secrets and lies, border violations and pre-emptive strikes. That was SHIELD business as usual, and Captain America did not like it.
So Steve didn't fall for the HYDRA line. But SHIELD, institutionally, did. Which makes it unsurprising when any SHIELD agent crosses that last line. Tragic and wrong, but not surprising. It's the logic taken out to its conclusion. Kill all the threats now and maybe they get to retire in peace.
Calling it HYDRA distances it. There's still room to think there's good guy sneaky spy assassins and HYDRA just got its agents in amongst them. But calling it HYDRA is calling the mindset by its true name. Here be monsters. But SHIELD agents knew that. They just thought they could be monsters in a way that kept the rest of the world clean.
So I'm really happy about this line of logic, because so many movies are, like, 'Look! Over there! A monster! Doing exactly what we do but for a different team! Kill it quick!' But this one was, like, 'Look, out there, a monster! Oh, hey, that's not a window, that's a mirror.'
So the HYDRA in SHIELD had to be someone we knew and were comfortable with, or we wouldn't get that effect at all.
I want to watch again and maybe make notes. I was watching for the whoosh boom but now I'm thinking about the talky parts and trying to recall details.
Winter Soldier could have been in the movie more. But he thematically ties it together, as someone else pointed out in someone elses comments thread, I really ought to keep links for stuff but I was reading all excited. But, Bucky was taken, made into technology, wiped and programmed, reduced to only a soldier, given no life outside of his function as a weapon. That's the ultimate result of the kind of logic that says you need agents to be killers. And on Agents of SHIELD Coulson was all 'trust the system', and I consider it an open question whether he was like that before TAHITI, but if all you do is trust the system then that goes very wrong because a system is made up of a lot of humans with bias and prejudice and power relations. If you just take orders because you trust the system, you act as empty and programmable as the Winter Soldier. And then there's how Steve treated Bucky - there was one point where he had to be stopped, where Steve was doing his absolute best to stop him, because there were millions of lives at stake. Right then, toppling SHIELD, aiming at his best friend, Natasha presumably doing the same to all her friends and co-workers, that was necessary at that moment. But immediately after he got it done, he was willing to reach out again. Stop them, then try and get them back. Microcosm of the SHIELD problem now it's gone boom. And it paid off for him immediately too, cause he got saved right back.
... if he'd killed Bucky when he was trying to get the chip back then that would have been kind of reasonable and logical under the circumstances but utterly not Captain America or Steve Rogers. So that paid off in immediate saving, though arguably only saving from Bucky. But I'd bet big that he'll turn out to be key to saving the world later. Which is the problem with killing people, you never know when you'll need them later. Each death diminishes the world and hence diminishes your own possibilities. Good works better.
Hawkeye: There was no Hawkeye. I want to know what his holding pattern is, what he's been doing between stories, and who they are in this 'verse that Black Widow wouldn't go to him, would say everyone she knows is trying to kill her. And I want to know this partly because all through the movie she was wearing a necklace with an arrow on it, and seriously, what to think of that as isn't Hawkeye related?
I don't mind at all him not turning up in this film, he could be anywhere in the world, it's always reasonable for people not to be in that particular mess if they're not called into it. Like the comic to explain where War Machine was in Avengers, he arrived in time for shawarma, because he'd been posted on the other side of the world and the battle wasn't really very long.
But I want to know Hawkeye, because comics guy is awesome, so I want to know what's been happening with him. Is he even still a SHIELD agent? ... at the start of the movie, I mean. Is he having a bad time the same way as Selvig? And whose agenda is served by pushing them that way? ... it's entirely possible it's coincidence, but the way this movie went, it is impossible to be paranoid enough.
It has been pointed out that Loki's 'freedom from freedom' line matched Zola's version of Hydra's basic agenda. What could be important is that both of them worked with the Tesseract. Is it in fact the glowy cube's agenda? It shows you thinks. Is the cube at root of the actions of Hydra and Loki both?
And what knock on consequence does that have for others exposed long term to it?
And there are consequences. See: scene in the middle of the credits.
HYDRA has the glowstick of doom, and its effects are... varied.
I knew Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch needed a new origin story if Magneto was stuck in a different universe, but given the existence of Scorch in Agents of SHIELD there are still people who are just born different, yesno? It's not a 100% madscience origin universe. But it was heavily implied that these particular two are now empowered by the glowstick somehow.
... I really really want to know what's up with Hawkeye.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is developing a consistent political stance. Bad guys use fear to justify the removal of liberty. AIM and the Mandarin, probably the ten rings, and HYDRA using SHIELD, they all keep everyone focused on the fear so they'll willingly hand over the power. And that puts an interesting spin on super heroes - they're embodiments of personal freedom, power fantasies, and they're standing up to that fear which gives organisations the leverage they need.
It's an interesting place to start. But, well, isn't it handing a lot of power to superheroes to leave it to them to protect us?
But then, Falcon. He's some random nice dude, and then Cap needs allies, and he steps up.
And Skye, the way she looked initially, random hacker girl who can. But if she was super special since birth then that's kind of undermined.
Darcy, in the Thor movies, very very ordinary, steps up to help save the planet.
In the MCU heroes are not born, and they're arguably not made or chosen, they make and choose themselves.
Captain America, 5' 4" before, 6' 2" after. He was chosen a little, but it was because he kept pushing to get the chance.
And Tony got born with all kinds of everything, but the becoming a hero part was him choosing at a moment he had nothing but his brains and education. (expensive education.) (and a cave full of weapons he'd already designed.) (okay, he had kind of a lot, but he didn't just sit in his tower being rich and inheriting SHIELD from his dad, is what I meant.)
Hmmm, my preferred angle is a bit shaky, oh well.
I want to watch the movie again and have big thoughts.
... watching will lead to having more whoosh boom thoughts, I know, but possibly also big thoughts.
... maybe.
[ETA for those linked here: My first reaction to Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD 1.14 TAHITI have related thoughts]
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SHIELD looked in the mirror and saw they'd been HYDRA all along.”
Looks like you haven't linked to this on your own tumblr -- y'mind if I do? This is awesome.
~
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Pls to be sure it's tagged appropriate, with spoiler tags etc
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has lots of good stuff, also in the comments
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As for what Hawkeye was up to, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we'll see him in the Marvel One Shot that will inevitably be included on the DVD release, helping Falcon get his flight wings out of Ft. Meade. :)
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I googled for it but got nothing also.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1725432/captain-america-winter-soldier-cast.jhtml the co-writer says they left out Hawkeye for reasons we'll learn in Avengers 2.
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I think the fact that Hydra had Loki's scepter would piss him off alone but prisoners just make it worse.
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