Robert Redford

HYDRA has been inside S.H.I.E.L.D. since the day S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded. Seventy years of it, growing inside the organisation built to stop it, engineering the exact crises that make people ask to be protected. That’s the twist at the heart of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, so if you haven’t seen it yet, this is your warning, because I can’t talk about the film properly without it.

I did not see that coming. Not even slightly. And I’ve been sitting with it for a few days now, still turning it over, because it’s the rare twist that makes everything before it better rather than just louder. The setup is simple enough. Steve is living in Washington, doing jobs for S.H.I.E.L.D. with Natasha and still trying to work out where a man from the 1940s fits in, and he’s already uneasy about how much Nick Fury keeps from him. Then Fury is ambushed in the middle of the city by a masked assassin with a metal arm, and within a day or so Steve is the one being hunted by his own side, with no idea who gave the order or why.

A political thriller in a superhero costume

What makes the reveal work is that it isn’t a swerve. It’s an explanation. Zola lays it out in that bunker and suddenly the whole shape of the thing makes sense, every questionable call, every surveillance program, every piece of overreach that S.H.I.E.L.D. has waved through in the name of security. It wasn’t drift, it was design. The organisation didn’t get corrupted, it was corrupt from the foundation, and the good people inside it have been doing HYDRA’s work without knowing. That’s a genuinely upsetting idea and the film commits to it. Project Insight is the payoff, three helicarriers that can pre-emptively kill anyone an algorithm flags, and Steve reads it correctly the first time he sees it while everyone else in the room has a reason why he’s being naive.

I didn’t expect that tone to work and it works completely. Marvel films are usually a specific shape, threat appears, hero assembles, sky opens, and even the Spider-Man films over at Sony stick to a version of it, with The Amazing Spider-Man ending on a lizard and a cloud of chemicals over New York. This one is about a man discovering that the institution he trusts is the thing he spent a war fighting, and it plays that as paranoia rather than spectacle. The Washington setting helps. So does the fact that for a long stretch nobody knows who to trust and there’s no cavalry to call, because the cavalry is the problem.

Compared to The Avengers two years ago, the action is noticeably more grounded. Fewer alien armies, more fights in lifts and on freeways where you can feel the weight of what’s happening, and the lift fight in particular is a great bit of claustrophobic staging, a dozen agents who were on Steve’s side a minute ago closing in around him. I liked the scale of The Avengers enormously, but this is the more confident filmmaking.

Redford, Bucky and the people around Steve

Getting Robert Redford to play Alexander Pierce is the smartest casting decision Marvel has made. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him in anything and he hasn’t lost a thing, he carries every scene he’s in without ever appearing to push, which is exactly the trick this part needs. Pierce isn’t a snarling villain. He’s a reasonable, tired, well-dressed man who believes order is worth the price and says so in a level voice over breakfast. Casting an actor with that much built-in authority means the film doesn’t have to spend time establishing that Pierce is credible, he walks in credible, and it quietly borrows the whole tradition of 1970s conspiracy films like Three Days of the Condor that he came out of, which is precisely the tradition this story is working in.

The Winter Soldier himself has almost no dialogue, and I’ve seen a few people call him underwritten. I don’t think that’s the same thing. He’s a weapon that’s been wiped and reused for decades, and the horror of the character is that there’s nothing left in there to speak, so when he does talk it lands hard because it’s so rare. Sebastian Stan does a lot with a role that’s mostly physical, and the moment where recognition starts leaking through the programming is the best acting in the film.

Anthony Mackie’s Falcon is a welcome presence, mostly because he’s the only person in the film with no stake in any of it. Everyone else is compromised, hiding something or working an angle, and Sam is a veteran who helps because Steve asked. They meet in the very first scene, with Steve lapping him again and again on a morning run around the Mall in Washington, and the friendship basically starts from Sam being a good sport about it. That’s a straightforward job and the film uses it well, and the wing-suit stuff is a nice change from watching people punch through concrete. He earns his place by the end without the film having to make a fuss about it. Natasha gets the most she’s had to do so far as well. There’s an actual person in there this time, someone whose whole professional life has been building a self out of cover identities and who’s genuinely unsettled when the files go public and there’s nowhere left to hide. The last we see of her she’s sitting in front of a Senate committee more or less daring them to lock her up, which is about as honest as she’s been in any of these films.

The soft ending, and the show that had to keep up

Steve refusing to fight Bucky is the centre of the whole thing. Dropping the shield, taking the beating, “I’m with you till the end of the line.” It’s a proper character climax rather than a power climax, and Marvel doesn’t usually go for that. That said, the ending does tip into love-conquers-all territory and I could have used slightly less of it. Not the sentiment, the mechanism. Decades of systematic psychological destruction start coming apart because Steve says the right sentence, and the film wants that to feel inevitable rather than convenient. I believe Steve would refuse to fight. I believe it would shake something loose. I’m less sure it should visibly work inside the same scene, and it’s the one place where the superhero logic pokes through the thriller, a small complaint against a film I liked a great deal.

I want to give real credit to the television side too, because I wasn’t expecting it to matter. Watching the HYDRA reveal land on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the same window, with the show’s own characters discovering the same thing from the inside, was an exceptional piece of coordination. The series had been fine and a bit shapeless up to that point, and then the film pulls the floor out from under the entire organisation and the show has no choice but to become about something. It’s the best the series has been.

What I want, and don’t have, is for that to run both ways. The show reacts to the films but the films never appear to notice the show exists. If they’re going to build a shared universe across both screens, I’d like the traffic to go in both directions rather than the television arm existing to soak up consequences, and if they do that properly this stops being a nice piece of scheduling and becomes something genuinely new.

Where it lands

One of the better Captain America films, and one of the better MCU films full stop. Somewhere around 3.5 or 4 out of 5 for me, and the only reason it isn’t higher is that one soft ending.

Burning S.H.I.E.L.D. down is a bold way to finish. Steve dumps every file, HYDRA’s and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s together, and destroys the institution rather than trying to save it. I don’t know yet whether that’s the right call. The organisation was rotten and the film makes the case for the fire convincingly, but it also means the world just lost the only body watching the horizon, and something is going to grow in that space. Fury ends the film officially dead and heading off to Europe, which tells you Marvel isn’t done with the fallout either. I’d like to find out what comes next. Genuinely well done, and a surprise from a series I thought I had the measure of.

So was Steve right to burn the whole thing down, or should he have tried to save the parts of S.H.I.E.L.D. that weren’t HYDRA? Tell me in the comments.