It boggles my mind that somebody paid 44 billion dollars to become the permanent main character of twitter.
Say what you will but when William Randolph Hearst owned a newspaper you could not get away with calling him a little bitch in it.
You wanted to call William Randolph Hearst a little bitch you had to go to the trouble of making Citizen Kane.
I have to own up to something: I was super grumpy when Marvel started marketing CA:TWS as a sort of ensemble Avengers 1.5 movie. I don’t particularly care for SHIELD tbh, and Steve Rogers is my favourite superhero, so I want him to have his own franchise to himself - no other title Avenger needed another superhero to co-star as a supporting character, and to me it felt like Marvel thought Captain America couldn’t carry his own franchise.
I have to own up to something else: I was wrong.
Because, when you get right down to it, CA:TWS is made in a way that just screams Captain America. At the heart of it, the film is the story of the hero - the single heroic figure whose goodness and morals go unquestioned by virtue of Steve Rogers being Steve Rogers - pitted against the machine, the system, David versus Goliath-style. Of course it’s his story, but at the same time the narrative makes it absolutely clear that it takes a village to save the world: it follows Steve’s heroic journey and part of his journey is to build alliances with other heroes whose complementary skill sets enable not just him, but all of them, to take down HYDRA. Steve can’t singlehandedly take out the bad guys (he sort of does, in CA:TFA, but it is proven to be just a pyrrhic victory); it takes Fury’s inside knowledge and planning, Hill’s supervision, Natasha’s spy skills, Sam’s emotional support and military know-how, Sharon’s unwavering belief in doing the right thing. It takes the unnamed agents who risk their lives to help Steve &co get to the Helicarriers. It takes the pilots who explicitly say they’re going to be the only support Cap &co get. It takes people, not just the all-American all-white all-male brooding solitary action hero archetype that overwhelms the genre; it takes people, unified against a common threat - even if, or maybe especially if, that threat is the government.
It takes a village to bring down a corrupt machine built on lies and violence, but together they do bring it down. If that is not one of the best messages a Captain America movie could have then I don’t know what is.
Also surely that’s the primary message of CA, at his core - that he inspires loyalty and self-sacrifice in others through his unquestioning application of the same? He’s meant to represent what's good about America, after all.
