We watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier again (as well as Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame) and I understand why people think it's a great film and used to rank highly among the first raft of MCU films. It is a cracking romp as a Mission Impossible stylee caper. However, having watched a lot of these inter-connected films now in a short space of time, it makes you wonder what the 'continuity guy' gets paid...
There are some remarkable gaffs in this film and there's a couple of thousand pages on the internet pointing out stuff like the time line of this story and how it differs from the first Cap film, but I spotted three biggies that I haven't found mention of anywhere else.
Except they're not biggies in The Winter Soldier they become biggies at a later date in proceedings.
#1 - the battle in the lift takes place during Winter Soldier, so how come it was replicated in Endgame as it took place months after the first Avengers film? The scene where he takes on Hydra in the lift hadn't happened yet, but it was copied exactly apart from the outcome. Then it gets weirder as Now Cap encounters Then Cap in a battle that couldn't actually have happened because Then Cap was with the other Avengers...
#2 - Cap and Black Widow are now Avengers; they saved the Earth and a few months later in Age of Ultron they're Earth's Mightiest Heroes, so what happened here? Both of them were treated like they had soiled the American flag rather than saved everyone's bacon.
#3 - Cap tells Falcon that Bucky and his entire platoon were captured and experimented on by Arnim Zola, which, unless he was deliberately lying, is manifestly untrue and is even contradicted in flashback footage in this film. Not only was that not what happened, Zola was arrested before it could have.
#4 - The part which fucks up Endgame big time: Steve Rogers sees footage of Peggy Carter from 1954, talking about how Cap saved the lives of a bunch of people and one of them turned out to be the man she eventually married... It's a bit unethical of Mr Squeaky Clean to decide to drop all the infinity stones back where they came from and decide to stay, creating the most obvious time paradox and multiverse strand that all manner of attempted explanation cannot excuse. He expressly went against the wishes of the Ancient One and decided to hang up his suit in 1946, preventing whatever Peggy Carter's actual timeline would have been and - along with Loki also creating an alternate timeline - thus creating the one thing old baldy was trying to explain to Bruce Banner they had to prevent. Talk about selfish and self-centred...
It's probably the reason I have a massive dichotomy about Avengers: Endgame because the internal logic of the film makes no sense at all (and I know, we're talking about superheroes, but, a quality threshold please!). I reckon it's by and large a cracking film, but it very quickly stops making sense, dips into the realms of implausible and settles on a copout ending and essentially binning the three most marketable characters of the franchise - not just in the stories but in the whole marketing and PR department. With the greatest respect to Natasha, not having Steve Rogers and Tony Stark in the MCU has crippled it.
The problem with time travel films is you kind of have to stay within the parameters and keep it relatively simple, because if you don't you leave more unanswered questions than you answer. Endgame tried to be epic and obviously needed to be as the culmination of a big story, but it simply fails to hold up to any scrutiny at all.
I've said this before but Clint Barton's descent into samurai wielding assassin is a perfect example - why and why?
Not only does the science not add up, neither does much of the story, including the second snap, when half the population of the world came back unaged... Did these scientists in superhero suits not think about the complete and utter dire consequences of doing just that? What about the people who died as a consequence of the first snap? People on planes, helicopters, cars, at operating tables, who disappeared leaving those in their care to survive? All because Tony Stark had a daughter he would probably have had exactly the same anyhow.
I just can't understand why Marvel would do this unless there's a plan to undo it all in the future, plunging us into a never-ending loop of Avengers films.
#4: I think the idea is supposed to be that the man Peggy married was Cap, and was always Cap. They never showed his face or gave his name. Rather than creating an alternate timeline, he just slotted in where he was always supposed to be.
ReplyDeleteBut Peggy specifically says Cap saved the life of the man who would become her husband. It's a bit cryptic for her to refer to him in both the first and third person. I admire your defence of this heap of shite writing - Marvel's not mine - but it was just a cop out.
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