I agree, especially since he carefully set aside her file in the deleted scene after looking at and ignoring the phone. It works better that he didn’t intrude into her life 70 years after disappearing. And the Alzheimers part was just dumb. Would have been better if they had Hayley Atwell in a flashback sequence. Preferably in the red dress.
What to watch after watching CA:TWS?: http://filmschoolrejects.com/features/10-movies-watch-after-winter-soldier.php
I agree that would suck. Fortunately, I didn’t see it happening when I watched.
This reminds me of the ad for spinal damage research that Christopher Reeve did a few years ago. They CGIed his face onto a walking guy — the idea was, “Someday soon, this could happen.”
Some people who saw the ad were convinced he’d been cured. On the other hand, I shouted when I saw it — shock and fear, mostly. To me it didn’t just look fake, it looked creepy fake.
I thought it was moving and very well done.
My vote is for Citizen Kane. Welles looks natural playing an old man - like he’s not even wearing make-up.
http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e2014e8a405cd6970d-500wi
But in reality he was only 25 years old when he filmed these scenes.
http://acertaincinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/del-rio-welles-1941.jpg
One interesting scene was when Fury took Captain America down into the hangar to tell him about the helicarriers and Operation Insight.
There was no apparent need to do this. Captain America wasn’t involved in the plan. So why did Fury tell him about it? And why, after defending the program, did he ask Pierce for a postponement?
My guess is Fury was feeling some of the same doubts Steve talked about. So Fury was using him as a sounding board. He defended the program to Captain America to see if he could convince Steve and himself this was a good idea. And when Steve expressed the same doubts he was feeling, he decided to ask for a postponement of the launch.
I also think Fury was prepping Steve to the idea that SHIELD might not be as pure and lightside as he (Steve) thought it was.
So I’m thinking…
Natasha’s answers to the Senate Subcommittee couldn’t be better designed to lead to Civil War if they were intended to do so.
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Iron Man defies the Senate. Even if Shandling was Hydra, no one knew that at the time. A superhero was announcing he was outside the control of the government. Previously, he had executed his own foreign and military policy in Afghanistan.
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Aliens show up - Asgardians - and one stays…utterly out of control. A godawful amount of destruction occurs in a small town in New Mexico.
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More aliens. SHIELD defies civilian control and a huge chunk of Manhattan is destroyed with a bodycount that has to be in tens of thousands. Possibly higher. Once done, SHIELD tells the heroes to take off, again defying civilian control.
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More supers assault Air Force One. Sure, Iron Man saved people but it was supers who tried to kill the President.
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Winter Soldier. SHIELD, already showing a tendency to defy civilian control, turns out to run superhumans AND be infiltrated and leads and attempt to take over the world by assassinating all who might stand against it.
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During congressional investigations, a superhuman - and former KGB agent - defies civilian authority AGAIN and tells them that the federal government NEEDS the superhumans and there’s nothing they can do about it.
That’s a quick jump to superhuman registration and control by civilian authorities. Hell, it’s screaming out for such control or nation-states will simply have to acknowledge that they no longer run the world. Some backlash - possibly leading to the Civil War - is almost required for the United States to continue as a viable entity.
One weakness was the Alexander Pierce character.
You’ve got a character who’s never been mentioned before even though he’s supposedly the top man at SHIELD. He’s Nick Fury’s old and trusted friend. He’s a nice guy who turned down the Nobel Peace Prize because he didn’t think he deserved it. And he’s played by Robert Redford.
Was there anyone who didn’t know from the first minute that he was going to be the secret villain?
The reveal ended up having no impact because it was so obvious. When Sitwell or Garrett or Ward turned bad, we were shocked. But the only shock with Pierce would have been if they had done a twist and made him a good guy.
Fury wanted Project: Insight postponed because he’d just learned that someone was using his clearance to hide SHIELD operations. And if there was one hidden operation, there were probably a bunch. And the most tempting prize available to SHIELD at that point in time was three new advanced Helicarriers.
Of course, since he had deduced the actual goal of the hidden bad guys, he had to be whacked.
Fury revealed Insight to Steve because (1) Steve was angry about secrets being kept from him, and that was basically the biggest secret, so by revealing it Fury made a start towards regaining some trust, and (2) Fury knew that something was awry in SHIELD (hence Natasha’s secret mission), and knew that the three Helicarriers would be a tempting prize to infiltrators, so better to have an Avenger keeping an eye out, too.
Also, Fury showing Steve the Helicarriers was a way to reveal them to the audience at an appropriate time to indicate that they were Checkov’s guns.
And don’t forget the Hulk who tore up the city and was then recruited as a founding member of the new team.
The problem with that is that it puts Fury and SHIELD on the same moral plane as Pierce and HYDRA. It says that Fury’s only problem was that HYDRA was going to kill the wrong twenty million people. Fury would have been fine going ahead with the program as originally planned and killing the right people.
I’d prefer to think that Fury was having doubts about the plan itself and not just about HYDRA taking over.
Honestly, the only reasonable response to the existence of the Hulk is a crash project of killing him. He’s far too dangerous to leave lying around.
Civil War sucked. And they’ve got the exact wrong characterization of Iron Man to even go down that path. Movie Iron Man is on record telling Banner to swagger and cut loose. You can’t suddenly have him be all registration/lockdown happy even if you get Kevin Spacey to put Pepper’s head in a box.
I was thinking Black Widow was just an implausibly gifted but otherwise “normal” woman. Am I crazy?
Yes, but that’s beside the point. Natasha is just a high-level normal, not a super.
In one of the early Marvel Agents of SHIELD threads, the inevitable comparison of Black Widow versus Agent Ward or Agent May (or maybe both) came up. I pointed out that the Black Widow (and Hawkeye) hangs out with and holds her own alongside true super beings. May and Ward are just the top tier of secret agents who fight (mostly) other secret agents. Natasha isn’t just a high-level normal; she’s the highest level normal.
Skye just needs a little more training, and she’ll be able to take her.
The next Avengers villian will be (do I really need to spoiler box this…if I don’t someone somewhere will get butthurt)Ultron and we need to figure that Avengers 3 will be (more needless spoilers, sorry)Thanos
By the time they’ve reached that point, Downey’s and Evans’ contracts will be up, so they could conceivably reboot the universe (BOO!) or let it grow so that new characters playing the pivotal roles in Civil War. Or they could just ignore the change in character, or hang a lampshade on it, with Tony Stark taking Reed Richards comic’s role (“I ran the numbers - this is the only outcome”).
That said, I agree with your Civil War assessment.
What? No. Just because Hydra was planning to kill twenty million people does not require that Fury must have been planning the same thing. He couldn’t have done so even if that were the case; Hydra was only able to do that because of the Zola Algorithm.
We heard Fury’s plan: that’s what he was explaining to Steve. The satellite + helicarriers were going to identify bad guys (terrorists, etc.) and take them out before they did their damage. Not preemptively kill anyone who might be a bad guy. And Steve didn’t object to the helicarriers taking out bad guys – he objected because they were being used as “weapons of fear”. Fury was planning to make the bad guys so afraid of SHIELD that they wouldn’t act. His rebuttal to Steve was, basically, that modern times required harsh measures, and SHIELD could be trusted to do that; if Steve wanted a future with SHIELD, he needed to get with the program.
Fury was still arguing that when they met up again in the bunker. He had not come over to Steve’s view of things at all. Steve had realized that SHIELD couldn’t be trusted, and so had to go – helicarriers and all. By that point, Fury agreed that they couldn’t allow the helicarriers to be used to kill people, but still insisted that SHIELD could be saved (trusted in the future, basically). He only agreed to follow Cap’s lead when everyone else – even Maria Hill – wouldn’t side with him.
And the structure of the film requires that Fury not come over to Cap’s viewpoint. He is there as a sympathetic foil to Captain America – his views look attractive to the audience, but only so that it can later be revealed that Cap’s views are in fact right. The movie is about Captain America: he is the one whose doubts are being explored. Fury is there to present a view for Cap to doubt; if Fury himself doubts the validity of his viewpoint, it cheapens Steve’s own inner turmoil, and lessens his achievement in rising above the pressure to go along and to instead to the right thing.