Here's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever type: I'm quite looking forward to the new Captain America movie.
This was unlikely for a number of reasons. Firstly, Captain America is, without putting too fine a point on things, a bit crap. There's an old joke that Action Man is the perfect American symbol because he has fifty guns and no dick, and Captain America is worryingly close to that trope; having been injected with the the Super Soldier Serum, he's as strong, fast and agile as it is humanly possible to be, which is basically just a fancy ad for steroid abuse. In reality, steroids replace the male body's need to create testosterone, leading to shrinking testicles in users. Whatever they shot Cap up with, he must have balls like raisins.
"I swear there used to be something down here..."
Steroid use and naff, star-spangled jingoism aside, it's also fair to say that the first Captain America movie of the modern era sucked. (For past eras, check out movies about Captain America and his rocket bike, or the ultra-low budget early 90s debacle with J.D. "Catcher in the Rye" Salinger's kid as Cap. Go ahead, I'll wait.) Chris Evans' first outing in the role was a thinly plotted World War 2 pastiche that somehow managed to be more cartoonish and silly than the other Marvel movies about buff Norse gods in Mexico or drunk playboys with rocket boots.
To take a story set during an actual, real world conflict with history-changing ramifications and have it seem so utterly silly felt not just wasteful, but mildly insulting. Captain America is, at his best, a character rife with notions of patriotism and old fashioned values, and to have him involved in laser battles during the forties with Agent Smith from The Matrix wasn't really up to scratch.
Fast-forward a few years (well, about 70, from Cap's perspective) and with the epochal success of The Avengers, it's time for round two of the individual Marvel movies, and this time, they're actually in danger of doing something interesting with Captain America. Dispensing, mercifully, with the period setting, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" seems, at least from the first trailer, to be addressing some important questions. Should America be allowed to police the world? What is the real price of freedom? How far are we (the western world) justified in protecting our interests?
Cap's ideas on this are refreshingly simple and actually come across as quite shocking to modern ears. When Nick Fury points out how many threats the U.S. Government "neutralises" before they become a problem, Cap warily points out that punishment is supposed to come after the crime, not before. In another tense exchange, we hear him tell Fury that America isn't running the world through freedom, but through fear.
To hear issues like this being debated on the big screen by a character that can all too easily be a mindless shill for "the American way" (lookin' at you, Kal-El) is refreshing and, to my mind, actually quite exciting. Although in the interests of fairness to writers past, this isn't the first time Captain America has been used as both an idealist and a man out of his own time to deal with controversial topics. Comics writers were accused ten years ago of turning Cap into a "traitor" by sections of the right-wing media in the States when stories saw him trying to address more than just the gung-ho, flag waving side of the War on Terror. Still, it's nice to see deeper themes being explored by such a populist and potentially lightweight character, albeit explored in a movie with super powers and giant explosions.
Incidentally, pretty much the whole internet has pointed out that in the trailer, someone brings down the S.H.I.E.L.D heli-carrier. This is the second gigantic, invisible, flying super-base S.H.I.E.L.D has lost in as many movies. Who's funding this?! Tax-payers in the Marvel Universe must be asking some serious questions.
Unfortunately for everyone not living in the Marvel Universe, the themes which the trailer is hinting may lie at the heart of "The Winter Soldier" might be too little, too late. It's been said that armies have a habit of perfecting the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one, and it's broadly true - how many impressive tank divisions did NATO and the Soviet Union build by the end of the cold war, only for everyone to piss off and fight the sandy desert where they couldn't be used?! Along these lines, Cap might be asking the right questions a generation too late.
What's certain is that level-headed skepticism by those who appreciate the true cost of war would have been useful sometime around September 12th, 2001. Due to the terrifying march of history, however, that was twelve years ago and we (Britain, America et al) decisively fucked the War on Terror in almost every available direction. This includes the War on Iraq, which didn't have much to do with terror but was kind of in the neighbourhood and seemed like a nice place to drop bombs, anyway.
We're so far past the point where questioning the wisdom of U.S. (or western) millitary action will do any good that we're all, as a society, into the post-game analysis, and what it's revealing isn't pretty. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, whose whistleblowing revealed fifteen thousand ignored civilian casualties from U.S. actions, not to mention vast numbers of hushed-up "friendly fire" botches, is now in jail for daring to make a stink. Barrett Brown, who founded a think-tank designed to make sense of the mountains of troubling information being leaked about just what-the-fuck western millitaries are up to, is currently in jail and looking down the business end of a hundred year sentence. Julian Assange, the poster boy for trying to tell the world just how much illegal, repugnant shit governments (particularly the U.S. government) get up to is probably going to spend the rest of his life in hiding.
Despite Captain America's entirely rational and much needed objections to the war on terror, the truth is that the game has moved on, and now it's becoming the war on people. Were he not a fictional character and a superhero asking questions in a millitary base and, instead, a real-world reporter, Cap's questions about the nature of crime and punishment and ruling through fear could be enough to get him locked up. The only person who seems to have gotten away with publicly asking American intelligence agencies what the fuck they're up to in recent years is Angela Merkel, and she only gets to ask questions because people would probably notice if the leader of Europe's biggest economic power went walkies to Gitmo in the middle of the night.
It's quite ironic that the only major figure who seems to share Captain America's concerns about American intervention is the leader of Germany, a position that the good Captain hasn't always been in such strict alignment with.
Whilst I'm heartened by the more serious tone of the new Captain America movie, and glad that someone has had the balls to raise intelligent, liberal questions in a smash-bang popcorn movie, I can't help but feel that things are so much worse than Cap fears. The more terrifying aspects of defense policy in the western world are no longer aimed at third-world nations, but instead at our own people. We have throwaway drones and long-distance missiles with which to blithely maim unsuspecting shepherds, but it takes the full might of our governments to make sure anyone who objects to that is silenced.
By the time Captain America gets around to worrying about what western governments are doing to their own people, he'll probably be sharing a cell with Chelsea Manning.
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