sad

elinimate:

imhereforbvcky:

avengemenugget:

captaincentenarian:

Captain America: Civil War Commentary (Stephen McFeely, Joe Russo)

HE USED HIS FLESH HAND

WELL I FUCKING FEEL IT, ALRIGHT MCFEELY?!? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! I’m in a perpetual and incurable state of empathic suffering. Thanks a heap.

Maybe someone can explain this to me, because from where I’m standing, this is just sloppy writing.

We have Bucky, a.k.a. The Winter Soldier a.k.a. the “ghost story”, and yet he kills Tony’s parents in the least efficient way possible, lingers in front of a camera as if he’s posing for New York Fashion Week and then shoots the camera, like that even matters when his face is so clear to see? And which roadside security camera in records high quality images anyway, let alone one from 1992?

There’s a fan theory out there that Hydra forced him to do it this way, just to see if he could kill someone who used to be his friend, but if that’s true, they should have at least alluded to that instead of having us clean up the mess. Or is it because an admission like that would, one again, make Bucky sympathetic to the viewer?

I like the Russo’s and I’m sure they were hampered by the studio execs, but if they’d introduced an actual conflict, they wouldn’t have needed to force the issue like this.

Well, I mean. They are not wrong, that’s true. The thing is, we already knew all that? We have seen the Winter Soldier kill. We have seen him as the remorseless killing machine. And unlike it is for other bad boy characters, I honestly haven’t seen much of the typical white-washing. No one denies the Winter Soldier was a brutal killer. And the news that Tony’s parents were among his victims were of no surprise.

So it’s not that it was not necessary, because as they say it would take a very strong person to resist the impulse to kill the man they witnessed murder their parents. We needed to see it and it needed to be bad, because otherwise Tony’s reaction would not be justifiable.

Except… the movie opens not on the murder, but on a scene of torture. It opens on an explicit depiction of the murderer being (a) treated inhumanely, followed by (b) literal mind control. Then the murder. By the time we land in Siberia there is no doubt, whatsoever, that Bucky is not culpable. Not to mention that this scene literally takes place in the same place Bucky’s nightmare happened. And that’s kind of the problem with this sequence. We get that Tony has the right to his anger, and we get that he needs to lash out and make someone pay. But the longer the fight goes on, the less justifiable Tony’s anger becomes, until finally we arrive at a scene where Tony, in his titanium armor, kicks a crippled, lying-down man in the face (a man, at this time, poses no threat). And that’s somehow fine. We needed to see Bucky’s hands commit a murder to justify Tony’s rage, but we were also shown plenty of footage that makes it unjust, so that scale never balances itself. Not in this or the following movie.

Side note: I kinda like that the Winter Soldier strangles Maria with his flesh hand. I’m not fond of the “left arm is the murder arm” fanon. It’s his arm. It may not be flesh, but it’s his arm. The Winter Soldier is not in the arm, he’s in the head.