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drwexAnother Marvel series, another disappointment. This series really felt like it had the potential to be a proper sequel to Captain America: The Winter Soldier but instead we got a muddled mess that doesn't seem to know what stories it's trying to tell, is held back by an apparent need to set up/tie in other things that will come later, and that wastes two of the finest actors in action today (Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan). (1/5 or maybe 2/5 stars).
To be clear, I do mean actors. Both men have dynamic screen presence, wide emotional range, and good dialog delivery. But they need better material to work with than this series gave them.
The series nominally tells the story of Falcon/Sam Wilson becoming Captain America/Sam Wilson. It does so in a story universe that has to contend with 21st-century systemic racism amd also is the first attempt by Marvel to grapple with the effects of the snap/blip. The series' putative enemies - the Flag Smashers - are some unfortunate mishmash of straight-up terrorist, sympathetic defenders of the downtrodden, and weirdly unsympathetic individuals.
We also have to contend with Bad Cap/John Walker/US Agent, who this series makes far more likable than his comic-book version. Apparently he's going to be around later so instead of a resolution to his arc we just get him popping in and out. And a major appearance by old villain Baron Zemo, and Wakanda makes its return in the form of Ayo, and hey there's Sharon Carter because Reasons and we need to set up her future series too.
We also get - entirely through exposition - the story of Isaiah Bradley, whose comic arc both made him the first Black Captain America and also lets the series at least glancingly deal with two awful incidents of US history, not to mention the horrible treatment Black veterans have gotten for the last two centuries.
All that is crammed into six episodes marred by some obvious reshoots and corner-cutting.
Throughout, we really get no solid grip on what drives most of the people we're watching. As noted in the subject here, I do not know what changes between the Sam Wilson of episode 1 who gives up the shield and the Sam Wilson of episode 6 who becomes full-on flying Captain America making speeches to Senators about the Meaning of Everything.
In detail:
The snap/blip are just horrifying and the MCU has never tried to face it. Because Marvel put five years between the two you have a scenario in which the blip - suddenly restoring billions of people - almost certainly resulted in mass starvation. There simply would not have been enough food to prevent hundreds of millions of people dying. The emotional toll also would have been staggering. How many people would have lost their partners, then spent years picking up the pieces of their lives, dealing with the grief and trauma and finally moving on... only to have that loved one suddenly pop up. Old Partner, meet... um, yeah that was your best friend but they're New Partner now. The amount of disruption in people's lives and the global traumas would likely have affected everything. But the MCU just wants to pretend none of that happened except when they want to trot out some factoid or other for convenience.
The series seems to want us to focus on the massive refugee problem the Blip would have caused, while being all vague and hand-wavey about national borders changing and who are this GRC anyway. It's frustrating and it undercuts the series' supposed main villain, the Flag Smashers. Their ideology seems to be a mish-mash of "treat refugees better" (yay) and "get rid of all national borders" (um, maybe).
The main Flag Smasher is Erin Kellyman's Karli Morgenthau. Kellyman does a decent job but her plot motivation got ripped apart after initial shooting. I've read that there was supposed to be a pandemic plot and the GRC were withholding lifesaving medicines. In the first episode we see the Flag Smashers stealing vaccines. Marvel/Disney decided to remove that plot due to COVID which leaves us with an aimless character. They re-shot some scenes where she tries to talk us through her motivations but it's hurried and muddled. We get told that she wanted her life to be different but yeah so did most of us, Karli. Last I checked that wasn't (generally accepted) motivation for murder.
I don't think that villains need to be one-dimensional sneering mustache-twirlers but they need to have clarity of purpose. I honestly can't tell if this series wants us to root for or against Karli. She does some pretty straight-up murderous things, and also a bunch of things that are much more humane. Her dialog interactions with Sam in particular lead us to think he's sympathetic to her which means we ought to be, right? Except for the straight-up murder bits.
Speaking of which, the treatment of John Walker is also super muddled. In the comics he's basically a militant fascist. This series gives him a much softer side with personal tension, a wife, and an admiring best buddy/wingman. There's some really excellent analysis you can read online about how Walker's version of the Captain America costume is designed to make him look like a bad guy, and lead us to hate him. Then he straight-up murders someone with the shield and we're like "Yep, OK, that's our villain."
Except the writers then give him the "I am what you made me" speech at his discharge hearing which is (a) a nice callback to Rambo giving just about that same speech and (b) a stark echo of Isaiah talking about how he was mistreated by the military. So how are we supposed to feel about Walker? Is this someone suffering from trauma and abandonment who needs sympathy and treatment, not our hatred? I honestly can't tell you what the writers wanted here.
And just when he should have ended his arc he shows up again in the finale. Did everyone just forget this dude straight-up murdered someone? Did Sam and Bucky have a mind-wipe so they'll team up with him? It makes zero sense, even without the SUPER weird tacked-on costume scene that seems to exist just so they can say "US Agent" which we know is coming as its own thing in the MCU at some point.
Finally there's Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp). Props to her for kicking ass in her John Wick-esque fight sequence, but can someone please tell me what Carter wants? She's the Power Broker, surprising no one. But she leads Sam & Bucky to her "golden goose" and then stands guard outside while they mess everything up. OK, I'll grant she probably didn't know Zemo was going to shoot the dude but Zemo is absolutely the most transparent character in this series. He makes no bones about what he wants or what he'll do to get it. Why would Carter save the three of them, lead them to her weapons manufacturer, and then bring in Batroc to try to kill Falcon while she's arming the Flag Smashers? What, in a sentence, does she get out of any of this?
Surrounded by this cast of muddled misfits we have the buddy duo. Either one could, technically, take up the shield, but from the beginning it's clear it has to be Sam or no one. The series should be about his arc from doubt to certainty and how his take on Captain America will respond to the challenges that Bradley, Karli, and Walker each represent. Boy, it sure would have been nice to see that.
Instead the writers seem to fall back on "tell don't show" far too often. People talk at each other, really just for the benefit of the audience. They're largely info-dumps and they're awkward AF in places. I would love to have seen Bradley's story done in flashback montage. I would have loved to see Karli before she got radicalized. What happened to her? With clear foils, we could then have seen Sam evolve his understanding, find his own grounding principles, and see how that leads him to becoming Captain America. As is, I can't tell you one thing that Sam believes differently at the end of the series than I thought he believed at the start.
"Show don't tell" is Writing 101 stuff and this series flunks it. I nearly wept for how awful Bucky's dialog was in his final scene with Yori. The scene is important, but it's too complicated to convey in a few lines of dialog. The writers should have trusted Sebastian Stan and Ken Takemoto to convey things without words. Imagine if we'd just seen clips of them talking, gestures, and each man crying as they confront their separate and shared grief. We (the audience) know what Bucky is going to say when he goes to see the old man - it doesn't have to be actual dialog and in fact the actual dialog detracts from the power of the emotions.
I like both these characters and I'm really unhappy about how badly this failed to be the story it could have been.
To be clear, I do mean actors. Both men have dynamic screen presence, wide emotional range, and good dialog delivery. But they need better material to work with than this series gave them.
The series nominally tells the story of Falcon/Sam Wilson becoming Captain America/Sam Wilson. It does so in a story universe that has to contend with 21st-century systemic racism amd also is the first attempt by Marvel to grapple with the effects of the snap/blip. The series' putative enemies - the Flag Smashers - are some unfortunate mishmash of straight-up terrorist, sympathetic defenders of the downtrodden, and weirdly unsympathetic individuals.
We also have to contend with Bad Cap/John Walker/US Agent, who this series makes far more likable than his comic-book version. Apparently he's going to be around later so instead of a resolution to his arc we just get him popping in and out. And a major appearance by old villain Baron Zemo, and Wakanda makes its return in the form of Ayo, and hey there's Sharon Carter because Reasons and we need to set up her future series too.
We also get - entirely through exposition - the story of Isaiah Bradley, whose comic arc both made him the first Black Captain America and also lets the series at least glancingly deal with two awful incidents of US history, not to mention the horrible treatment Black veterans have gotten for the last two centuries.
All that is crammed into six episodes marred by some obvious reshoots and corner-cutting.
Throughout, we really get no solid grip on what drives most of the people we're watching. As noted in the subject here, I do not know what changes between the Sam Wilson of episode 1 who gives up the shield and the Sam Wilson of episode 6 who becomes full-on flying Captain America making speeches to Senators about the Meaning of Everything.
In detail:
The snap/blip are just horrifying and the MCU has never tried to face it. Because Marvel put five years between the two you have a scenario in which the blip - suddenly restoring billions of people - almost certainly resulted in mass starvation. There simply would not have been enough food to prevent hundreds of millions of people dying. The emotional toll also would have been staggering. How many people would have lost their partners, then spent years picking up the pieces of their lives, dealing with the grief and trauma and finally moving on... only to have that loved one suddenly pop up. Old Partner, meet... um, yeah that was your best friend but they're New Partner now. The amount of disruption in people's lives and the global traumas would likely have affected everything. But the MCU just wants to pretend none of that happened except when they want to trot out some factoid or other for convenience.
The series seems to want us to focus on the massive refugee problem the Blip would have caused, while being all vague and hand-wavey about national borders changing and who are this GRC anyway. It's frustrating and it undercuts the series' supposed main villain, the Flag Smashers. Their ideology seems to be a mish-mash of "treat refugees better" (yay) and "get rid of all national borders" (um, maybe).
The main Flag Smasher is Erin Kellyman's Karli Morgenthau. Kellyman does a decent job but her plot motivation got ripped apart after initial shooting. I've read that there was supposed to be a pandemic plot and the GRC were withholding lifesaving medicines. In the first episode we see the Flag Smashers stealing vaccines. Marvel/Disney decided to remove that plot due to COVID which leaves us with an aimless character. They re-shot some scenes where she tries to talk us through her motivations but it's hurried and muddled. We get told that she wanted her life to be different but yeah so did most of us, Karli. Last I checked that wasn't (generally accepted) motivation for murder.
I don't think that villains need to be one-dimensional sneering mustache-twirlers but they need to have clarity of purpose. I honestly can't tell if this series wants us to root for or against Karli. She does some pretty straight-up murderous things, and also a bunch of things that are much more humane. Her dialog interactions with Sam in particular lead us to think he's sympathetic to her which means we ought to be, right? Except for the straight-up murder bits.
Speaking of which, the treatment of John Walker is also super muddled. In the comics he's basically a militant fascist. This series gives him a much softer side with personal tension, a wife, and an admiring best buddy/wingman. There's some really excellent analysis you can read online about how Walker's version of the Captain America costume is designed to make him look like a bad guy, and lead us to hate him. Then he straight-up murders someone with the shield and we're like "Yep, OK, that's our villain."
Except the writers then give him the "I am what you made me" speech at his discharge hearing which is (a) a nice callback to Rambo giving just about that same speech and (b) a stark echo of Isaiah talking about how he was mistreated by the military. So how are we supposed to feel about Walker? Is this someone suffering from trauma and abandonment who needs sympathy and treatment, not our hatred? I honestly can't tell you what the writers wanted here.
And just when he should have ended his arc he shows up again in the finale. Did everyone just forget this dude straight-up murdered someone? Did Sam and Bucky have a mind-wipe so they'll team up with him? It makes zero sense, even without the SUPER weird tacked-on costume scene that seems to exist just so they can say "US Agent" which we know is coming as its own thing in the MCU at some point.
Finally there's Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp). Props to her for kicking ass in her John Wick-esque fight sequence, but can someone please tell me what Carter wants? She's the Power Broker, surprising no one. But she leads Sam & Bucky to her "golden goose" and then stands guard outside while they mess everything up. OK, I'll grant she probably didn't know Zemo was going to shoot the dude but Zemo is absolutely the most transparent character in this series. He makes no bones about what he wants or what he'll do to get it. Why would Carter save the three of them, lead them to her weapons manufacturer, and then bring in Batroc to try to kill Falcon while she's arming the Flag Smashers? What, in a sentence, does she get out of any of this?
Surrounded by this cast of muddled misfits we have the buddy duo. Either one could, technically, take up the shield, but from the beginning it's clear it has to be Sam or no one. The series should be about his arc from doubt to certainty and how his take on Captain America will respond to the challenges that Bradley, Karli, and Walker each represent. Boy, it sure would have been nice to see that.
Instead the writers seem to fall back on "tell don't show" far too often. People talk at each other, really just for the benefit of the audience. They're largely info-dumps and they're awkward AF in places. I would love to have seen Bradley's story done in flashback montage. I would have loved to see Karli before she got radicalized. What happened to her? With clear foils, we could then have seen Sam evolve his understanding, find his own grounding principles, and see how that leads him to becoming Captain America. As is, I can't tell you one thing that Sam believes differently at the end of the series than I thought he believed at the start.
"Show don't tell" is Writing 101 stuff and this series flunks it. I nearly wept for how awful Bucky's dialog was in his final scene with Yori. The scene is important, but it's too complicated to convey in a few lines of dialog. The writers should have trusted Sebastian Stan and Ken Takemoto to convey things without words. Imagine if we'd just seen clips of them talking, gestures, and each man crying as they confront their separate and shared grief. We (the audience) know what Bucky is going to say when he goes to see the old man - it doesn't have to be actual dialog and in fact the actual dialog detracts from the power of the emotions.
I like both these characters and I'm really unhappy about how badly this failed to be the story it could have been.
