Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2016)

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" has probably the most intense and exciting action scenes of any marvel movie. In fact, I feel like the movie as a whole has more in common with a "Bourne Identity" movie than a superhero movie. This is largely do to the way these scenes were shot, edited, and choreography. The scenes are almost always shot in a wide angle, showing each full hit. While there are many cuts, I realized that again they almost never cut on a hit, which lessens the impact of the hit so it seems much less visceral. Also, again, while there are many cuts, the action is always kept in the center of the frame, so the viewer's eyes aren't jumping all over the frame every second, trying to figure out what is going on. Finally, the character always starts at a disadvantage at the beginning of a fight scene and has to fight his way back up (particularly in one of my favorite scenes, the elevator fight). I know these may seem like very subtle touches, but they add up to make some incredibly visceral fight scenes.
And those are definitely the best parts of the movie. The fight scenes. Don't get me wrong, nothing else is really bad, per se. The main characters are rather well rounded (for a superhero movie that is), and they all follow similar character arcs (they all learn to be able to trust in people again, while also learning that maybe everything is not quite what it seems). There's also some political commentary, but it's very surface level stuff. Basically it tries to tell us that, while technology becomes better and better, the government will be able to develop more powerful weapons. And the government themselves could actually be apart of some Nazi party and we could be entirely oblivious as to everything they believe in and the power that they hold. Of course this sounds ridiculously over the top, and that's because it absolutely is. Hell, I even found myself laughing out loud at some of the crazier moments in the plot. So obviously it didn't exactly portray the message that I thought it was going for very well, unless it was going for satire, which I'm 99% sure it wasn't.
But nonetheless, it was a very entertaining movie, with pretty good dialogue (although some obligatory cheesy superhero movie lines), well written characters, great action, and a little bit of political commentary delivered in a very over the top fashion. So I'd say it fulfilled it's purpose, and even went a bit farther than that.