Mother Jones – by Asawin Suebsaeng
There are currently no plans to screen Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the White House, as far as the film’s directors have heard. But if it makes it to the White House family theater, President Obama would be watching one big-budget, action-packed, and Scarlett Johansson-starring critique of his controversial terror-suspect “kill list.”
This isn’t me reading things into a mainstream comic-book movie. It’s what the directors themselves will tell you.
“[Marvel] said they wanted to make a political thriller,” Joe Russo, who directed the film with his brother Anthony, tells Mother Jones. “So we said if you want to make a political thriller, all the great political thrillers have very current issues in them that reflect the anxiety of the audience…That gives it an immediacy, it makes it relevant. So [Anthony] and I just looked at the issues that were causing anxiety for us, because we read a lot and are politically inclined. And a lot of that stuff had to do with civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president’s kill list, preemptive technology”—all themes they worked into the film, working closely with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
In The Winter Soldier, Captain America and the rest of the heroes (played by Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, and so on) confront the government program Project Insight, which involves three Helicarriers (gigantic autonomous killer drones, basically) that are fed large amounts of data and intel. The Helicarriers process the data to identify and preemptively eliminate potential threats to national and global security. And though the film’s topical parts were all crafted prior to the NSA revelations, the directors say it’s no accident that data mining is a key element of the plot: “It was all leading up to Snowden,” Joe says. “It was all in the ether [already], it was all part of the zeitgeist. The Snowden stuff actually happened while we were shooting.”
The politics of The Winter Soldier fit comfortably into the Russo brothers’ oeuvre, which has included plenty of political satire and commentary. Prior to The Winter Soldier, the duo was best known for directing episodes of Arrested Development, which produced some of the finest satire of the Bush era and Iraq War, and Community, which is also peppered with solid political humor and jabs. (As for their go-to sources for news and politics, Anthony’s top two are the the New York Times and NPR, while Joe’s are Digg and Reddit.) The day I interviewed them, they happened to be in Washington, DC, to meet with the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus.
According to Joe, the brothers pushed to make their Captain America political thriller even more political and topical than it initially was. “There were already things in the script that just needed to be pulled out to make it more [relevant],” he recalls. One of the film’s stars, Robert Redford, was approached for the role in large part because he starred in the 1975 political thriller Three Days of the Condor.
“[That film] was a big influence on this movie,” Joe says. “You could really call this movie ‘Three Days of Captain America,’ if you wanted to. The structure is so similar…We felt like we had a decent shot at getting [Redford] because the script had a political component to it and we thought that might motivate him.”
But don’t take any of this to mean the film is a stern lecture on American foreign policy. It’s thrilling as hell, and also the best to emerge in the recent string of Marvel movies. “We’re action fetishists,” Joe says. “And we love ’70s thrillers.” The brothers drew on the influence of some of their favorite action-flick moments: The famous bank heist and shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat. William Friedkin’s The French Connection. John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man. John McTiernan’s Predator. Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption. (And for the Washington, DC-set car chase in The Winter Soldier, the brothers consulted YouTube, searching for videos of actual car chases. One video—wherein two escaped convicts in Brazil get stuck in traffic and plow through cars as police pursue them on foot—was especially helpful.) “Choreographing action, it’s like choreographing a Broadway show,” Anthony says.
But at the heart of the explosion and melee -filled film are the political themes, includingtargeted killing. “The question is where do you stop?” Joe says. “If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there’s 1,000? What if we find out there’s 10,000? What if it’s a million? At what point do you stop?”
Here’s a clip from the new Captain America:
You know, some say that the Zionists in Hollywood are allowing these kinds of movies to be released in order to give the people a false sense that many people in and out of the government are awake to all the government conspiracies and are trying to do something about it, so then the people at home watching won’t have to worry so much and just go on with their lives and is just a way for the Zionists to cool down the masses.
However, I’m seeing it as being more to it than that. I’m seeing it as a Zionist group which is desperately trying to spur the masses (whether it be controlled or oppositional forces) in order to promote civil and global war much like they did in the Civil War, WWI and WWII when the American people refused to go to war and the MSM media controlled by the Zionists were finding any way they could (finally resorting to the intentional German sub incident in WWI and Pearl Harbor incident in WII) to get the people involved in it.
I see the Zionists are losing and unless they get the people to go to war FOR them soon, all of their NWO plans that they have spent years in creating and developing will fall apart. In WWI and WWII, they had newspapers. Now they have Hollywood and the MSM. It’s no different.
I’m off to see it now, NC. Be back later this afternoon.
Hey, I’ll be seeing it tomorrow. Don’t spoil it for me. 😆
The good guys win. Later. 😆
More ridiculous movies from the Semitismic scourge in Hollywhine. More reasons to throw out your t.v. and stop going to the movie theatres. If you feel the need for good entertainment, go see a good Mozart opera or ballet. Women like that better anyways and take your children to stage plays, much much better for educational purposes. I’ve been raising kids in my home for over 20 years now. Turned off the cable years ago. Don’t miss it a bit and I live in Los Angeles. My kids have been home-schooled for years but still do the state testing. They are grade levels above the kids in their age group. Classical educations- nothing can compare…
Opera, ballet, and stage plays suck, dude. I quit watching t.v. over 5 years ago, and with the improvements in special effects over the years, movies are one of the best forms of entertainment out there.
Besides, the NWO LOVES to forecast their plans in the movies these days, IF you’re intelligent enough to figure it out.
I live in L.A. too, and I need something more spectacular than opera (gag), ballet (gag), or stage plays (gag) to help me escape the insanity of this place for a least a couple hours now and then.
The reason movies like this are allowed is simple.
To shift blame away from the jews.
Sorry if I’m spoiling anything but the “nazis”
of course are to blame. Its always anyone else but the jews.