I will have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the first Captain America movie, and I was surprised that I liked it so much. I think the reason why I liked it was because it showed the world of the Greatest Generation combined with retrofuturistic technology that I always love.

The first Captain America film ended on a note that was only touched about in The Avengers movie. That is, Steve Rogers is a man out of time, waking up in a world where the great war is over and values have changed. In fact, the film opens with the Captain looking over a list of things he missed like “Disco” or “Star Wars/Star Trek”. I am actually told that this list changes depending what country you saw it in. Weird.

The film starts off by showing that Captain America is a government agent tacking special missions for SHIELD that never seem to bleed into the television show Agents of SHIELD. When Nick Fury is targeted by an unknown group of assassins, Captain America realizes that he can’t trust those in his own agency.

The film then becomes an espionage film that is a mix of the first Mission: Impossible movie, The Bourne Trilogy, and The Fuguitive. It’s one of those films where the hero isn’t fighting for the establishment, but the establishment is coming after him/her. From there, the hero has to figure out how to stop the bad guys’ master plan with another master plan.

The Winter Soldier refers to a trained assassin that turns out to be an old friend of the Captain’s. I won’t bother spoiling who it is, but like The Amazing Spider-man 2, it isn’t a surprise if you know the Source material. In all honesty, you could have done this film without him.

As you can see by the poster, Captain America and Nick Fury are big players in this film, and we get to see more of them. What is really strange is to see the one and only Robert Redford in this film. Since he is no stranger to intrigue films like 3 Days of the Condor, Sneakers, and Spy Game, I just can’t see why I don’t believe he would be in this film. Sort of like why I didn’t believe that Kevin Bacon was in an X-men film.

I wouldn’t say that The Winter Soldier is a bad film, but it suffers from what I call “big storyline syndrome”. The film is quite epic in its scale, maybe more than it should, climaxing with three flying heli-carriers designed to shoot up all of America’s enemies, which is apparently everyone. The way they have to disable these carriers seems just impractical, and every Internet critic has wondered why Steve just doesn’t call the Avengers in to help.

Yeah, not calling for help was a big thing in solo superhero comics, but solo superhero stories have the ability to develop a single character. Instead, The Winter Soldier seems to focus on this giant epic story, but I would rather see the story of Captain America interacting in a world that could be teetering on the brink of a dictatorship. This is the plot that The Winter Soldier should have focused more on, but like its comic book source material, a flashy action setpiece is no substitute for great characters.