Cultural Crossovers #9: Captain America - The Winter Soldier

Once more into the cinema, dear friends, once more:

• Captain America continues to be awesome.
• He don’t need no steenkin’ parachute, although why the vibranium ain’t glowing is a mystery.
• Ah, multitasking. Always room for a banter thread.
• And this is why concealed mission objectives are a bad idea unless you’re concealing them from yourself with a conditional-release trigger. Even for compartmentalization purposes.
• Heli-cruisers, is it?
• Ah, the idealist versus the pragmatist. The audience sides with the idealist. (The sentinels in the audience sigh softly.)
• Oh, that reunion. It could make a stone weep, and we all still hate mortality.
• Hiding things from yourself, Fury, or something sinister going on?
• Nice car. Smart. Just the thing for a nice day out in hostile territory.
• …not quite good enough, but damn close.
• The Winter Soldier, I presume?
• Well, that’s a nice trick, Mister Cyborg.
• Oh, he is so not dead.
• And, Pierce, this is possibly the most obvious frame job since they hung the Mona Lisa.
• Son, you don’t have enough STRIKE units. The whole of SHIELD doesn’t have enough STRIKE units.
• And, as usual, the Council of Holographic People is being played like an organ-grinder’s… organ. The Imperial Security Executive is deeply unimpressed.
• Nice moves – and you schmucks call yourselves a tac team?
• YOU UPLOADED A MIND-STATE WITH THAT!? (in a bunker? with a box of scraps?)
• Oh, you cunning bastards. When working with a population of kneelers, anyway.
• (And how the hell was Fury blind to this all these years? This is why the Imperial Service has three, count ’em, three, Departments of Impropriety.)
• “I shoot my housekeeper to demonstrate how unnecessarily evil I am!”
• Oh, it’s Senator Asshat being… well, yeah, exactly what we’d expect.
• And that’s how one conducts an interrogation. Also, really nice jetpackoskeleton.
• Ah, proleptic algorithms. Nice tech, lots of useful applications, shame about the grotesque abuse of it here.
• Well, shit. How did you end up there? And then?
• Excellent timing, Agent Hill.
• Oh, Rumlow, don’t you know that the traditional cliché is to make the prisoners dig their own graves?
• Called it.
• Ah, more freezing, after a run through the brain laundry. That makes sense.
• Please note: the tech in your laundry also sucks.
• …and yeah, seriously, when you’re this compromised, you BURN IT TO THE GROUND. And then shoot the ashes into the sun. And then blow up the sun.
• Good impromptu speech, that.
• And glorious moment-stepping!
• And then, sudden transparency. Everyone in the audience who doesn’t secretly work for the Fifth Directorate applauds. So does everyone who does, because, y’know, secrecy.
• “Order only comes through pain”? Man, HYDRA are all about the fucked-up mottos.
• Well, this is a spectacular mess.
• Nice catch!
• And after their respective multiple high-risk plays, the entire audience would be more than delighted to go into battle alongside either Cap or Black Widow. Any day of the week.
• Well, that’s a hell of a loose end to tie up.
• …and there are some idiots playing with the scepter of mindfucking. That’s going to work out well.

Also doesn’t take much cultural explanation, same as the last one in this sub-series, except for two really big details:

One, how did you get a supposedly non-evil organization to think that Project Insight doing preemptive executions was a good idea (don’t tell us, pragmatism – which is why we don’t like pragmatists around here); and

Two, how in all the blazes of nucleonic eggbeating fornication did, I repeat myself, Fury let SHIELD get that compromised? I mean, there’s suspension of disbelief, but based on previous films and characterization, we’re not supposed to think of him as hilariously incompetent, so…

Wut?