Tag: captain america

Okay so seeing this gif makes me want to give major props to the set dressers as well as the cinematographer. The meta – let me show you it.

In the background between Sam and Steve we have a very modern style generic veteran poster. The words you can just make out ‘You Fought For Us, We Fight For You.” Appropriate for Sam on several levels, especially as we go into the second half of the movie where Sam chooses to fight for Cap. They give him that specific dialog ‘Hey, Captain America needs my help’.

Behind Steve we literally have his past. We have an old school (this style of illustration became popular during WW2 and except when you want to hit the nostalgia hard, stopped being used in the 1970s) illustration of an eagle in flight carrying a flag in its talons. So it not only echoes the propaganda that Steve himself would be used to seeing but they literally put it right behind his head, he’s stepping out of the past and into the future.

The spacing of the shot is very deliberate too. You have Sam in open space, moving back and forth a bit as he speaks (yes, this is also Mackie’s style but they gave him room to move). He’s backlit by the open door. Steve is, from this angle, very grounded against the door frame, the dark wooden column. He’s also standing very still. We do get a nod and a head tilt but his movements are slower and smaller than Sam’s. [I could do a whole other meta on body language in this movie but if you just look at the gif you can infer tons of stuff.]

sherloques:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Audio Commentary:

“In the MCU where you’ve got these dynamic visual characters like the Hulk, Iron Man and
Thor, how do you introduce a guy who glides and talks to birds? All of us pushed for this militaristic
approach to him. Basically, he is a human fighter jet. Sam gets some of the
more dynamic sequences here which is great because it’s really our hope that in
the movie he doesn’t come across as a sidekick, he comes across as a partner to
Cap. It was on the agenda of everyone to make sure that he occupied his own
story space in the movie and didn’t feel like an afterthought. This mission
would not have been accomplished without his contribution.”

sherloques:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Audio Commentary:

“This is the revelation of Bucky. We wanted to do it when the whole world was falling in on Steve. To find out that the one thing he thought he knew was not even true was like having the final rug pulled out from under him. The worst thing that could happen to Steve is “my best friend, who I thought was dead, is a killing machine”. It’s so rare that you have such an emotional connection between a hero and a villain. Best friends turned into mortal enemies is in a way even more tragic.”

sherloques:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Audio Commentary:

“We’re heading towards the midpoint of the movie where in conspiracy thrillers you figure out who’s after you and what the truth is, so you can turn around and go forward. And we hit upon the idea that the secret place they went to find the answers to was where Steve was, in essence, born, where it all began. This scene of Steve seeing himself in the past was a very talked about sequence. We all knew we wanted to intimate some sort of memory from him. Using footage from the previous film seemed like a cop out, so we were trying to find a new way to express again this identity crisis he’s going through, and also to remind the audience of what this place actually was. So we tried to externalize it, use these ghosts running through the location so that you get context for it. But also that moment where he stares at himself is a very sad moment. Again, it’s, “What have I lost and what have I gained?”

sherloques:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Audio Commentary:

“One of the more memorable lines by Cap in the film is, “This isn’t freedom, this is fear.” It’s probably the theme of the movie. That’s what he chooses to stand against in the film. There were a couple lines that when we got them really crystallized where he stood. That was one of them, another coming later was, “I guess I just like to know who I’m fighting.” This really helped to understand where this guy, who might seem one-dimensional to some people, works in the machinery of the story.”