What’s cool about that scene is that you can actually see the different kinds of baseline power and skill when each person fights against Bucky! It creates a situation where each superhero, just as they are, has to fight without warning.
Sam gets taken out immediately because the Soldier sneaks up on him. He didn’t get a chance to think or plan, which is how Sam operates in a fight – in CATWS, he came from behind and took out the HYDRA soldiers. But as soon as he’s conscious, Sam makes a tactical decision, just like a soldier: he goes after Zemo, because he knows he can’t take Bucky on without any gear. Sam recognizes the distraction for what it is – Zemo’s escape:
Tony fights intelligently, using the environment to his advantage. He sneaks up on Bucky, uses sonic and flash bombs, and anything he grabs becomes a weapon. He also twists the battle to always centre around his tech, which takes split-second calculations in a fight. But when that tech fails… physically, Tony is just a regular man, and he’s easily defeated.
Then Sharon fights. She’s FBI trained, bold and unafraid, and could easily take down a skilled fighter… but she’s only human, and she’s inexperienced in fighting enhanced beings. She’s also not skilled enough in her fighting style – her movements are more about force (which does nothing to Bucky, being inherently stronger). When she tries to bring Bucky down, Sharon puts her weight onto Bucky’s metal arm, and uses her fists to fight, so Bucky just shakes her off. It’s not enough.
Natasha takes over, and you can see the difference immediately: she’s exceptionally skilled in combat and has been trained to fight enhanced beings. She sneaks up on Bucky while he’s distracted with Sharon, hitting vulnerable areas and then backing out of his range. Natasha uses her Widow move, coming at Bucky from behind, using his human arm for leverage so he can’t toss her off, and she gets quite a few hits to Bucky’s head using her elbows, not her fists. Nat isn’t enhanced, but she’s holding her own… until Bucky defeats her with the metal arm. But I find their fighting styles to be eerily similar.
T’Challa then enters the fray. It’s now Enhanced vs Enhanced, and you can see how the playing field levels in terms of physical strength: T’Challa’s punches are more effective, and his hits cause Bucky to stumble. But T’Challa underestimates Bucky’s strength, likely because he’s never fought The Soldier before now. He’s also inexperienced compared to Bucky, because he’s young and new at this; you can see him experimenting in his attempt to subdue Bucky. It’s a time-consuming fight, but Bucky would have won in the end. So there’s potential – T’Challa thinks on his feet and is a skilled fighter – but without the suit, he’s not quite there yet.
And, like all of them, T’Challa is only trying to detain Bucky, not kill him… but the Winter Soldier is willing to kill them, and that makes a huge difference. The caged animal is always going to be stronger and more volatile, and that automatically gives Bucky an edge.
What the Winter Soldier doesn’t realize, though, is that Steve is in the same boat; he doesn’t care what has to be done, as long as he gets Bucky back. After he gets over the initial shock of Bucky’s mindcontrol, Steve is a formidable opponent: he’s enhanced, he’s skilled, he’s experienced, he’s familiar with the Soldier’s fighting style… but mostly, he doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He’ll go down with Bucky if that’s what it takes. And that’s where Steve wins over the Soldier: his love for Bucky gives him that upper hand.
(Okay, I went off on a tangent. But I just really like that scene!)
Unfortunately I can’t make gifs so I will just reblog all of those. If you’re wondering who all these people in the Black Panther trailer are (it goes by very quickly!). I have some canon for you:
My best friend pet sat a cat named Lenny who was so spherical that if you ignored his legs, you could calculate his exact volume and surface area from his circumference. Like literally, this cat was so fat that he was a geometric perfection, less of a body and more a mathematical diagram. So fat. So so fat. A black basketball that meowed. And he moved with an aristocratic grace. If he wanted to jump up into your lap, by god he would jump up into your lap with the blithe self-assurance of a cat who has never considered he might fail. He balanced on his feet with a ballerina’s poise. He was a cat who looked like he should have been wearing a top hat and a monocle, and he should have had 12 children whom he loved dearly, and if he spoke, it would be the posh kind of English and he’d say “right-o” without any irony as he died of gout. I met this cat once, and I love him so much it hurts just to think about it.
So.
Some time when he is on the run doing the whole Secret Avenger thing, Sam Wilson picks up a cat. Maybe it’s a stray, a scrawny sort of sorry beast you find in back alleys and under bushes, the kind of animal that demands you drop everything and attend to this little rag of helplessness, and maybe that’s exactly what Sam did and he kept attending to it and look at how beautiful his cat is now. Or maybe Sam stole (borrowed) a car one day and neglected to see the cat carrier in the back, and oh my god, he just stole someone’s cat, he just stole someone’s cat, and Sam is feeling like the worst person in the world, until Steve finds some paperwork that says this cat was about to get dropped off at the pound, at which point Sam switches over into pure rage because who would ever get rid of this cat. Or maybe Sam just goes to the pound one day, and when Steve comes back to their apartment, they own a cat now. Steve rolls with it; he knows Sam’s lost a lot. And. Well. It is a hell of a cat.
(“I’m just saying, this cat could have fed a family of twelve in the Depression,” Steve says as he pets the sheer mass of feline opulence in his lap, and Sam’s like, “We get it, Cap, you’re old.”)
And Sam realizes that he has to name this cat. And he looks at this creature, this pure and perfect cat of unparalleled majesty, and there’s only one name that he can think to give it.
And at some point, during some crisis, they team up with T’Challa once more to take out, I don’t know, a evil space robot or something. And when they’re done and the world is saved, Sam is like, “Hey man, you oughta hang out with us before you head back,” and he says this because 1) hell yeah T’Challa should come hang out with them, that would be so fucking cool, and it would feel almost like being back at the Compound, a bunch of good people hanging out together after doing good things, and all of a sudden Sam misses the Avengers in a way he can’t talk about with Steve because Steve will just apologize again and, like, that’s not it. That’s not the point.
“Sure,” says T’Challa, who looks too good for a man standing there in half a cat costume.
Maybe Sam’s a little too rah-rah American to pay much head to royals, but damn does he remember that T’Challa is a king as Sam opens the door to the shitty apartment they’ve been hiding in. It’s secret, which means it’s terrible, which means that there’s barely anything that Sam would want T’Challa to touch, let alone sit in, and Steve’s already peeled off to claim first dibs on the shower, and Sam’s just standing there trying to think of something to say that’s not incredibly awkward.
“Boy, you should have seen where I was staying before you helped arrest me,” Sam says. “That was a cool place.”
Nailed it.
T’Challa looks like he is trying to think of something to say too, something that’s like probably along the lines of yeah sorry I helped arrest you, thought your friend was a murderer lol by the way he’s still fine in our freezers, when they hear the soft thud that means the cat’s woken up. It sounds a bit like thunder from far away. And then there’s the cheerful tinkling of his bell as the cat trots merrily out into the living room. If you put him next to a 19th century country gentleman named Lord Faulteroy of Missionhillwestshire, Sam is not sure he could say which one is which.
“My god,” T’Challa says, which is what most people say when they see Sam’s cat for the first time.
“Yeah,” Sam replies, and then as T’Challa kneels and reaches out a hand, Sam realizes something he probably should have realized before he brought the King of Wakanda here. “Ummm,” Sam manages to get out before T’Challa reads the tag on the cat’s collar.
There’s a brief silence.
“There are two ‘l’s in my name,” T’Challa says as he pulls as much of Lil T’Chala into his lap as he can manage.
“Petsmart fucked that up,” Sam says. “That’s not on me.” It was in fact on him. Sam was too sure that he knew how to spell T’Challa’s name without checking. He’d own up to the mistake, because yeah, he feels like a dick about it, but he’s already lied about it being Petsmart’s fault to Steve because otherwise Steve will just give him that grin and be like, have you heard of this thing called Google? Answers all your questions. Sam couldn’t handle that.
T’Challa smiles. Then he bows his head. He solemnly takes his namesake’s front paw, and says with a grave voice that Sam will learn to recognize someday as T’Challa’s joking voice, “Nice to meet you, your highness. Are you also the greatest warrior in your land?”
And in this universe, in this place, that’s the moment Sam lowkey falls in love.
No worries! I’m not gonna dig up the original post but basically: the cameo I didn’t care for because it was gratuitous. It was an ad for Spider-man The Movie rather than a necessary or useful part of the story. I mean it was fun, I liked seeing it, I loved the Peter-Tony interaction, just thought it was waaaaay out of place in the narrative.
I don’t care that much about the million spider-man reboots one way or another – I don’t watch them, so *shrug* but a big long Spider-man product placement in this film wasn’t good for the movie we were watching, even if it was clearly great marketing for the Spider-man film.
So, in that sense, nobody would have had as much of an impact because nobody else had any reason to be there – Spider-man’s only purpose was to advertise his film. I’d prefer to see that aspect taken out entirely rather than replaced with another character. But if we were going to make a film that needed the boost and HAD to awkwardly shove another character into Peter Parker’s place in this film, I’d have preferred either Miles Morales or Kamala Khan. Miles and Kamala, as heroes of color, might actually need the boost; Peter Parker didn’t really, people were gonna go see his movie regardless. (As a friend pointed out, that would mean two nonwhite characters who survive the entire movie, and that probably breaks some kind of rule – ETA Sam and Rhodey do also survive; I was thinking of new-introduced characters, sorry that wasn’t clear.)
Disney doesn’t have the guts to do a Black Spider-man or a movie about a Muslim superhero, though, so we got Awkward Teenaged Cameo Peter Parker instead.
As Chadwick Boseman pointed out in a very salty interview – there were 3 black men and all of them survived the movie.
sam wilson (under his breath): soft kitty warm kitty
t’challa: do not
sam: little ball of fur
t’challa: i will claw you in the fucking face
sam: happy kitty sleepy kitty
t’challa: you know cats eat birds
sam: PURR PURR PURR
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