With its superb fight scenes and stand out performances by a
talented cast, this movie is a fan favourite and cornerstone of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe.
I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say about
it.
So I’m going to start with the little disclaimer I have for
this series as a quick reminder.
Once again I’m rating
the depiction and use of torture, not the movie itself. I’m trying to
take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence
of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims
and torturers.
The relevant plot details are, well, most of the film. I’ll
try to be as brief as I can.
Steve Roger’s (aka Captain America) boss at SHIELD (Nick
Fury) is assassinated by a mysterious man known as ‘The Winter Soldier’. Before
dying Nick tells Steve that SHIELD itself has been compromised and gives him a
usb.
On refusing to hand over the usb Steve is attacked by a
large group of his former colleges in a lift.
He escapes and teams up with Natasha Romanov aka the Black
Widow. Together they discover that SHIELD has been infiltrated by Hydra, a Nazi
organisation who are particularly interested in SHIELD’s latest weapons project
which they could use to kill millions.
The Winter Soldier, a character who is heavily coded as
mentally ill, is ordered to assassinate them by Hydra.
Steve and Natasha track down a SHIELD/Hydra agent and
threaten him with death or grievous bodily harm unless he gives them
information. They get the information they want.
They clash with the Winter Soldier and during the scuffle he
is unmasked and revealed as Steve’s long lost wartime friend Bucky Barnes.
Steve, Natasha and their friend Sam are all captured by Hydra.
The audience is told that Bucky, apparently now a super-soldier,
was captured by Hydra, tortured and brainwashed. He has been their best
assassin for decades. A scene of his memory being ‘wiped’ follows with props
that are heavily reminiscent of ECT machines.
Steve, Natasha and Sam stage an assault on SHIELD HQ in an
effort to stop the launch of the new weapons. In the process Steve takes over
the comm system and announces Hydra’s plan to the entire base.
Two sympathetic characters are shown resisting Hydra demands
when threatened with death. One of them dies for his trouble.
Steve and Bucky fight until the last weapon is disarmed.
With the threat of civilian casualties gone Steve refuses to fight Bucky and
tries instead to appeal to his humanity, asking him to remember their
friendship. Bucky beats him unconscious but stops short of killing him.
I’m giving it 0/10
The Good
And well that really is the problem: with regards to torture
I cannot think of more than one good thing about this film. Usually I’d throw
the movie at least one point for a single good scene, but in this case I think
the scene is part of a larger entirely negative trend in the narrative.
1)
The scene I’m thinking of is the attack on Steve in the
lift. About eight or nine people, all armed in various ways, attack Steve at
once. His arms are pinned by several people each while he’s repeatedly shocked
with a device a bit like a cattle prod. This basic set up is extremely true to
life for many cases of police brutality, although a Taser would have been a
more likely weapon.
The Bad
Where to begin?
1) Every major
‘good’ character in this movie engages in torture.
Our heroes Steve, Sam and Natasha
torture a Hydra agent for information by threatening to kill him, then throwing
him off a building (Sam catches him before he falls to his death).
This is not just portrayed as good and reasonable but it is played
for laughs. The scene is used to extend a joke about Steve’s dating life.
3)
The ‘bad guy’ they torture does not resist once they
have tortured him. This is extremely unlikely. The data we have at the moment
suggests that torture makes people far
more likely to resist.
4)
This stands in contrast to the way ‘good’ characters act when threatened
with death or torture. The film consistently shows ‘good’ people resisting torture and ‘bad’ (or in
Bucky’s case mentally ill) people complying
under torture. This is not only wrong; it’s frankly sickening and perpetuates
extremely harmful stereotypes about victims and torture.
5)
Brainwashing does not work and is a central, important
plot device in the film. The story simply does not work unless violence,
torture and pain can ‘force’ a victim to change sides.
6)
Torture cannot change hearts and minds. It cannot force
someone to support or work for a cause they are strongly against.
7)
Memory really
does not work in the way the film suggests. Anything that could remove old,
strongly held memories, such as those of childhood or the victim’s name, would also have removed their memory of how to
drive a car, fight hand to hand, use a gun or virtually anything else Bucky
does in the film.
8)
Even accounting for the sci-fi idea of removing specific memories, torture and pain
would not force a victim to comply with their captors. In fact it makes
resistance more likely. A Bucky Barnes
without the memory of his friends or the war would still almost certainly
resist Hydra simply because they caused him pain.
9)
There has never been a recorded case of ECT machines
being used to torture. They have been
used as a form of abuse in some hospitals but they have never been used by
military or terrorist organisations such as Hydra. This is another inaccurate
stereotype: the idea that torture is ‘scientific’ or ‘high-tech’.
10) The
film assumes that a victim of systematic abuse over decades would be physically and mentally capable of complex
assassinations. Instead the sort of damage to both physical and mental health
this would inflict means that Bucky and Natasha should both be noticeably less capable than
their colleagues. Instead they are more capable than their colleagues,
implying that abuse made them ‘better’ at committing wanton acts of violence.
11) Both
this film and other Marvel films state that Natasha has both suffered and
committed abuse, yet she shows no severe symptoms. This seems to be narratively
linked to the idea that she is ‘strong’. And I detest the notion that a basic,
bodily reaction to trauma makes victims weak.
Overview
I think the word for this movie’s use of torture is ‘dire’.
It’s not just consistently wrong.
It’s not just based around an impossible, trope laden
premise.
It’s not just running through a check list of every harmful
stereotype that regularly turns up in fiction.
The movie supports the notion that the torture of ‘bad
people’ does not ‘count’.
It shows ‘heroes’, particularly individuals that the
audience is supposed to think are morally above reproach, engaging in torture
and the plot supports and justifies
their doing so. It tells us that really ‘good’, ‘pure’ characters, such as the
titular hero, threaten ‘bad guys’ with torture and then stand back to watch
their friends do the torturing.
It shows victims (ie Bucky) as dangerous and violent and without other symptoms. It shows
torturers like Natasha as without
symptoms. It shows torture as a successful interrogation tactic and shows
torture fundamentally changing hearts and
minds.
Even accounting for sci-fi elements, the movie’s attitude to
and treatment of torture is consistently false, dangerous and fundamentally against the basic principles of human
rights.
Human rights are not for ‘good people’. They are for everyone.
Whatever their race, gender, creed, politics, or crime. Torture is never justified.
And for that reason this movie’s treatment of torture is
quite possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. It is a shining example of how much
torture apologia pervades popular culture.
Question re: Bucky (setting the “that’s not how memory works” aside) – I think the central premise was less that he was tortured into complying and switching sides, and more that there was some complex psychological mechanism that included him no longer being able to tell sides apart (possibly as a result of memory loss), some extreme form of Stockholm syndrome, PTSD and anything that is leftover from the army.
This is a harsh thing to read when I still want to pretend CAWS is the only MCU movie I enjoy without reservations… (ʘᗩʘ)
i don’t hold catws quite in the same regard so this was an interesting read.
has gotten a lot of flack, and I don’t disagree that it could and should have been handled a lot better, but even as it is, I really really like what it says, or rather, confirms about
Bucky.
So this response to the post I did on the physical issues that Bucky Barnes probably has as a result from his time with HYDRA (strictly from a massage therapist’s POV) got me wondering: how much WOULD the metal arm weigh?
But that’s comic books. What about in the movie perspective? Well, let’s look at it.
In CA: TWS, the arm is shown to deflect bullets from a handgun fired at close range with no apparent damage and when Bucky punches Steve’s shield neither is damaged. From this I think it’s safe to say that at least the outer surface of Bucky’s arm is made of vibranium.
From that we can also extrapolate that the outer vibranium plates, which were shown shifting around a lot in TWS, must be about the same thickness as Steve’s shield.
There aren’t any measurements or calculators for the weight of imaginary vibranium, but in CA: TFA, Howard Stark mentions that vibranium is one-third the weight of steel. That means that, if the shield were made out of carbon steel, it’d be 36lbs (12 x 3 = 36).
A circle of steel that’s 30" across and 36lbs would be about .18" in thickness.
Thus, Steve’s shield is .18" in thickness.
And so are the outer vibranium plates of Bucky’s arm.
That steel weight calculator doesn’t have a cylindrical option, but this one does.
Circumference of a human arm is a little difficult to figure–obviously personal fitness causes the size of one’s arm muscles to vary quite a bit. Various sites that I’ve looked at indicate that a highly-fit man could expect his biceps to be 17" in circumference at their widest and his forearms to be about 13" at their widest. (For reference, I’m a not-fit woman and my biceps are 13.5" and my forearms are 11".) Obviously that’s at their widest points, so I’m going to knock 2" off both of these measurements to make it more equal across the length of the limb.
Varioussites helped me figure out that for a 5’11" man, a normal forearm length would be about 10" and upper-arm length would be about 15". (My forearm is 9" and my upper arm is 12".)
Thus: assuming that Bucky’s forearm is 11" around (which is a conservative estimate) and 10" long, the metal plating covering that area, at a .18" thickness, would weigh in steel about 9lbs. Divide by 3 and in vibranium that’d be 3lbs.
Assuming that Bucky’s upper arm is 15" around (again, conservative) and 15" long, the metal plating covering that area, at a .18" thickness, would weigh in steel about 18lbs. Divide by 3 and in vibranium that’d be 6 lbs.
6 + 3 = 9lbs. The outer vibranium plating on Bucky’s forearm and upper arm weighs about 9lbs. (Based on conservative estimates of arm circumference.)
That’s just the outer plating on his forearm and upper arm. That doesn’t count his hand.
Looking at body segment percentage weights, we see that in terms of typical body percentages, a hand usually weighs .65% of the total body weight compared to 1.87% for the forearm. Thus, the hand usually weighs about 1/3rd of the forearm.
Assuming that holds true for the metal hand, then the vibranium plating on the hand would be about 1lb.
6 + 3 + 1 = 10lbs. The outer vibranium plating on Bucky’s whole arm weighs 10lbs.
If we bump Bucky’s height up to 5’11" (actor Sebastian Stan’s height), the ideal body weight for a 5’11" man with a large build tops out at 184lbs. Looking at the body percentage index again, we see that typically, a whole human arm is about 5.7% of a person’s bodyweight. So for a 5’11" guy with a large build at 184lbs, that’s about 10.5lbs.
The outer plating on Bucky’s whole arm already weighs about as much as his regular flesh-and-bone arm, assuming that a) it’s made of vibranium, a very light metal, b) the plating is the narrowest possible width that can deflect bullets, and c) the circumference of the arm isn’t very big. All of which would make the plating a lot heavier than what I’ve calculated.
Young men standing on the top of their own graves Wondering when Jesus comes are they gonna be saved Cruelty to the winner, bishop tells the king his lies Maybe you’re a mourner Maybe you deserve to die -Soldier Side, System of a Down
writers of avengers fic consistently misunderstand this phrase, and honestly i don’t blame them, it’s pretty confusing in context. bucky barnes is a sniper. snipers use rifles. fury was shot outta nowhere, by a sniper, presumably with a rifle. and if you’re not a humongous gun nut, you probably don’t automatically think slug == shotgun, not rifle. nor will you know that ‘rifling’ can mean two different things.
lucky for you, i am a humongous gun nut, so i’m here to sort that out for you!
okay, for starters, shotgun barrels are, in fact, rifled. and we all know you trace a bullet by the marks the barrel’s rifling leaves on it. so how could the winter soldier’s leavings make the ballistics techs at SHIELD shrug helplessly? well, because it wasn’t a bullet, it was a slug. a shotgun slug. and in shotgun slugs, ‘rifling’ doesn’t mean the grooves in the barrel, it means the fin-like protrusions on the slug itself, like so:
that’s an american-made big game slug, and it’s got those fins to keep it twisting despite the drag of the cork back end, which acts to stabilize it with air resistance. short range, but plenty effective if you’re hunting moose.
but the winter soldier was hunting bigger game: nick fury. through a brick wall. which is why he used something more like this:
stainless steel saboted slugs. as you can see, they have no rifling – that is, no twisty fins. they rely on their forward-weighted mass for their accuracy, which is tolerably good up to about 100 meters.
there are a number of russian makers of these, going back to soviet days, but you can also easily machine your own. these don’t deform on impact, meaning they wouldn’t have great stopping power against, say, a charging polar bear – but also meaning they keep their trajectory when going through obstructions like the wall of steve’s apartment. and that plastic sabot, or boot, which makes it fit tight and grip in the barrel, flies off when fired, taking with it any identifying marks from the barrel rifling.
i don’t think we ever got to see what bucky fired these from, but it would probably have been something like this:
a russian vepr 12 shotgun, which looks a whole lot more like a rifle than a shotgun at first glance. tactical shotguns like these are popular with law enforcement for the same reason bucky used one to shoot fury – urban combat. right through the dang wall.
so there you have it. ‘russian slug, no rifling’ means bucky came loaded for bear.
For anyone getting their knickers in a twist over Steve’s AOU line about “language,” just remember:
Bucky Barnes
had the world’s
biggest
potty
mouth
…And Steve was the one calling him out on it half the time.
So even if Steve Rogers does occasionally curse (and I’m not saying he wouldn’t – he grew up in Brooklyn and he was a soldier, it stands to reason he knew how), as an officer he was responsible for keeping his men reasonably respectable, and likely got into the habit of playfully chiding Bucky about his foul language.
So when Steve says “it just slipped out” – he probably forgot for a moment, in the heat of battle in winter in Europe, that he wasn’t in occupied France with the commandos, and it wasn’t Bucky cussing on the radio.
This isn’t Steve with a stick up his ass. This is Steve right out of the comics, still ridden with PTSD and occasionally forgetting which theater of war he’s in, slipping into the comfort of teasing his best friend.
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