Five awesome ways they bent physics for 'The Avengers'

[Jolie Rouge]

There's a bit of reality behind Captain America's shield and Thor's lightning
By Katharine Gammon

The fiction world has long been full of cool science and technology that eventually sneaks its way into real life. Flip phones, for example, were dreamed up on "Star Trek" long before they made it to market. Comic books are no different. "The Avengers," in which Marvel’s greatest superheroes join forces to conquer world-threatening evil, get their turn on the big screen this week.

It turns out that besting a supervillain requires bending a few rules of physics. Here are some of the amazing feats of physics to check out while you’re watching:

Captain America’s shield

Captain America harnesses the power of "Vibranium," a metal extracted from a meteorite that crashed in Africa. The shield is capable of absorbing, storing and redirecting kinetic energy, and the material becomes more powerful as more weapons are turned against it. In the movie, Captain America redirects a shot from Iron Man’s repulsor ray into a bunch of Chitauri warriors sneaking up on Iron Man.

“The property that lends Vibranium its remarkable characteristics is its ability to store or channel energy in its atomic structure,” said Suveen Mathaudhu, a program manager in the materials science division of the U.S. Army Research Office. He recently contributed to a Journal of Materials story on the science of the Avengers.

Scientists have yet to find a material that gets tougher the more it gets knocked around, but battlefield materials are getting increasingly better at dissipating impact energy.

Thor controls lightning
The Norse god Thor is able to summon lightning by wielding Mjolnir, his trusty enchanted hammer. Thor can channel the storm’s fury into devastating energy blasts that can destroy even secondary Adamantium. In real life, companies are tinkering with artificial lightning. Applied Energetics, a company that develops lasers and particle beam systems, has built a lightning gun that can stall cars or defuse roadside bombs.

Wireless power for aliens
In the movie, shape-shifting Chitauri aliens are wirelessly powered by their mothership. While wireless powering (especially for something so big) remains difficult and inefficient for non-super beings, many researchers, including a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are working to make this a reality. The most common form of wireless power transmission — for example, the consumer devices that can charge cellphones — use direct induction followed by resonant magnetic induction, but other methods under consideration include electromagnetic radiation in the form of microwaves or lasers.

Iron Man’s suit
“One thing we can learn is that many, many science fiction heroes are scientists and engineers who use their innovative scientific discoveries to support or lend them their super-characteristics,” Mathaudhu said. Iron Man (alias Tony Stark) is a prime example. Iron Man’s armored suits give him superhuman strength and durability, flight, repulsors and the unibeam projector. They also have energy shields, an electromagnetic pulse generator, arm-mounted cannons and projectile launchers, various tools like a drill or detachable hip lasers, and can absorb and release energy. In real life, exoskeletons developed for military purposes have been shown to support soldiers as they run at speeds of up to 10 mph while lugging 200 extra pounds of gear.

Interdimensional portals
Even a demigod like Loki needed a scientist (astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig) to build a device to open up an inter-dimensional portal. “Scientists often [think in a way] that is predisposed to the limitations of the current physical world. However, science fiction has no such constraints and thus can stimulate creativity and innovation in unique ways. In the fictional world, they are not limited to the technology of today, and are free to image the extreme possibilities of science and materials, which often become realities in the real world in the future,” Mathaudhu said.

In fact, Einsteinian physics do provide hints at how transport through wormholes might be achieved. By current standards, such portals seem wildly unlikely, but no more so than an evil Norse god waging war against a team of superheroes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47302575


Who cares ?? It was an awesome movie !!

[Jolie Rouge]

'The Avengers': 5 Things You Need to Know If You Don't Read Comic Books
May 03, 2012 @ 6:41 pm

"The Avengers" assemble this weekend in what many box office analysts are predicting will be the biggest opening in movie history.

It's an event that Marvel Studios, the company behind the superhero films, has been building up to since "Iron Man" opened in 2008, teasing the super-team flick in each men-in-tights film it sends to theaters. But not everybody grew up reading comics or had the time to watch the nearly half-dozen films that led up to the blockbuster hopeful. To that end, TheWrap has assembled a helpful guide to get you brushed up on the back story behind "earth's mightiest heroes."

Who Exactly Are the Avengers?

Marvel shook up the team's origins when it decided the super-group was ready for its big screen close-up, but here goes. Unlike "The X-Men," they're not social pariahs on the wrong side of the law, and unlike "The Fantastic Four," they're not a family. They're government sponsored and government approved.

In the movie version, the team is backed by an espionage group know as S.H.I.E.L.D. and its eye-patch-wearing chief Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). The membership consists of Captain America (Chris Evans), a World War II-era soldier; the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), an ornery creature with super strength; Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the god of thunder; Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), a rich, acerbic guy in killer armor; Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), a supremely talented archer; and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a Russian spy whose main talent is her disappearing, reappearing accent.

In the comic books, a group consisting of Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, the Ant-Man and the Wasp first united to defeat Thor's brother Loki. On the big screen, the villain remains the Norse god of mischief, but the two insect-inspired do-gooders have been jettisoned.

What the Heck is a Tesseract?

Stumble into "The Avengers" cold, and you're bound to spend a good deal of the film scratching your head and muttering, "What in the name of Odin's beard is a tesseract?"

Allow us to elucidate. The cube is a stunningly powerful object that the U.S. government has in its possession when the film opens and that Loki wants. Frequently referred to in the comics as the cosmic cube, the tesseract gives its owner nearly unlimited power and the ability to open portals between galaxies ... which is pretty handy if, like Loki, you're plotting an alien invasion.

The cube hails from Asgard and previously made cameo appearances in "Iron Man 2" and "Thor," and factored rather prominently in "Captain America." In that film, Captain America's arch-nemesis, the Red Skull, captured the cube and attempted to harness its powers to create a weapon. Things didn't go according to plan, and Red Skull was vaporized while trying to wield the cube. So it's clearly, buyer beware.

Hey That's Not Eric Bana...Or Edward Norton?

There's a reason that Mark Ruffalo dubbed Hulk, "our generation's Hamlet." Every 30-plus-year-old actor seems destined to get a crack at bringing their version of the big green guy to the silver screen. In "The Avengers," Ruffalo becomes the third actor in less than a decade to play Dr. Bruce Banner and his monster alter-ego.

Bana played the part in 2003's "Hulk," and Norton took over the role in 2008's "The Incredible Hulk." Bana left because barely anyone could stomach Ang Lee's ponderous take on the comic book character or his movie's bizarre starfish motif, while Norton reportedly feuded with Marvel over the movie's script and final edit.

Enter Ruffalo, who plays a far less tortured, much more shaggy and Ruffalo-licious Banner. This time, the good doctor has learned to better control the inner anger that unleashes the Hulk, but Loki has a way of getting under even the most Zen-person's skin.

Wait, There's an Alien Invasion?

The Avengers don't just have to best Loki to save the world, they also have to prevent a horde of extraterrestrials from overrunning Manhattan. The brothers from another planet in this case are a race of alien creatures known as the Chitauri. In the comic books, these creatures are shape-shifters who once aided the Nazis in their quest for global domination. On the big screen, however, they mostly keep their skeletal, fish-eyed form.

Although they are technically pulling the strings when it comes to Loki, they have the movie bad guy problem of having really bad aim, while proving to be really easy targets. As outer space menaces go, they're only marginally more threatening than E.T.

Will Spider-Man or Wolverine Pop Up in Future "Avengers" Sequels?

Not likely. Although both characters find themselves at various points in the Marvel mythology as members of the team, neither Spidey nor Wolvey will be suiting up with the gang in the near future. The culprit isn't a lack of big-screen success. The original Spider-Man films grossed nearly $2.5 billion worldwide, and the character is swinging back into theaters this summer in "The Amazing Spider-Man," albeit with Andrew Garfield taking over the wall-crawler role from Tobey Maguire.

Likewise, Wolverine has played a key role in making the X-Men franchise a hit and starred in his own blockbuster spin-off, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." But the rights to these characters are tied up with other studios. Before Marvel was acquired by Disney for $4 billion in 2009, it licensed the rights to many of its most popular characters to other film companies.

To that end, Fox controls the X-Men characters and Sony houses Spider-Man as long as they keep making sequels or reboots to the hit films. Barring a miracle, it's going to be a long time before Iron Man, Spider-Man and Wolverine save the world together.

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/avengers-5-things-you-need-know-if-you-dont-read-comic-books-38401

comments

Since the article failed to actual define what a tesseract is, please allow me.

A tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the cube, that is, the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells. It is also called an 8-cell, a regular octachoron, and a cubic prism, and is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes. Just as a square can be unfolded into two dimensions and form a cross shape, a tesseract can be unfolded into three dimensions that looks like a set of stacked cubes stacked four high, on top of the other, with two wings to the left and the right of the second cube down from the top, like a three dimensional cross.

Below is a Schlegel diagram of a tesseract. Just remember, despite the view, all the angles between the lines are right angles. They just appear otherwise because this is a projection of a four dimensional object on to two dimensional space.

Any reader of A Wrinkle in Time would know this stuff. There is also a great science fiction short story by Robert Heinlein called, "—And He Built a Crooked House—" and first published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1941, that discusses a house in the Hollywood hills built as a tesseract that collapses into the additional necessary dimension after an earthquake.

There isn't anything particularly "a stunningly powerful" about a tesseract any more than a cube or a square is stunningly powerful.

http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1336157074/uploads/mediaembed/images/260/2596/cached75.jpg

..

good comment, I think the part of the Avengers was it brought you to edge of what was technically not , but maybe possible. I think the average writer in those days had to have a minor degree in Chemistry, Physics and a good background in Poly Sci. Fashion however was always a bit unrealistic. I mean can you really move in those things?

...

the movie has nothing to do with the comic books. ..

..

The movie was as good if not better than the hype! To bad the so called " syfy" channel hasn't got a clue as to what people want to watch!

[Jolie Rouge]

The 2012 Avengers when they were in High School
http://chzsetphaserstolol.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/sci-fi-fantasy-the-avengers-in-high-school.jpg

http://img.ifcdn.com/images/dae27a6e0fcb6a6c3330037a47f05b66d4ca8445ae659e9184 939ea7bb6b65e2_1.gif

[Jolie Rouge]

'The Avengers: Age of Ultron'
Elizabeth Olsen confirmed for role in 'Avengers' sequel
Oct. 3, 2013, 2:57 PM EST

http://entimg.s-msn.com/i/150/News/Mar13/Elizabeth_Olsen_150.jpg

The actress has been linked to the role of the Scarlet Witch for months, and now Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Nick Fury in the Marvel franchise, has told The Wall Street Journal that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's sister will be on-set when the sequel starts shooting next year.

He tells the publication, "I know we're shooting in London, that James Spader is Ultron and going to be the bad guy, and that we added Ms. Olsen, but I don't know what she's doing, if she's on the inside or the outside. I haven't seen a script."

The film is set for release in 2015 and also features returning "Avengers" castmates Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner.

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=830608&ocid=ansent11

Elizabeth Olsen In 'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' According To Samuel L. Jackson
By Christopher Rosen 10/03/2013 8:51 am EDT

Samuel L. Jackson does what he wants, up to and including spilling the beans about Elizabeth Olsen's role in "The Avengers: Age of Ultron." In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Jackson confirmed that Olsen will co-star in the "Avengers" sequel.

"I don't know what she's doing, if she's on the inside or the outside," Jackson said, referring to Olsen's onscreen loyalties. "I haven't seen a script.”

Olsen, who is the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, was first rumored for the "Avengers" sequel back in August when the website Bleeding Cool reported she would play Scarlet Witch for director Joss Whedon, a new mutant character who casts hexes for a living. Saoirse Ronan was reportedly the first choice for the part, but the actress downplayed those rumors as "online stuff" in a recent interview.

Whedon has long been a fan of Scarlet Witch and her brother, Quicksilver, even teasing their participation in the "Avengers" sequel as early as April of this year. "I've got these two characters [in the first draft of my script] -- my favorite characters in the comic book, a brother-sister act," Whedon said at the "Iron Man 3" premiere. "They're in the movie, that's exciting."

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is currently rumored to play Quicksilver in "The Avengers: Age of Ultron," but he hasn't been confirmed yet by either Marvel or Jackson. According to Jackson, filming on "Avengers 2" begins in March of next year. Expect the casting process to be locked down before then.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/elizabeth-olsen-avengers-age-of-ultron_n_4036145.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Tom Hiddleston Pushed a Kid
Posted by Georgie on November 6, 2013

Relax! It was to promote his film “Thor: The Dark World,” but I got your attention, didn’t I? (I’m sorry for misleading you, but you won’t regret watching this, I assure you!)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q-h4ulFK2Ek

http://cdn.pophangover.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Loki-kids-clip.jpg
This is the best film promo I’ve ever seen. Though let’s hope the whole “pushing kids in order to prove one’s power” thing doesn’t catch on…

http://www.pophangover.com/34612/tom-hiddleston-pushed-a-kid/

[Jolie Rouge]

10 GIFs That Make You Wanna Hang Out With The Avengers

Marvel has brought together an amazing set of leading men for their Avengers Universe. From established vets like Robert Downey Jr to virtual unknowns like Chris Hemsworth, the casting has been impeccable. Plus each and every one of them looks like they're having a great time.

If you wanna know why you have so much fun watching those movies, it's because they're having so much fun making them. Here's the GIFs to prove it.

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091910400/hC30F3AE4/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091916800/hF90B0365/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091918080/hAC240696/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8092043776/hD0BFE08C/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8092052480/hF04951D8/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091915264/h09096AF2/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8092027904/h5E53334B/


https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091914240/h884FD561/



https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8092044288/h912D04C9/



https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8091909376/hCE76301D/


http://cheezburger.com/208645

[Jolie Rouge]

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' is the most political (and subversive) superhero movie ever made
By Darren Franich on Apr 6, 2014 at 11:00AM

We spend a lot of time here on the internet talking about the Meaning of blockbuster movies, attempting to analyze what some new mega-successful PG-13 rated corporate-branded movie says about our culture or the age we live in. We do this maybe because blockbuster movies have become more interested in tackling weighty themes. (9/11 is all over the Christopher Nolan Batman movies and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies; conversely, it’s difficult to graft some larger mid-’90s topical narrative onto Star Trek: First Contact or Batman Forever.) But we also do this because blockbuster movies are popular, and it’s fun to use popular things as a prism for understanding the issues of our day. It’s rare for a blockbuster movie to come right out and announce its intentions.

And so I was legitimately shocked and impressed and fascinated when I reached the middle of Captain America: The Winter Soldier — SPOILERS FROM HERE — and got to the scene where the movie clearly states that our modern intelligence apparatus and our whole system of national security was invented by some of the greatest villains of the 20th Century. And worse: Like the vampires of the pre-glitter period, HYDRA was welcomed in by their victims, freely and of their own will. In real-world terms, Winter Soldier basically says that the NSA was invented by Nazis…and that we let it happen, insisted even, giving up our freedom because we were too afraid to do anything else. EW critic Owen Gleiberman pointed out in his review that the villain in Winter Soldier is really the military-industrial complex. And that villain has accomplices, accessories, and henchmen who help the bad guys by doing nothing. To paraphrase Pogo: We have met the enemy, and they is us.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we construct meaning with regards to pop culture — “we” as people who write about pop culture, but also more generally “we” as people who become fans of billion-dollar franchises, and who feel a natural human urge to ascribe some deeper meaning to something beyond just “Thing We Spend Money On For Enjoyment.” On one hand, I don’t really think it matters if the filmmakers were trying to say something specific; indeed, you could make the argument that making a film out of specific ideas is less interesting, that it’s more important for films to have characters and style and interesting storytelling. We all interpret art in our own way. No one who wrote this headline can ever safely criticize anyone for reading too much into pop culture.

At the same time, it’s relatively rare to find a major blockbuster movie where the central ideas actually have some clarity and the filmmakers take the extra step beyond assembling lots of contemporary cultural identifiers. For all the talk about the hot-topic nihilism of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, what made The Dark Knight great wasn’t that it turned the Joker into a terrorist (although the imagery was there).

The Dark Knight put several ideas into a spin cycle, but at its center, it was really about a lack of purpose. The Joker isn’t a guy who performs terrorist acts for his country, or his cause, or even for money: Indeed, if you take the Joker at face value, he’s not really doing it for any purpose at all. Conversely, The Dark Knight Rises failed because it gave the villains almost too much purpose: Bane was a socialist terrorist fundamentalist Tea Party Occupy Wall Streeter, who was spoiler-alert actually just the love slave of a vengeful ninja-monk heiress. (ASIDE: Many franchises become less interesting as their central themes become more explicit. Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection are much more open about their freaky-Freud sexuality — Ripley gives birth to and has sex with an Alien — but they’re also much less interesting than Alien and Aliens. This could also just be because the first two movies are near-perfect sci-fi films made by top-of-their-game directors, but it’s not like David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are hacks. END OF ASIDE.)

The Nolan Branch of superhero cinema favors gritty allegory; you could also throw in last year’s Man of Steel. It’s spiritually similar to the Singer Branch: The X-Men films are all freefloating riffs on the idea of outsiders and Civil Rights, which is arguably a much simpler idea than anything in The Dark Knight and also a more important idea than anything in The Dark Knight. So far, the films of Marvel Studios have generally gone in a much lighter direction. Iron Man began with an extended tour through the Middle East, but the franchise raced into farce with Iron Man 2. Understandable: There’s something inherently interesting about a weapons manufacturer injured by his own weapons, but when said manufacturer immediately decides to become a superhero and completely halt all weapons production in his multi-billion-dollar company, we’re officially in fantasyland.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! There were a few scenes in Avengers that hinted at a darker, more paranoid vision of the Marvel-verse — but most of those concerns were thrown aside when the Avengers decided to avenge Coulson, essentially throwing aside a profound debate in favor of just winning one for the Gipper. Again, also fine: Avengers needed to get to a big battle scene with lots of Avengers.

But then we get to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And on one hand, it might simply be impossible to construct a post-WWII Captain America adventure that doesn’t even accidentally say something interesting about our country. (The man’s name is America.) But throughout history, there have been plenty of Cap creators who take full advantage of the character’s standing as a potent symbol. There was the time that Cap found out that the mysterious leader of an evil organization called the Secret Empire was some politician who was probably/definitely Richard Nixon. More recently, Captain America got killed — an essential period-piece moment from 2000s America.

[Jolie Rouge]

Winter Soldier doesn’t do anything that bold, but it’s very much in the same spirit. The film’s onscreen exemplar of Political Leadership is Robert Redford’s Alexander Pierce, who turns out to be the Big Bad — and if the idea of a politician being a supervillain is less transgressive than it used to be, there is something incredibly potent about seeing the star of The Candidate and Three Days of the Condor recast as the government baddie. In All the President’s Men he took down Nixon; now, he’s become Nixon. (Redford in Winter Soldier is probably as close as a superhero movie will ever get to Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West.) And when, in the middle of the movie, Captain America becomes a fugitive from his own government, it means something. (“Captain America Vs. America.”)

This is a film draped in American political iconography. The first shot is of the Washington Monument; the Watergate hotel is right across the Potomac from SHIELD HQ. Cap’s mission to the Lemurian Star is the kind of well-executed Special Op that Paul Greengrass loves to shoot — I can’t remember another time that a superhero punch-fight has been rendered as a Metal Gear Solid stealth mission — but it’s also a complete crock, less about saving people than about saving information. (“Information” is the movie’s Macguffin. In this sense, it really does have a lot in common with Zero Dark Thirty, a detective story which wades through mountains of material attempting to answer one simple question: Where did Bin Laden go?)

From there, you have the loaded scene where Fury shows Captain America the top-secret mega-helicarriers. Along the way, Fury offers a parable that explains his perspective on life: The story of his grandfather and the gun. It’s a simple story — essentially, it’s a variation on “walk softly and carry a big stick.” But then Fury shows Cap the stick: Weaponry that can take out 100 hostiles a minute, that can read a terrorist’s DNA from a million miles away, that can essentially do Minority Report without the weird bald-people pool party. “I thought the punishment usually came after the crime,” says Cap. “You hold a gun on everyone on Earth and call it protection. This isn’t freedom. This is fear.”

I guess that, for some people, this conversation might be too on the nose. And if the movie were just a brute-force idea battle — if it just announced that the Nazis invented the NSA and created terrorism to make us scared, if it’s whole point was “Captain America Is Good, Bad People Are Bad!” — that would be fine. But the cynicism is not cheap. Fury throws Cap’s idealism in his face, refuting the nostalgic idea that things were better in the ’40s: “Greatest Generation? You guys did some nasty stuff.” Cap’s argument is that they did that bad stuff to make the world better — to make it the kind of world that didn’t hold a gun to everyone’s head.

In the next scene, Cap goes and talks to an old friend: Peggy Carter, now in her ’90s. Peggy’s the time traveler who took the long way around: We hear briefly that she helped to create SHIELD, that she was presumably a key figure in the agency’s activities throughout the Cold War. Peggy’s statements are not encouraging: “Sometimes, the best we can do is to start over.” Then she coughs and forgets everything that happened in the scene — the superhero movie version of the final Tony-Junior scene from Sopranos. With a bit of imagination, we can imagine that Peggy Carter lived her whole life following up on Cap’s promise: Doing everything she could to make the world safer. She failed — and, as we later learn, in the process helped to create an organization that came thisclose to conquering the world.

Winter Soldier is much more gleefully over-the-top than the Nolan films — this is a movie where an undead Nazi scientist takes the time to compose a montage showing how HYDRA created Hugo Chavez. But it never loses sight of what it’s talking about: the security state, and how appealing it is, and how terrible it can become. Late in the movie, Redford’s character asks a member of the Security Council the kind of theoretical question beloved by pundits and 24 producers: What if you know that someone was about to march into your home and kill your daughter? What if you could stop that person right now, with the flick of a switch?

Redford tells Fury that they want the same thing: order. Redford argues that he is the hero, because he’s willing to flip that switch — because he’s willing to save seven billion people by killing a few million. (HYDRA in Winter Soldier is basically Ozymandias in Watchmen.) Redford asks Fury if he‘d be brave enough to flick that switch. Fury’s response, a great line in a third act filled with great lines: “I’m brave enough not to.”

This comes right around the moment when Captain America refuses to fight his best friend — poor, brainwashed Bucky, another long-way-around time traveler from the ’40s. If the 20th century left Peggy Carter as a worn-out old soldier, at least she’s better off than Bucky, an idealistic, all-American boy who became a murderous killing machine, a demonic mash-up of a PTSD-afflicted vet and a CIA superspy. In the comics, the Winter Soldier was explicitly working for the Soviets; on the big screen, he’s a HYDRA agent, which you could argue is a roundabout way of being an agent of SHIELD. Cap can’t kill Bucky, so he stops fighting, and lets Bucky pummel him. The macro- and micro-narratives of Winter Soldier both climax in the same place: A character refusing to take action, a fighter deciding not to fight.

In its closing moments, Winter Soldier takes a couple steps back. This is to be expected: The movie can only burn the house down just so before building forward to further spinoff-sequels. Black Widow gives a speech to the government where she insists that the government can’t lock up people like her: “You need us,” she says, and admits that even if people like her could destroy the world, “We’re also the ones best qualified to defend it.” No superhero movie can ever really be against the idea of superheroes — it’s an echo of that famous Truffaut quote about how no film can ever truly be anti-war, because movies fundamentally make war look exciting.

Yet Winter Soldier indicates that Marvel is willing to dig into its characters — to let them explore our real, contemporary world. Black Widow is also the character who, earlier in the movie, advocates for a kind of personality void: the ability to live without a past, to become anyone, to defeat the Information Age by living a life without any personal information. (“Who do you want me to be?” she asks – and it’s clear that she has all the power in that situation.) But the movie ultimately puts her into a position where she has to unveil all of her secrets along with SHIELD’s — yeesh, this movie basically recaps the whole Snowden affair as a quick throwaway plot beat in the third act.

Winter Soldier confirms, for me, that Captain America is Marvel’s most interesting franchise, the most willing to engage with a world that looks an awful lot like our own. (Compared to last year’s Iron Man and Thor sequels, Winter Soldier is a freaking David Simon joint.) I’m not sure if Cap 3 will continue this trend — and I’m not sure I need to see another movie about the Winter Soldier, which is strongly hinted at in the post-credits scene. But having seen Winter Soldier twice now, I’m impressed most of all with the force of its message. Early in the film, Fury offers a statement promoting realism: “SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we’d like to be!” Winter Soldier ultimately argues that “taking the world as it is” makes it worse for everyone. It’s an optimistic movie, but it’s operating from a position of paranoia and cynicism. It hates America, yet it believes in America: A paradox, but also a promise.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-hydra-shield-paranoia/

[Jolie Rouge]

http://img.ifcdn.com/images/d547c2af9c6356b6fe90096e97333dda973e333ae42627b0f5 4a0a0e85284f96_1.gif