mjharper said:
SargeSmash said:
Kumagawa Misogi said:
Why bring up Bush? Obama has been in charge for 5 years (longer than the USA fought in WWII) and things have only gotten worse.
Kind of my thinking as well. Or if you're going to put up pictures, throw up an image of both Pres. Bush and Pres. Obama. As it is, it really betrays the reviewer's political leanings. (Which is totally okay, I get it, but it also feels completely unnecessary.)
Oh come on. Bob makes reference to 911 in several ways. What has Obama got to do with that? What has Obama got to do with pre-emptive strikes? Your argument is like saying we shouldn't reference Hitler anymore because Angela Merkel is Chancellor in Germany. Having accused Bob of showing his 'political leanings', you've clearly displayed your own with a nonsensical argument.
(No, I'm not comparing Bush to Hitler, and yes, I'm aware of Godwin.)
OT: Looks like it should be a fun film
Well, to be honest there has been a number of criticisms about this one. To be blunt it wouldn't surprise me if Marvel winds up having the exact opposite message that seems to be going on here in the long run. After all more than a few people have been quietly pointing out this movie could be called "Captain America 2: The World's Biggest Hypocrite". Not to mention that it seems the backlash over NSA-spying, and post-911 crackdowns is slowly backfiring as people gradually wake up and brain cells start to fire. After all, your starting to see people realize that the whole NSA info gathering thing isn't that big a deal, and is probably a good thing ironically enough, because after all the technologies exist, those who threaten the US aren't going to be concerned about civil liberties or what they do to gather information (with nations like China, Russia, and even North Korea being quite tech savvy when it comes to these kinds of thing) so it's stupid to intentionally deprive our own defenders of the same information and technology needed to counter them. What's more it's fundamentally too late to act AFTER someone has already wiped out dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in a given attack. If you say arrest the half a dozen people you might be able to find who are responsible for such an act after it happens you might as well give carte blanche to terrorists because that's how they inspire fear, not being pro-active to a degree basically means everyone is vulnerable and you had better give these guys what they want, because to the victims it doesn't matter if they say eventually get Bin Ladin in Pakistan years later.
At any rate as this applies to Captain America, it should be noted this is a guy who was basically empowered by a secret government project, even if he became an icon afterwards. He's also a dude who joined, and in the comics actually leads, what amounts to a group of vigilantes who depending on the timeline may or may not have official government sanction (in the movie they do). Indeed in the comics attempts to send in a government liason to keep The Avengers on some kind of leash has been portrayed as a bad thing (and in the context of the universe it is).
As a point, a few people analyzing this movie have commented on the sheer irony in a premise where you fundamentally have one group of fundamentally unaccountable government agents, taking on another group of fundamentally unaccountable government agents. You wind up with the CIA of all people being the ones who arrest the "bad" dudes in SHIELD, and for the most part Captain America, and Black Widow are fundamentally going to be doing what they have been doing, and the TV show "Agents Of SHIELD" despite a tie in episode is likely to not be fundamentally altered that much in the way it's going to function as a result. The entire point here is that it's pretty much "Black Ops. are fine as long as it's the right people doing them".
What's more as a lot of people are pointing out it could be argued that as brutal as the bad guys in SHIELD are, time is likely to prove them right. After all we had one assault on New York, and we're priming for Ultron to pretty much create another catastrophe on at least a similar level. At some point if Marvel plans to take itself seriously at all someone is going to pretty much say "Gee, maybe this wouldn't be happening on the same scale if we actually had three heavily armed helicarriers and someone was being pro-active about stuff like this... how many people are dying horribly now in the crossfire compared to the number that would have been lost".
Interestingly this point might very well lead to a cinematic version of the "Civil War" event which handles things better than the actual comic version did. In the comics they had to have people acting REALLY out of character and made dumb analogies (like slavery) and focus almost entirely on the secret identity aspect of things to try and make Cap not look like an idiot. When they brought out "super gitmo" (which really wasn't that fundamentally different than "The Raft", "The Vault", or other things which had The Captain America seal of approval for years beforehand) it got particularly eye rolling. Then of course Cap basically "wins" by having an old buddy who happens to be a super villain as much as a hero, do the villain thing by having his army attack New York and do exactly the kind of thing that people have been spending decades preventing this villain (Namor) from doing... at which point he surrenders because "durr, maybe this wasn't the right thing to do". Really Cap, really, siccing the Armies of Atlantis on the drylanders to try and demonstrate why too much security is a bad thing, especially when they start leveling the city, and kind of defeats your whole point? Wow, what a rocket scientist.
At any rate, pretty much everyone is saying this is a decent movie on it's own merits, but whether it's one of the "deepest" or "dumbest" seems to be a matter of opinion. I think it might have been business insider (though I'm not sure) that made some of the same points I just did yesterday in their review. It seems I'm not the only one that thinks in the long run half the point might be that Cap is doing the wrong thing in the big picture, especially in how the situation is handled, and that this is going to snowball. By basically castrating SHIELD he's creating an environment where super heroes are going to be increasingly needed (to take matters into their own hands in fact), and it seems inevitably after a crisis or two he's going to be called on it, and that will probably be by Iron Man. With less heroes involved the whole "Registration" aspect will be tertiary to the security aspects, and if the story goes down similarly Cap's side is likely to inevitably win the "war" but only by sort of making the point of the other side, followed by a surrender.
