Falcon and Winter Soldier Baron Z E M O - He's back for more vengeance?

[MOVIELORD101]

That's also possible. There are some definite curveballs/misdirects/intentional omissions that Marvel seems to be doing with their promos to hide the real premise. Their hiding of John Walker from most of the trailers and TV spots is also another sign that they're holding quite a bit back.

I bet Walker kills Zemo after having snapped at some point and he's the antagonist for the rest of the season.

 

[Dark Raven]

I bet Walker kills Zemo after having snapped at some point and he's the antagonist for the rest of the season.

I hope not. I don't want Zemo turned into another Baron Strucker.

 

[metaphysician]

There is nothing confusing about Zemo's motives and I feel like you're really making it out to be way harder to follow than it actually is.

His family was killed in an Avengers battle, and he....blames The Avengers. Of course everyone who loses loved ones doesn't turn into a vengeance-obsessed villain, but that's hardly a rare villainous motivation/backstory either.

He didn't kill T'Chaka to kill T'Chaka. He framed Bucky for the terrorist bombing to flush him out of hiding.

Also I don't think it's a big stretch that, even with Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, etc. not being around anymore, he would continue to see superheroes and enhanced people as a destructive force in the world. And it's even less of a stretch that he would target Bucky and Sam, both of whom were very closely tied to Captain America.

Or, to put it more simply:

Yes, Helmut Zemo's motivations don't stand up to detailed moral scrutiny. This is true. *Its why he's the villain*. He engages in morally unjustifiable life choices as a response to his own personal tragedy. If he didn't do this, he wouldn't be the villain. In another timeline, where Zemo dealt with his guilt and pain in a more honest and less self-serving manner, we would be talking about Helmut Zemo, courageous secret agent waging a one man war to wipe every last remnant of Hydra from the planet. But we aren't, because in the MCU timeline, Zemo didn't have enough strength of character, so it was easier to blame the superheroes.

I feel like this is a recurring issue, where too many audience members assume that if the villain is portrayed as being sincere and lacking obvious vices, that we are supposed to agree with them. Villainy is supposed to come from hypocrisy and venality, and absent those, you don't have a villain. This viewpoint being nonsense, natch, and coming to a complete crashing halt when encountering someone like Thanos or Zemo, resulting in either a mistaken impression that the villain isn't villainous, or just generalized confusion.

 

[Dr. Evil]

Zemo should be inherently evil. He should not be likeable, so he should not be like Loki.

 

[Dark Raven]

Zemo should be inherently evil. He should not be likeable, so he should not be like Loki.

Watch him get his own TV show now and then his own country music movie with one of the female Avengers as his wife.

 

[Dark Raven]

What are the chances of someone calling Zemo "Dr Zemo" like he was accidentally called in his first appearance?

 

[metaphysician]

Zemo should be inherently evil. He should not be likeable, so he should not be like Loki.

Eh, I don't like the term "inherently evil" here. Very few villains are "inherently evil". Zemo isn't a supernatural horror or dark god, and he's not even a rampaging psychopath like the Red Skull or Bullseye. He's just a callous individual pursuing horrible goals for generally odious and immoral reasons. He is not, as villains go, the type of character where the audience should be going "I literally cannot imagine any way they could ever not be a monster". And I don't just mean this in the sense of the portrayal of him in Civil War. In the *comics*, Helmut Zemo has spent the last few decades as someone who very very slowly ratcheted himself up to a position on the bare bottom rungs of the 'heroic redemption' ladder. Last I heard he's still a fairly terrible person, but he's a terrible person who nonetheless has gotten a little better via working out some of his issues and the simple positive influence from pretending to be a hero for a while ( and hanging out with other people doing the same ).

 

[chamber-music]

So far I don't find MCU Zemo as sympathetic as villains like Magneto and MCU Killmonger. Bad things happened to those characters that lead to them taking an extremist outlook.

It is questionable how good of a person Zemo was before his families death since he was the leader of an elite Sokovian paramilitary death squad. We also know Sokovia wasn't exactly a stable nation pre-Ultron also either.

Comic Helmut Zemo was mostly driven by vengeance towards Captain America for his father's death until the nineties.

 

[metaphysician]

Oh, Zemo almost certainly wasn't a good person at all. Its just, bad people still have families and loved ones, so his motive of "My family died and I want to right this wrong" is a valid one. The problem is in his assignment of blame, mainly.

What makes Zemo work for me is that he very clearly understands most of this. He's vengeful, and lashing out, but on a certain intellectual level he is aware of this. He's a smart enough person to understand his own motivations and even the hypocrisies within them, but a weak enough person to not be able to overcome them. Hence his sympathy to T'Challa.

 

[Schlosser85]

Oh, Zemo almost certainly wasn't a good person at all. Its just, bad people still have families and loved ones, so his motive of "My family died and I want to right this wrong" is a valid one. The problem is in his assignment of blame, mainly.

What makes Zemo work for me is that he very clearly understands most of this. He's vengeful, and lashing out, but on a certain intellectual level he is aware of this. He's a smart enough person to understand his own motivations and even the hypocrisies within them, but a weak enough person to not be able to overcome them. Hence his sympathy to T'Challa.

I feel like sometimes people try to oversimplify everything, or act like everything has to be black-and-white, one thing or another. Zemo being a bad person even beforehand, but also loving his family and being legitimately grief-stricken, are not mutually exclusive.

 

[metaphysician]

I feel like sometimes people try to oversimplify everything, or act like everything has to be black-and-white, one thing or another. Zemo being a bad person even beforehand, but also loving his family and being legitimately grief-stricken, are not mutually exclusive.

Yep. Its like I've said before many a time: a big part of the problem is this assumption that villainous actions have to come from venal motives. Sure, a lot of villains work like that, but the worst ones have their evil arise not from vice, but from virtues warped and misapplied.

 

[Schlosser85]

Yep. Its like I've said before many a time: a big part of the problem is this assumption that villainous actions have to come from venal motives. Sure, a lot of villains work like that, but the worst ones have their evil arise not from vice, but from virtues warped and misapplied.

And you could argue that's true of plenty of the best villains the MCU has had. Zemo, Loki, Killmonger, Vulture, Thanos.

 

[Arrow1987]

Could he be behind the Flag Smashers

 

[Schlosser85]

Could he be behind the Flag Smashers

It’s possible.

 

[Fosterson]

I feel like sometimes people try to oversimplify everything, or act like everything has to be black-and-white, one thing or another. Zemo being a bad person even beforehand, but also loving his family and being legitimately grief-stricken, are not mutually exclusive.

True. You could make the case that the fact that Sokovia was a war-torn country shows that Zemo wasn't exactly born into ideal circumstances either. Not to excuse the bad deeds he undoubtedly committed, but living in such terrible conditions will undoubtedly force people to make morally compromising decisions. War can cause otherwise good people to commit the most terrible of deeds.

Assuming Zemo is the same age as Daniel Bruhl (42), he would have only been 21 when Wanda's parents were killed in 1999, and the war in Sokovia had clearly been going on for at least several years before that, meaning that he would have experienced war since at least his teenage years. Being exposed to violence at such a young age is really damaging to say the least. You only need to look in the real-world to countries like Iraq and Syria, where you have an entire younger generation growing up who have known nothing but war.

 

[Dark Raven]

Marvel should make a mini series set in Sokovia in the past with Wanda, Pietro and Zemo. They could even have the whole thing in Sokovian with English subtitles. It can be Marvel's venture into the foreign language film genre.

 

[Xeno]

So far I don't find MCU Zemo as sympathetic as villains like Magneto and MCU Killmonger. Bad things happened to those characters that lead to them taking an extremist outlook.

It is questionable how good of a person Zemo was before his families death since he was the leader of an elite Sokovian paramilitary death squad. We also know Sokovia wasn't exactly a stable nation pre-Ultron also either.

Comic Helmut Zemo was mostly driven by vengeance towards Captain America for his father's death until the nineties.

This is how I see Zemo, too. He was obviously a cold-blooded killer who helped fuel the cycle of violence and vengeance that made his country a hell on earth. He was part of the same Sokovian military that bombed the Maximoff's apartment building, a horrific war crime that eventually led to the destruction of the country at Ultron's hands. So he essentially helped bring about his own family's deaths, just as he had killed so many other Sokovians himself.

Of couse, Zemo avoids confronting his own complicity in his loss. Sure, he loved his family, but didn't give a damn about anyone else's. He expressed a sliver of guilt over one murder he committed (that of T'Chaka), but the others he killed caused him no regrets.

Zemo is a great villain with understandable motives, yes. However, that does not make him sympathetic.

 

[Fosterson]

This is how I see Zemo, too. He was obviously a cold-blooded killer who helped fuel the cycle of violence and vengeance that made his country a hell on earth. He was part of the same Sokovian military that bombed the Maximoff's apartment building, a horrific war crime that eventually led to the destruction of the country at Ultron's hands. So he essentially helped bring about his own family's deaths, just as he had killed so many other Sokovians himself.

We actually don't know who bombed the apartment building. We don't even know who the factions involved in Sokovia's war were/are. Was it a civil war, like the conflict in Syria today? Or an inter-ethnic conflict, like the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s? Or was it a war against a foreign power(s)?

FWIW, the MCU wiki says that it was actually the US Airforce that did the bombings, which would make a certain amount of sense given that they were using Stark Industries weapons and Stark's main customer was the US military. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time the US got involved in a foreign conflict and "accidentally" killed civilians. Not to mention that in one of the photos we see of Wanda and Pietro protesting, you can clearly see a placard with "America Get Out of Sokovia" written on it. And the fact that there was an anti-Avengers protest going on while they were attacking Strucker's base in AoU was probably the result of them being viewed as a tool of the US government.

EDIT: I was just scanning the MCU wiki page for Sokovia and it mentions that in Iron Fist (which I never watched) we find out that a bunch of US soldiers were captured and tortured by the Sokovian military while they were fighting there, which shows that the United States did in fact militarily intervene in the country and may have been responsible for the apartment bombings.

 

[Dark Raven]

If they have a teen version of Helmut he could be Baron Emo.

 

[Fosterson]

If they have a teen version of Helmut he could be Baron Emo.

Here he is!

 

[Dark Raven]

Here he is!

Maybe Helmut Emo accidentally superglued his mask to his face after watching American Pie.

 

[djsunyc]

i still think he is going to be a kind of ally. from the trailers of the show, it looks like he is walking with them in madripoor.

 

[Dark Raven]

i still think he is going to be a kind of ally. from the trailers of the show, it looks like he is walking with them in madripoor.

Hopefully not this kind

 

[Fosterson]

i still think he is going to be a kind of ally. from the trailers of the show, it looks like he is walking with them in madripoor.

Maybe he'll temporarily help Sam and Bucky against the Flag Smashers (who are clearly physically enhanced)?

 

[Fosterson]

Can't wait to finally see him properly next week!