Wait people are moaning about the economics of creating the Helicarriers in real world terms? Are you yanking my short and curleys? Seriously?
I just don't like the idea of power creep, even in comic book movies. I get that the point of a comic book movie is to have an exciting finale, but it almost seems like every movie is trying to top the last one; eventually, it's just going to seem ridiculous. I guess I can accept three Helicarriers, but if five newly built Helicarriers show up in AoU, I'm going to call BS.
-Falcon’s inclusion didn’t seem particularly organic to me. He may have benefited from having greater agency in the story.
Yeah, he was a cool guy, but he didn't really seem to have any personal motivation. They could have at least played up the bit about his last partner dying or something (although motivation-through-someone's-death is a bit overdone). Although building his relationship with Steve on their common ground as soldiers was good.
The reason being that Hydra doesn’t have any discernible ideology beyond world conquest, which is all well and good for people like Stern and Pierce who could feasibly profit by being in a position of power, but for lower level SHIELD agents, I find it difficult to believe Hydra has much to offer.
Well, HYDRA has always been pretty much a cult, right? That's how they get such fierce devotion from the lower level guys, through indoctrination.
Furthermore, I wasn’t convinced that Arnim Zola’s character was a natural progression from TFA. To me at least, he didn’t appear enamoured with Hydra and was simply interested in the scientific resources he had access to. He turned coat at the first opportunity, rather than die to protect the Skull’s pans. You could argue this was simply because Zola was always looking for an opportunity to usurp the Red Skull, but I think it’s quite a stretch to make that interpretation from Jones’ performance in TFA.
Yeah, he never really seemed evil on his own. Either he was hiding his true colours all along and biding his time, or his conversion into AI messed with his mind and made him more malevolent.
I also don’t think I understood the endgame of Insight. Assuming that Hydra was successful in killing everyone they considered a threat, where do they go from there? Wouldn’t that make SHIELD an obvious target for damn near everyone left standing in the aftermath? I certainly doubt the response of the new president to three helicarriers murdering thousands of innocent people, including his/her predecessor would be to give SHIELD more power. Maybe someone can explain this to me because it seems a stupid plan, and a waste of 70 years worth of careful infiltration/manipulation.
I thought it was a stupid plan, too, but as others have pointed out, we're to assume that the Insight Helicarriers were the ultimate weapon. If they were able to get in the air and triangulate, it'd be checkmate. Since we don't know the full extent of their capabilities, I guess we can assume that any response - fighter jets, missiles, nukes - would be deterred.
And then the movie becomes a Jack Ryan flick; it becomes a different movie.
That wouldn't have been so bad. Comic book superhero movies don't need to all follow the same big action blockbuster template, do they? If the MCU is going to continue for the next two decades, some variety is always nice.
Iron Man 3 was cool because it experimented with other, more dramatic elements - we saw a lot of Tony Stark without a suit, facing down PTSD. CA2 also had some of that before it went into its huge action finale.
- also as a corollary to the above, it bothered me how Fury and Natasha didn't keep a better eye on Pierce once they had taken control of the room in the end. He shouldn't have been allowed to play with his phone. That's like amateur hero mistakes.
Given all the other things going on and the fact that they perceived him to not be a physical threat, that's understandable. Here's a plot hole - why didn't Pierce kill Natasha instead of the WSC members? As important world people, they're more valuable as hostages. They're also a lot less dangerous to keep close. I guess it can be argued that Pierce kept Natasha alive since Fury would be less likely to sacrifice a close friend than some suit. But it still kind of seems sloppy to me.
True. As I've said before...after WW2 we brought lots of Nazis into America, and we had high level people/companies that worked with them...so Nazism was welcomed into our country with open arms. It is sheer luck that we didn't experience something like Hydra for real. I think that including Hydra in the story is an extra warning to us about how we do business with tyrants.
To be fair, none of the ex-Nazis who worked for the US were actually devoted to the cause of Nazism. Sure, guys like Wernher von Braun were willing to use concentration camp slave labour to build their experiments, which is obviously pretty bad in itself, but none of them had any ideological aspirations, really.
Interestingly enough, von Braun was mentioned in IM3. I wonder if, in the MCU, he might have somehow been connected to HYDRA? I doubt it, but that'd be funny if this turns into a plot point later down the road.
Anyway, I used to share the opinion that the HYDRA reveal took some of the political edge off, but after reading some opinions here, I'm starting to agree that it doesn't change the fact that SHIELD allowed itself to be moved into that murky direction through unethical practices. Also, like somebody else said, it would be a completely different movie if Captain America was gunning down average American joes who thought they were following orders from the good guys. That's understandable for, say, Jason Bourne, who ended up being an international fugitive for it, but not Captain America (yes, I realise that he's been a fugitive in the comics, but it's too early for that to happen in the MCU). So by necessity, his enemies have to be devoted HYDRA henchmen.
