Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Was worried that this movie would throw itself aground by making seriously overt political statements and screwing up what was best about the first Captain America movie.

In the end, it turned out better than I expected and all in all I liked the movie more than not.


The characters were well done and in general true to themselves, the action scenes were great, and I was surprised that they didn't go with the Black Widow romance instead setting up a possible future connection with Sharon.

On the political side of things, I think they managed to walk a nice tightrope that allows viewers on the Left to blame Bush/Military thinking as the 'big picture Bad Idea" while the Right can point to Obama's Kill List and expanded Drone use (the makers of the film openly claimed the latter as their inspiration for what it's worth).  If one insists on being political at all, at least that's ideal method for a big tent pole summer movie.

However on both sides of that question they backed away from making it a strong link by making the US President and other government members and SHIELD agents the first targets of the Insight Weapons.  In short, they made it so big and so disconnected from loyal US citizens that they blow their underlying 'message'. So yes, better than expected although I think less than what the makers thought they were doing.

Other than that it's just a general and obvious warning that one can go too far on the Security-Freedom scale. In that line some of it (the scenes between Cap and Fury for the most part) come off a lame half-arguments that doesn't let anyone really address the issues. More walking the tight rope while pretending otherwise.

Still for my part, I could have done without any of it as none of it added to my enjoyment of the movie. On the bright side it was a passing moment easily ignored.

But there was a much more major part of the plot I didn't like...

Modern comics love giving readers neat characters and awesome toys, and then destroying them. And now the movies have followed in that path first with the Iron Man armors and in this movie with SHIELD. I like SHIELD, it's cool and fun- more so than the CIA (where Sharon ended up) or the FBI (who I assume are the guys arresting the Hydra senator). Now it's gone (at least for while, there's still a TV show named after it assuming it doesn't get canceled).

I also didn't care for the fact that they basically tossed all the heroes of the past under the failure bus (Peggy Carter and Howard Stark where the founders of SHIELD, and thus the ones who allowed it be corrupted from the beginning). There should be room for "Heroes of another Story" without them being torn down revealed to be fools or road kill. In fact this applies to the whole background of the movie, in which every evil and threat of the post-war period is due to the manipulation of a single comic book villain group instead of the evil that mankind does as a matter of course.

As to the grittier and darker take this movie represents, I do think there's room for stale beer in a comic book movie, as long as its contained. But in this case it was too far reaching, and cast the entire world in terms of failure. This was the Dark Age of comics with a Golden/Silver Age character guest starring.

And perhaps that's why I ended up liking the movie more than not, because I've come to view the world as entering its own Dark Age and would like an icon of what was great about the past to still exist. Still, wouldn't it be nice to have more than one of those?

Deadly Games- Now without Death

One of the common conflicts one sees in online RPG forums is that between posters who say that the PCs risk death in their games, and those who want to play their characters without worrying about losing them to random and often meaningless events. The former call the latter wimps and pound their chests about how hardcore they are.

Previously I personally didn't care much about either side, not because I didn't have a opinion- but because I play both ways depending upon the campaign's genre. I took them at their word and passed them by.

However I've noticed something about "Our Campaign is so Deadly" types that arose out of our Only War experience a bit back. On of the players in the online campaign made the statement "this game is so deadly...", but no one had died. How could he say that? Then a thread over on therpgsite referenced my posts about those campaigns and the same subject came up there and so I put the question to the 'deadly game' proponents there.

And guess what? None of these players of these so called 'deadly games' actually could give an example of a significant PC being killed.

The key word there is *significant*, as I did get examples of characters that hadn't been played long dying, 1st level guys in a D&D dungeon crawl, newly created 5th level D&D characters intended to introduce new players to the game, or a PC in a CoC that wasn't meant to last more than a few sessions anyway. Those were the examples I got. But of characters dying after years of play with real history behind them? None except for those I provided myself.

In short, these 'deadly' campaigns would kill the hamsters (i.e. short lived PCs that don't really have much player investment) but long lived ones were in practical terms as safe as the wimpiest 'PCs don't die unless they want to' campaign.

And to add an even weirder outcome, most of the people who started the thread making the claims of deadly campaigns- ran from the thread and repeated their clearly untrue claims in other threads. They were completely unwilling to face the fact that their threats of 'deadly campaign' had been proven empty by their own history. I must wonder if they are lying to themselves as much as they are lying to others.

So in the future dear reader, if you see one of those types- asked when was last time he had one of his long played PCs die. Or anyone else in the campaign. Odds are good that you're get a blank look, or find out that they don't do long-run campaigns at all.