The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

 2021, d. Kari Skogland - Disney+ (6 episodes)

 It's hard for me to see past my wife's uber-fandom for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America and Winter Soldier, to not see her unbridled enthusiasm for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as an endorsement of quality.  If she's enjoying it this much clearly there's something here.

Which is all to say I found The Falcon and the Winter Soldier ("TFatWS) hard to watch objectively with someone experiencing such joy beside me.  

The show opens with a big, bold, cinema-worthy action sequence, an incredibly well executed comination of stunt-coordination, green screen, and digital effects simulating aerial combat like we've literally never seen before.  But it's a solo mission for Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and the titular team-up doesn't happen until episode 2 which just seems odd.

Episode 1, following its big set piece, is largely catching up with our two leads, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The last MCU movie before The Pause was Spider-man: Far From Home which made some jokes about the people returning from "the snap" (in Avengers: Endgame) but it didn't really deal with it.  TFatWS was intended to be the first Disney+ MCU show/mini-series, but due to the impact of the coronavirus, it was leapfrogged by Wandavision which only briefly dealt with the return snap.  So after nearly a year an a half, it's TFatWS that picks up the thread, and builds its central conflict around it.

The adversary here is a collective called the Flag Smashers.  It's told that after half the Earth's population disappeared at the end of Avengers:Infinity War the world started coming together, slowly erasing its boundaries and its prejudices, really fulfilling the vision Thanos set our for it.  In returning everyone five years later, there is a lot of disarray.  People had moved on, new lives started, new agreements and treaties and borders made.  Many returning from the snap are basically refugees, the life that they knew gone.  Likewise many of the people who had forged new lives in new lands are displaced by those returning to properties still theirs, complex decisions about re-appropriation made.  The Flag Smashers are watching a world in pain trying to return to the mess it was before the snap, and they want the world to be as one, to erase all borders and to give everyone a home wherever they would like to have it.  It's idealistic, but the film undercuts the idealism with increasingly extreme acts of terrorism.

This subject alone would be a lot for our two protagonists to ponder and chew on for five hours, but this isn't a political drama, it's a comic-book action-adventure show, so this whole plight becomes set-dressing and character motivation while a half dozen other elements drag Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) around the globe.

Sam has a return to his home and family in Louisiana, where he wants to swoop in and play the hero rescuing the family fishing business, but finds the limitations of his celebrity don't extend to banks where the racism is clouded as "risk-aversion".  Despite having been snapped out of existence for 5 years, the show doesn't really show much of the impact on Sam, except a nagging need to fix everything. On top of that Endgame left Sam in the position of taking the mantle of Captain America, with Steve Rogers passing down the shield.  It's a heavy responsibility, both living up to the legacy of an idol, and in being a living representation of a country, a country that has an ugly history in its treatment of its Black citizens.  Sam gives up the shield to the Smithsonian for a Captain America exhibit, not ready to take on the weight of it all.

Bucky, meanwhile, is over 100 years old at this point, having lived much of his life cryogenically frozen, so his memories of existing all have dramatic gaps in time.  Being blinked out of existence for 5 years is par for the course for him.  Outside of his frozen dreams, much of his life was as a brainwashed puppet, a killing machine that caused a lot of damage in that controlled state, all of which he remembers, and it haunts him.  He was trapped inside his own body, with no control.  To top it off, his only connection to the past, the only happy life he's had, Steve Rogers, left him behind (again), leaving him alone in a strange time where he doesn't feel he belongs at all.

Here are two characters who are well built to approach the modern world and the chaos that plagues it, each with very clear and differing perspectives on what it means to them.  As well both are veterans of multiple wars, which, along with being friends with Steve, connects them as people.  But previous films established that they have a very antagonistic relationship.  Bucky perhaps a little resentful of Sam as Captain America's most trusted ally and Sam perhaps a little wary of this killing machine he's faced in action more than once.  There's more than enough here for a whole show to be built around, but again, that would insinuate that this superhero action show was ready to just delve into the drama of its world and people, but it's not.

It also introduces John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a well-decorated soldier, as the new, government sponsored, Captain America... complete with Steve's shield, which the government considers their property (so many want to stake their claim to that thing).  It's Walker's very public debut that brings Sam and Bucky together, if at first just for an airing of grievances.  But the Flag Smashers demand their attention, and they partner up.  Walker and his partner Lemar Hoskins, aka Battlestar (Cle Bennett) are also sent out on the trail of the Flag Smashers, so doubtlessly paths collide.  That Walker is potentially unstable, suffering from severe PTSD and an almost crippling inferiority complex, further complicates matters.  (Walker does something particularly heinous late in the series that he just sort of walks away from which the show really needed to deal with more, but there's just not enough time to do so).

Again, the complexities start to abound, as it becomes clearer that Walker perhaps isn't entirely stable, and that the Flag Smasher are somehow enhanced with the super-soldier serum.  As was warned in Captain America: Civil War one super soldier like Bucky can upset the status quo, a small army of them could take over the world. 

That warning came from Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) who is kind of shoehorned into the proceedings, as a worryingly enthusiastic ally to Sam and Bucky.  Bruhl kind of takes over the show for two episodes, stealing every scene he's in, which makes for very delightful viewing but pushes its two leads to the side in an already complex story.

In freeing Zemo - if you recall he was responsible for the death of King T'Chaka in Civil War - this brings the Dora Milaje to shadow them, specifically Ayo (Florence Kasumba) who had become close with Bucky when he stayed in Wakanda for de-programming.

Further adding to the mix a returning Sharon Carter (Emily Van Camp) who was last seen helping them and Steve out in Winter Soldier to the detriment of her own carreer, and suddenly there's yet another character vying for attention in an already cramped mini series (plus a very, very distracting "mystery" in "who is the Power Broker?" that proved a quite unsatisfying bit of fan service/comic book easter-egging)

But we're not done.  Sam is introduced by Bucky to the Captain America of the 1950's, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), one of many Black soldiers who was experimented on with another super soldier serum. Bradley had his life stolen from him, and finds no sympathy from him in his regret of giving up the shield.  Bradley's story, a parallel to the real world Tuskegee Experiments, has real weight in the story but still can't help but only be the brightest fish in a very crowded pond.  I was hoping for at least a flash back set piece of Bucky (as Winter Soldier) meeting a younger Bradley in battle (but I suppose the show wanted to wait for Mackie's inevitable reveal as the first time we see a Black man as Captain America).

The divergences all have a flow to them (except maybe the sudden introduction of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a mysterious, Nick Fury-esque contessa who enlists Walker into her service...it's a real show stopper, though not unwelcome) that gives them a reason to exist in the story, but it makes the whole mini-series overly complicated.  In a shared universe of comics, this depth of crossing-over and calling-back is the norm, but because the characters live across titles and years, it's easier to accept them in a larger story arc.  In the limited realm of cinema for over a decade there's only been a limited amount of space to develop some of these characters, which means there's more of a burden on a series like this to spend much of its time on further developing these otherwise limited characters.  

Again, it all works in its own way, but it detracts from ostensibly the leads of the show, the two characters with their names above the title.  They introduce a lot in the first three episodes of the show, and the worry was constantly that it wasn't going to pull together.  They keep introducing more in the latter three episodes, but mercifully things do start tying together, just not as satisfying or as neatly as I had hoped.  It's very possible that the sudden limitations because of COVID-19 meant that aspects of the show and its story's conclusion had to be redrafted to accommodate travel restrictions and protective measures.

Wandavision was pretty laser-focused, with Wanda and Vision as its center.  The world building (and its utilization of supporting MCU cast like Darcy, Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau) likewise proved a bit distracting and didn't have the meaningful impact to the events that maybe they should.  The same thing happens here except to a much greater degree where all this universe build-out just means Sam and Bucky are often lost as the centers of the show.  In comparing to Wandavision, that show also didn't have the same reliance/burden of the past. So much of TFatWS demands that you be brushed up on your MCU Captain America and Avengers history.  These things are just part of the fabric in my household, but I could see more casual viewers being a little lost by this show constantly referencing past events as major story plots.  It's certainly very comic-booky in this fashion, both to its credit and detriment.

But even with the focus often pulled away, Mackie is still the undeniable lead, even above Stan. Though clearly a man of action, Sam has no superpowers and knows his greatest weapon is his empathy.  He doesn't just resort to his fists or his wings or his weapons, they're a last resort when words don't have their desired intent.  Even Steve Rogers, who people always seemed ready and willing to rally behind, wasn't nearly as dynamic in his speechifying as Sam, but it also goes to show what kind of man Sam is, and what differentiates him from other heroes, particularly the Captain(s) America that came before him.  By episode six of the show, Sam's exploration of race, citizenship, legacy and identity earn him the title of Captain America, and he owns it.  Similarly, Mackie builds the confidence along the way from being a right hand man in the MCU to being not just a viable, but necessary lead.  I have no idea what a Mackie-led Captain America movie would be but I'm eager to find out, because the there are so many possibilities.

Where Stan and the Winter Soldier wind up after this, it's hard to say.  It seems like Bucky, in the end, is trying to find a sense of peace, so if we never see him again that seems okay (but now that we've finally come to know him as a character it's a sad thought).  If a second "Captain America and the Winter Soldier" mini-series were to come, I would certainly welcome it.  I just hope it will be a little more focused.