‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Plays it Safe
One of the best things about the MCU is that there’s something for everyone. If you like action and fight choreography, you’ve got the Captain America movies. If you like comedy and ‘70s jams, you’ve got the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. If you like fantastical worlds and Chris Hemsworth’s abs, you’ve got the Thor movies. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is definitely going to be the exact thing someone wants from the MCU with its fast-paced action, solid CGI and simpler storytelling, but after the wild ride that was WandaVision, it feels a little too basic for me.
When we drop into the first episode, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is still fighting the good fight, kicking ass and saving lives. Even though he was given the shield by the man himself, he’s not ready to be Captain America and would rather be a hero in his own way than attempt to take up the mantle of such an epic figure.
Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is likewise dealing with a post-Steve-Rogers world and trying to work through his trauma and troubled memories about the horrible things he did when he was the notorious Winter Soldier. We know somehow the Wakandans helped him break free of his brain washing, but we get more detail on how he’s been coping and adjusting to a world where he doesn’t have to be an unstoppable assassin.
Both guys aren’t exactly ready to be superheroes—especially not in the epic way we remember when we last saw them in Avengers: Endgame. But there’s a new threat on the horizon, and we know they’re going to have to grow into the heroics as the story unfolds.
Only the first episode was made available to critics, but I think it’s probably safe to say this story will be a lot more simple and straightforward than Marvel’s first Disney+ offering, WandaVision, which I loved despite endless internet speculation leading to an ending that was perhaps a bit less epic than everyone on YouTube predicted.
Where WandaVision seemed set on being as weird as it wanted to be and giving us a deep-dive story about grief set in a bizarre fantasy reality of vintage TV, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seems more content to deliver us the grounded storylines that we might expect from a scaled-back TV version of the MCU. Its threats don’t seem like world-enders, and even though it’s clear the production spared no expense, it still feels very much like TV—far more so than WandaVision, which was actually set in a sitcom world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it’s just not as exciting after the weird world we’ve just seen.
But that brings me back to the MCU having something for everyone. When you have so many movies, and soon even more streaming shows, you can go in lots of different directions with your characters. Who would have thought back in 2015 that we’d be seeing Wanda Maximoff as Samantha from Bewitched and Thor going full Lebowski? Marvel has built characters we care about and know so well that we’re down for whatever situations are thrown at them, be it something wild like WandaVision or something more basic like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. No doubt, this show will serve to flesh out Sam and Bucky and help set up the next phase of the MCU, so it doesn’t have to be a game-changer. It can keep the engine running until movie theaters are back at full capacity and we can dive into our beloved Marvel blockbusters once again.
