Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the  sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger. It is the ninth main installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and also the third installment to Phase Two. It is was released on April 4, 2014 in the USA. It was directed by Joseph Russo and Anthony Russo and stars Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Robert Redford, and Samuel L. Jackson as Captain America, the Black Widow, the Falcon, the Winter Soldier, Alexander Pierce, and Nick Fury.

Synopsis
Two years after the Battle of New York, Captain America lives quietly in Washington, D.C., still struggling to adapt to modern society. In hopes of fitting in, Cap becomes an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., as well as a close friend of Black Widow and a new hero, Falcon. But now, Cap must put his own self-aggrandizement aside once again when a shadowy enemy from within the chief offices of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and who Nick Fury initially agrees with) starts creating countless weapons of mass destruction to seemingly protect the world - but really wants to destroy it and rebuild it. Cap and his friends must team up to stop him, but things get more complicated when Steve's former best friend Bucky becomes a villain like no other - the Winter Soldier.

Plot
Two years after the Battle of New York, Steve Rogers a.k.a Captain America is out on a jog in Washington D.C. While jogging he is frequently passing by a man who later introduces himself as Samuel Wilson telling him that he used to work in the army but now he works in the debriefing section. After the jog, Sam and Steve have a chat about how Steve is adapting to the new world. Natasha Romanoff then arrives to take Steve with her on a mission. The mission at hand is to rescue the hostages of a pirate-hijacked S.H.I.E.L.D ship. At least that's what Cap thinks. Cap, Agent Rumlow, Romanoff and his men fight the pirates and rescue the hostages. But as it turns out Natasha's real purpose on the mission to extract some S.H.I.E.L.D data from the ship, to a USB-stick. This annoyed Steve because it endangered the hostages.

When back at the Triskelion, Steve is angered with Nick Fury for lying to him. Fury then takes him to the basement where there are several Helicarriers and he introduces Rogers to the Insight Program. He tells Steve that S.H.I.E.L.D takes the world as it is, not as they like it to be. They are going to use the Helicarriers to fight threats before they even happened. Cap then says that, ''This isn't freedom. This is fear.''..

Later Steve visits the Captain America museum and also visits Peggy Carter in a retirement home, now past 90 years. He also meets with Samuel Wilson again after watching him during the end of his debriefing session. Meanwhile Fury discovered that the data on the USB was inaccessible. He tells this to Alexander Pierce, who just had a talk with the World Security Council about whether or not to let Fury continue to run S.H.I.E.L.D. Fury is on his way away from the Triskelion when he is attacked by false cops. He defeats them but is stopped when a masked man shoots a magnetic bomb under Fury's car, flipping it over. But before the masked man gets to Fury, he managed to drill a hole in the ground with a gadget and escape.

Steve arrives to his apartment after talking to his neighbor but gets suspicious when he hears his stereo's still on. He sneaks in through the window and finds Nick Fury sitting in his couch. He tells Rogers that his wife kicked him out and that they might be overheard by someone, before getting shot several times in his back through the wall. He gives the USB to Steve and tells him not to trust anyone, before he falls unconscious. Roger's neighbor smashes in the door reveling herself to be Agent 13. Cap finds the gunman and starts to chase him. He throws the shield at the masked man, but surprisingly the man catches the shield with his cybernetic arm and throws it back. He then jumps of the building and disappears.

Fury is taken to a hospital but his heart stops and he couldn't get revived. He's taken away and Agent Maria Hill asks to take care of the body. Agent Rumlow tells Cap that he is wanted for a hearing. He quickly hides the USB in a vending machine and leaves. When he arrives at the Triskelion he is questioned by Alexander Pierce who says he is one of Nick's oldest friends and wants to know who killed him. He also says that he and Nick were realists and that to build a new world sometimes meant tearing the old one down. Cap doesn’t trust Pierce and tell him none of what Fury said. He leaves Alexander to go to the hospital. When in the elevator it starts to fill up with people and he soon realizes that they are there to take him down. He asks if anyone wants to get out and then the fight begins. It's hard but Cap manages to knock out all his attackers, before jumping out the elevator to avoid arrest. After surviving the fall he drives away on a motor-cycle. A roadblock is set up for him and he also gets stopped by a Quinjet. He does however get past both.

It is later revealed that Pierce is working with the masked man when he shoots his cleaner for seeing him together with the masked man.

Steve arrives later at the hospital where he notices that the USB is gone. Natasha had taken it and he angrily asks her what she knows about all that has happened. She tells him that the masked man is a spy known as the Winter Soldier and she had encountered him once before. She decides to follow Cap. They go to an internet café to see if there is any valuable information on it. But they, as Fury did, find nothing. However they did find the location where the USB could be unlocked. Rumlow and his team try to find them but fail to do so.

They steal a car and drive to the location while talking about the good old days. When they arrive Steve realizes that they are at the old training facility where he trained during WW2. They find a secret storage room full of old computers inside a S.H.I.E.L.D office. There they find a more modern looking USB slot and they put the USB in. The computers power up and someone starts to talk to them. It is Arnim Zola who tells them that he was recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D after WW2 and that he helped to rebuild Hydra, inside S.H.I.E.L.D. But in the Seventies when he got the news that his body was un-savable. S.H.I.E.L.D, still needing his help, transferred his mind into software. He had been working on an algoritm that Hydra wanted. He told them that some of the deaths of S.H.I.E.L.D leaders had been due to Hydra, showing them a picture of Howard Stark, implying that his death might not have been an accident. He was also involved in the Winter Soldier program. But before Rogers and Romanoff can get any more information out of Zola S.H.I.E.L.D shows up and blows up the place. They survive the explosion and seek refuge with Sam Wilson. Sam tells them that he was part of a military project called Falcon, testing of a new form of winged Jet-Packs.

They went back D.C to talk to Agent Jasper Sitwell who is working for Hydra. He just had a meeting with Senator Stern, who before saying goodbye whispered Hail Hydra. Sam Wilson called Sitwell and forced him up on the roof of a tall building together with Natasha and Steve they get him to tell them that Zola's algorithm could calculate if a person would be a threat in the future. He also told them that Hydra are going to use Project Insight as a weapon to eliminate what they saw as threats against the world, mentioning Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Stephen Strange. This though would also mean that millions of innocent people would die.

The gang leaves but is attacked by the Winter Soldier and his men. A battle breaks out and as Cap and the Winter Soldier fights his mask is broken and it is revealed that he is Bucky Barnes. Cap says Bucky?, but Bucky doesn't know who that is and Cap, Black Widow and Sam are taken into custody. While in the prison van one of the guards stuns the other one and reveal herself to be Maria Hill. She then uses the drill gadget to escape with the gang.

Agent Hill took them to a secret facility where Nick Fury was resting, revealing that he didn't die, even though he where severely injured. He had taken a anti stress serum, developed by Bruce Banner, that lowered his heartbeat to only one per minute so that he would appear dead. Hill and Fury told them that Project Insight was only hours away and that they had to act quickly. The Helicarriers would hover in a triangle, connected, targeting all its targets before firing. The only way to prevent this was to use three special chips that would take away S.H.I.E.L.D's control over the Helicarriers. Cap had lost his suit earlier so he needed to break in to the Captain America museum and steal the one that was on display. And so they went off to save the day.

The Winter Soldier is being prepared for battle but he starts to ask who Bucky is. Hydra decides he knows too much about his past and they brainwash him again. He gets a flashback showing how Hydra's Russian division found him in suspended animation after falling of the train. It is then learn that Doctor Zola amputated his destroyed left-arm and replaced it with a cybernetic one. He also remembers how he was put in Cryo-tanks between his missions so that he would not get old.

The members of the World Security Council arrive at the Triskelion. They are given one device each to put on their collar that will grant them access to anywhere in the Triskelion. They then all walk up to Alexander Pierce's office. Captain America and Sam a.k.a The Falcon, breaks in and take control of the microphones. They tell the staff that there are traitors in S.H.I.E.L.D and that Alexander Pierce is one of them and that they cannot initiate Project Insight. Rumlow and his men walk in to the control room and threaten to shoot the guy in charge if he doesn't get the Helicarriers in the air. But Agent 13 intervenes and a gunfight breaks out, but Rumlow still manages to get the Helicariers in the air.

Pierce pulls a gun at a WSC member but Agent Romanoff, disguised as a WSC member, stops him. She then calls for Fury who is a S.H.I.E.L.D agent of the highest degree, and since two S.H.I.E.L.D agents of the highest degree are needed to stop Project Insight she asks Pierce to help them. Fury states that Pierce probably erased all traces of Fury being the director of S.H.I.E.L.D, but not on the eye scan since, quite recently, Fury changed the eyescan picture from the picture of his working eye to the picture of his damaged eye. But Pierce refuses to help and presses a button that is connected to the devices on the WSC member’s collars that knocks them out. Romanoff threatens to unveil a document with all of her and his secrets. She does and this makes Pierce knock her out too. This gives Fury no other choice then to shoot Pierce, leaving it all up to The Falcon and the Captain.

They manage to put the chips, with some hardship, for two of the Helicarriers in the right place, but when Falcon is going for the last one his jet-pack is damaged by the Winter Soldier and he is forced to skydive down to the Triskelion where he gets caught up in a fistfight with Agent Rumlow. Now it's all on Cap. He is about to put the chip in place before he is confronted by Bucky. They fight and during the fight Cap tries to convince Bucky that he was good once upon a time. As he tries to get the chip in place with only seconds left before Project Insight will initiate he gets shot multiple times by Bucky. He manages though and Agent Hill can take control of the other Helicarriers and shoots down the Project Insight ones. Before Steve passes out he promises Bucky to be with him until the end, a promise Bucky gave Steve decades ago. Then Cap falls into the water beneath and is about to drown when a hand grabs him and drags him out of the water. It is Bucky who then disappears.

One of the Helicarriers veers into the Triskelion severly damaging a portion of it. Falcon jumps out and is saved by that much by Fury and Romanoff. Rumlow is buried under rubble but is later seen being taken care of by doctors. Steve wakes up some time later a lot of new stuff has happened. S.H.I.E.L.D have gone trough some major changes. Nick Fury is officially dead and he has destroyed all evidence of being alive, even ditching the eye-patch for sunglasses. And if somebody asked what happened with Fury, he wanted Cap to answer that he was dead. Natasha went to a hearing where they asked why she shouldn't go to jail for what she had done. She said that it was because they still needed her. Now that her secrets were revealed she needed a new identity. And Cap decided to start looking, with the help of The Falcon, for Bucky, so that he can convince him of who he really is.

Sometime later, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is holding the Chitauri Scepter, stating that there are HYDRA agents worldwide. He then walks over to a pair of cells. He stops in front of them and says, "This is the age of Miracles..." One of the cells contains a man who is running around at a tremendous speed. The other one contains a woman who levitates a few books, before she lets a beam of energy explode from her hand.

Meanwhile Bucky, now in normal clothes,is walking around in the Captain America museum. He then stops to read about himself.

Cast

 * Chris Evans as Steve Rogers/Captain America
 * Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow
 * Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier
 * Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson/Falcon
 * Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill
 * Frank Grillo as Brock Rumlow
 * Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter
 * Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter
 * Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce
 * Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
 * Georges St-Pierre as Georges Batroc
 * Toby Jones as Arnim Zola
 * Maximiliano Hernández as Jasper Sitwell
 * Garry Shandling as Senator Stern
 * Callan Mulvey as Jack Rollins
 * Chin Han as Councilman Yen
 * Jenny Agutter as Councilwoman Hawley
 * Dale Coffman as Councilman Rockwell
 * Bernard White as Councilman Singh
 * Alan Dale as unnamed member of the World Security Council
 * Adetokumboh M'Cormack as Ferdinand Lopez
 * Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver
 * Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch
 * Thomas Kretschmann as Baron Wolfgang von Strucker
 * Gary Sinise as Smithsonian's Captain America exhibit narrator.
 * Stan Lee as a Smithsonian Security Guard.
 * Joseph Russo makes a cameo appearance as a doctor.
 * Ed Brubaker makes a cameo appearance as a scientist.
 * Danny Pudi makes a cameo appearance as a S.H.I.E.L.D. Technician

Locations

 * Earth
 * North America
 * United States of America
 * Washington, D.C.
 * Triskelion
 * Smithsonian Museum
 * New York
 * New York City
 * Avengers Tower
 * Illinois (mentioned)
 * Chicago (mentioned)
 * New Jersey
 * Camp Lehigh
 * Asia (mentioned)
 * Afghanistan (mentioned)
 * Pakistan (mentioned)
 * Europe (mentioned)


 * Germany (mentioned)
 * Russia (mentioned)


 * Moscow (mentioned)
 * Classified Location
 * HYDRA Research Facility

Events

 * S.H.I.E.L.D. Civil War
 * Project Insight

Items

 * Captain America's Shield
 * Vibranium
 * Captain America's Uniform
 * Black Widow's Bite
 * EXO-7 Falcon
 * Winter Soldier's Prosthetic Arm
 * Chitauri Scepter
 * Mouse Hole

Vehicles

 * Lemurian Star
 * S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier
 * S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet
 * Captain America's Motorcycle

Organizations

 * S.H.I.E.L.D.
 * S.T.R.I.K.E.
 * HYDRA
 * Stark Industries
 * CIA
 * FBI
 * United States Armed Forces
 * Strategic Scientific Reserve (mentioned)
 * Howling Commandos (mentioned)
 * KGB (mentioned)

Mentioned

 * Bruce Banner
 * Tony Stark/Iron Man
 * Matthew Ellis
 * Stephen Strange
 * Red Skull
 * Howard Stark
 * Maria Stark
 * Joseph Rogers
 * Sarah Rogers