Accuracy in…Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Let’s take a look at the characters from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Captain America is Steve Rogers and I think someone calls him a capsicle in this. He also shows some of the Civil War spirit in not wanting to just follow orders.

Black Widow is Natasha Romanoff and she gets to show off some of her little tools, but still lacks any powers. She is probably the best secret agent in the world—although secret must have gone out the window with THE AVENGERS. But who trained her? In the movie she says she worked for the KGB…which is fine, except that her character was born in 1984 and the KGB ended in 1991. So she should know that she worked for the FSB once she was 7. In the comics her training started very young and one of her finest tutors was The Winter Soldier.

Sam Wilson, The Falcon, and some kind of bird, looks like a hawk of some sort…

Before we get to Spoiler central and the Winter Soldier, let’s move on to Falcon who is Sam Wilson. The movie’s version of him comes from the Ultimate universe. The major difference is that in the movie Wilson does not work for Nick Fury, but instead agrees to help out Captain America. While I doubt there is a plan for this in place, Falcon agrees to join the Avengers (briefly). He also lacks his non-Ultimate universe comic book ability to talk to birds! He is the Aquaman/Namor of the air, except that there is no air kingdom nor air-people.

Promo for Cap 2 featuring Falcon (Anthony Mackie), © Marvel 2014.

The Winter Soldier is a character created by Ed Brubaker. Winter Soldier is a thawable assassin with almost no memory and a metallic arm. Who he was in 1944 is a different story. Not everyone from the first movie truly died. He is in fact one of the longest dead characters—58 years! That is longer than Wolverine has been a character! And in some ways if anyone would replace Steve Rogers as Captain America, the Winter Soldier might have what it takes, even without the serum. One key difference, as mentioned above, is that Winter Soldier was a KGB assassin, not a Hydra one.

Speaking of Hydra, Arnim Zola was Hydra’s finest mind in World War II. In the comics he never goes to work for Uncle Sam (?) and has his head/consciousness uploaded into a robot, not into a computer.

Yeah…Cap 1, Cap 2, comics…

Sgt. Peggy Carter is actually played by the same woman who portrayed her in Cap: The First Avenger, Hayley Atwell. Which is amazing because she looks like she is in her 80s now. She was also the original Agent 13 and a member of the French Resistance in WWII. Having her team back up with Cap made more sense in the 1960’s than it does now, because she would only have been in her late 40’s by then.