Captain America: The Winter Soldier

One of the many great examples of a film series that learned from it's initial film blunder is Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Let's face it, Captain America: The First Avenger was rather shitty and I'm not really mad at that because for one thing it's rather hard to say the least in going up against more cinematically appealing characters like Iron Man and Thor with the likes of an old school, campy, patriotic good guy like Captain America in an age of modern day, global terrorism threats from all over and within.  I mean how do you sell that, as obviously Captain America is also essential to the culmination of The Avengers storyline? Well, apparently you embrace the obvious struggles and weaknesses of the character and throw him into the modern day drama of the shadow world and modern technology.  It's a smart and almost the only thing one could do.  Well, they didn't do this half heartily, recruiting no less than Robert Redford  (special note of Three Days Of The Condor and Spy Game) to bring an espionage authenticity to the table.  The Captain America of the so called "greatest generation" goes thru the ringer in having everything and everyone that he thought he believed in reveal itself as an illusion or betrayal. The technology and special effects are all still impressive enough, as we saw in The Avengers, but the filmmakers were smart enough to better highlight the low tech, raw fighting skills of Steve Rogers.  Perhaps, they took the obvious lesson from The Bourne Identity movies that even the latest James Bond series had to update and reboot to.  The major thing I didn't like, was that there was inherently too many nods to obvious other movies or movie influences that can sometimes look too much like a generic, fucking copy and paste thing.  That and ironically, the addition of other major characters, seemed to make it a bit less of a Captain America movie, however smart that was or wasn't in detracting from the unique character identity of him.  I enjoyed Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow character development the most, though.  Spoiler alert here.  When it becomes obvious that the S.H.I.E.L.D. organization has been long used as a front for the sinister HYDRA organization and all the revelations and fall out that rapidly ensue, the internal fight within and choosing of sides chaos that followed was a bit extreme, messy, and unrealistically rather tidy in the compunctional explosions to follow. Now I don't watch televisions Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so maybe I'm missing some understanding to that faction of the story, but the plot seemed a bit too frantic for the outcome.  So at this point in the film, the plot was very eerily interchangeable with the G.I. Joe films.  However, a good summer blockbuster action movie, it certainly is.  Of course, there is the now customary reveal for the next series of Avenger films near the end of the credits with the introduction of two new characters, who seem more in keeping with the X-Men franchise.