The Winter Soldier is such an improvement over The First Avenger you'd find it hard to believe that they're part of the same series; don't get me wrong: The First Avenger was entertaining, but I thought it was more pedestrian than this film. The Winter Soldier is like putting Captain America into a James Bond film and S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has been a more immediate threat than we thought. Marvel does use a lot of the tropes of typical superhero cinema: cameos galore, references in-universe, and sequel-building; the difference being that the events feel more immediate to what's currently happening. The Winter Soldier stands out from The Avengers crowd, pretty well I might add.

Captain America has gone up in the world since being in one of the 90's worst movies ever made (Captain America|1991): The First Avenger redeemed that partially, and The Winter Soldier effectively gave the character a complete turnaround and he's kept driving straight since. Of course I'm writing this after Captain America: Civil War came out and I can say that THAT film is the strongest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far, but The Winter Soldier is still a personal favourite of mine. Steve Rogers is a freedom fighter in this film, and it does seem that Chris Markus and Steve McFreely wrote the script celebrating Edward Snowden's leaking of the NSA's global surveillance scheme. The Winter Soldier does play out like a regular superhero film, but it has more underlying themes than usual 'lets-bash-the-baddie-real-good' stuff, and Captain America wants to save the world from the control of totalitarian-hungry tyrants.

On the surface Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a comic book movie full of stereotypical traits of superhero movies: underneath it actually breaks down what the character stands for, just like The Dark Knight did with Batman; we get the heroes we deserve but not the ones we need. We need to go through hardships to get the heroes we deserve, and Captain America is a character respecting this struggle.