“This isn’t freedom … this is fear” – Captain America
Despite the film’s having tanked at the box office, Barack Obama recently hosted a showing of the sparsely viewed “Cesar Chavez: An American Hero.” But those anticipating Obama giving the same treatment to the already-breaking-box-office-records “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” shouldn’t hold your breath, as reported by Mother Jones.
Co-director Joe Russo (along with his brother, Anthony) stated in his interview that the just-released film was intended to be a political thriller with the plot line intentionally taken from the headlines.
Don’t drone me, bro …
Russo pulled no punches when he declared the film “had to do with civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president’s kill list, preemptive technology.” The last of these is a buzzword for the recent revelation that the National Security Administration was mining data of American citizens from both telephone records and off the internet, as well.
Russo added:
It was all leading up to Snowden. It was all in the ether [already], it was all part of the zeitgeist. The Snowden stuff actually happened while we were shooting.
On the topic of Obama’s penchant for making lists, Russo also asked rhetorically:
The question is where do you stop? If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there’s 1,000? What if we find out there’s 10,000? What if it’s a million? At what point do you stop?
Don’t spoiler alert me, bro …
S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division) agent Steve Rogers/Captain America slowly finds that the organization he’s a member of isn’t exactly the clear-cut good guys he initially believed. As Robert Redford’s character of S.H.I.E.L.D. honcho Alexander Goodwin Pierce tells the Captain early in the film, “To build a better world, sometimes you have to turn the old one down.”
Perhaps prophetic, the good Captain finds himself fighting against members of an oppressive one-world government. He also has to do battle with “three Helicarriers (basically gigantic autonomous killer drones) that are fed large amounts of data and intel. The Helicarriers process the data to identify and preemptively eliminate potential threats to national and global security.”
Tale of the take …
Since it opened last week “Cesar Chavez: An American Hero” pulled in $3 million. Prior to its April 4th North American debut “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” had already brought in $75 million overseas. According to industry insiders, the latest in the Marvel Comics-based films is widely expected to be one of the top grossing films of all times, as reported by MTV News.
