THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER: Pointless!

After a very successful opening of the universe on the small screen, which without a shadow of a doubt I can call WandaVision, it was time for a production devoted to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Unfortunately, this time it did not work out, and six clumsy episodes quite effectively killed my enthusiasm.

We meet the titular heroes right after the events of Avengers: Endgame. Sam rejects the legacy of Captain America, handing over the shield he received from Steve to a museum, while Bucky tries to fight the demons of the past that have taken over his mind, preventing him from finding himself in everyday life.

Soon, however, a threat appears on the horizon in the form of a group of terrorists using the super-soldier serum, and Sam and Bucky will once again have to join forces.

In theory, the latest Marvel production does not look bad. Not only do Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan return to their roles, but we can also count on a significant appearance by Daniel Brühl, who once again plays Zemo known from Captain America: Civil War, and Emily VanCamp, Agent Carter from the Russo brothers’ films. The whole thing is clearly inspired by the atmosphere of those productions, that is, in fact, by the comics of Ed Brubaker, the most accomplished contemporary creator of Captain America.

Unfortunately, Mackie and Stan are not, in my opinion, a duo that handles the spotlight well. Their characters lack the charisma of Steve Rogers, and the actors lack chemistry. The apparent contrast of characters, a tried-and-true way to give a production a successful dynamic (see: Lethal Weapon and the like), quickly blurs, and all the resulting humor feels extremely forced.

I do not agree with the thesis that all Marvel movies are the same, but indeed, the humorous dialogues present in Falcon sound like they came out of a generator of the worst dad jokes in this universe.

It is no better in the background. For reasons unknown to me (did anyone complain about this?), the Zemo known from the film was rapidly transformed into a character closer to his comic book original, losing his initial image in the process. Unfortunately, this does not lead to anything interesting, and the character disappears from the screen as suddenly as he appeared. The same goes for Agent Carter. The charismatic film character is distorted, probably only so that the creators could shock the viewer with any plot twist. It is hard to say anything more about the antagonists.

In the creators’ intention, they were probably meant to be multidimensional and ambiguous, but they turned out to be generic and therefore uninteresting.

The writers slide over all the presented threads so clumsily and without any willingness to dig into any of them that I quickly lost any interest in the story being told.

There are really interesting motifs here: the hardships of superheroes’ everyday lives, coping with war traumas, systemic racism, the situation of veterans, dirty government tricks, but all of this is treated superficially, without an idea, just to check a box.

Maybe if they had not thrown everything into the pot at once, had not added more characters, and had not forced the heroes to have the fiftieth dialogue about the metal shield (one might think it, and not Steve, was the essence of Captain America; Bucky at one point almost literally calls the shield his family), the whole thing would not give the impression that no one was really interested in creating this series.

Because in the end, the whole thing practically screams that all these events were simply POINTLESS, and the characters are exactly in the same place they were in the park in the finale of Avengers: Endgame. Six weeks of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier left me with nothing. It is an unengaging, calculated series, without a gram of an interesting idea, completely irrelevant within the universe and telling us nothing new about its characters. It makes one suspect that Disney+ series may indeed be successful (WandaVision!), but they will never tell stories as important as those we will see in theaters.

Oh, the cinematography was nice. And the action scenes were nice too.