The Watcher - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

by Jack Meldrum

Oh.

Wow.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is fantastic. Not merely 'good for the genre' or 'good but-flawed', but out and out tremendous. It's the best MARVEL movie ever made, by any studio. It's so good I genuinely believe it deserves Oscar nods for screenplay and director. It's a turning point for superhero movies and modern blockbusters, a rousing, earth-shattering film without a single bad scene or awkward moment. At all.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has totally redefined what a superhero movie is. When we look back in a decade, we'll mark at as the point where 'superhero' stopped being a genre and started being a form – a method and style of making any kind of movie, where character and action are irrevocably intertwined and everything exists in this kind of hyper-real, impossible state that you believe in wholeheartedly. It's a sublime political thriller in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate, and it has the best action I've seen in a Hollywood film in my short life – easily the best in a decade at least. It's a tense, chilling film about trust and conspiracies where a man flies around on a jetpack wing suit.

Everything works. From a wonderful opening scene that introduces us (and Captain America, still played note-perfect by Chris Evans) to Anthony Mackie's scene-stealing Falcon to the gut-busting mid-film twist to the fantastic final action sequence, The Winter Soldier is a testament to how the most important part of a movie is the screenplay. There's not a wasted line or a superfluous scene. Action happens because it should, not because someone worried we might be bored. Characters behave like real, complex human beings who just happen to have superpowers and deep moral codes.

And – SPOILER ALERT – there's one of the most shocking, nauseating twists you can imagine in any movie, revealed during a terse conversation with a man who lives inside a gigantic tape-reel IBM computer. For real. It's one of the best scenes in the movie and you don't question it for a second.

The eponymous Winter Soldier is also one of the best things in a very, very good movie. Sebastian Stan has perhaps thirty words in the whole thing but he acts the pants off it. He's chilling and menacing and goddamn relentless and there's never a doubt that he really would kill you, right now, if he was asked to. Despite the soaring unreality of the film, it's totally compelling, to an extent where several times I questioned how this movie even existed. It's that potent.

I can't even tell you about my favourite scene – one totally overflowing with cleverness and unbelievable use of multiple story threads – because it's pure spoiler and you deserve to see it untainted. But you do absolutely deserve to see it. The Winter Soldier is one of the best movies of the year so far, quite possibly the best superhero movie ever made. Unlike The Dark Knight, it's dark without being morose, and it's smart without being smug. It's a fantastically watchable, shockingly well-handled film that mines the source material for every bit of good stuff it can and then creates a transcendent movie experience.

This one's gonna go far.

Jack Meldrum tried to upload himself to his pocket calculator. It's still trying to compute his ego.

The Watcher Retrospective - Captain America: The First Avenger

by Jack Meldrum

As of writing it's been just over 24 hours since I saw Captain America – The First Avenger in cinemas for the first time. Not that it was the first time I saw it, as I've had the movie on DVD since roughly six months after it first came out.

But seeing it on-screen reminded me just how good this film is. 

The ultimate strength of Captain America is that it fully embraces the message delivered by Doctor Abraham Erskine – that a 'weak man knows the value of strength' and that, to steal a quote from Disney's Hercules, 'the strength of a hero is the strength of his heart'. It's an absolutely unironic celebration of goodness, of honesty, of courage and idealism. There's no jingoistic nonsense because Steve Rogers (played to perfection by Chris Evans) is not a jingoistic man. He's not even a patriot, if one considers how patriotism so often plays out. He's a man who believes wholeheartedly in the values his country is supposed to be about. And the movie believes in him in the same way.

Joe Johnston (who also did the sublime Rocketeer and the really underrated Jurassic Park 3) opens the film with the present-day discovery of the frozen Cap and then uses the prolonged flashback that is the rest of the picture as justification for montage after montage – an approach that delivers surprisingly effective results. It's the Second World War as we know it in movies, not necessarily as it was, and because the Captain is such an impossibly fictional character, it works. Johnston's clichéd beats aren't clichés, because he's using them to absolute best effect – embracing the impossible nature of the material and selling it to us as he knows we'll understand.

Hugo Weaving is the standout, though. His Red Skull - a man so evil the Nazis said 'maybe he's a bit much, ja?' - is a glowering menace and somehow totally believable, even when he's fondling the Cosmic Cube and shooting laser beams at Hitler's cronies. Toby Jones' Armin Zola is equally terrific, with a curious amoral/moral bent that suggests he's not totally comfortable with the Asgardian-derived superweapons he's asked to churn out. Skull and Zola form the backbone of the film's narrative and structure, driving the plot forward with their sinister 'kill everyone, remake the world' super-scheme. Their sublime construction and performance means that any time the film's jovial WWII stuff feels a little flabby, we cut right back to these tight, taut interactions between man and monster and it all feels fine.

The movie is, frankly, an impossibility – made less so now by the presence of the totally incredible sequel, but still something so honest and heartfelt it's unbelievable it dropped in the cynical year of 2011. It's a film I never expected to work, and yet it does, and it does it by kneecapping cynicism from the word go and going out of its way to treat what it does as what it is. It's silly, stupendous stuff.

So when I say the sequel is a total masterpiece, you know where I'm coming from.

Jack Meldrum volunteered for the super-soldier programme, but they said he was too super already. 

New Beginnings - Shutter #1

by Matt Puddy

Fresh from Image this week we have Shutter, a new comic by Joe Keating and Leila Del Duca.

Showing potential promise to be the new Indiana Jones of the comic book world, the story revolves around Kate Kristopher. Coming from a family with a history that is steeped in secrets, mystery and also discoveries, her late father opened up a whole new and interesting world to her when she was just a child. An example of this would be her 7th birthday treat, when he metaphorically offered her all of the different worlds whilst showing her our own Earth from the surface of the moon.

From the outset this is clearly set in an alternate reality, or pockets of one that is outside of our own. Paintings depicted by Del Duca in the hallways showings things like meeting aliens on Pluto in 1902 or family portraits complete with fairies or other magical creatures.

All of this is a lot to take in for a young girl. It's a huge amount to live up to, should she choose that path. Skipping forward 20 years and things are very different to our world. Society is multilayered with spacemen and minotaurs alike and plenty in between. It also appears that Kate not only followed the path, but documented it too and published books which have become fan favourites.

Once the book ideas started to wane, Kate turned to another love and photography has filled the void for her. All the while she has never forgotten her late father, whose grave she visits regularly. Today being special, as it’s her 27th birthday.

Things are tough and rapidly spiral down when she is attacked by three spectral assassins only to be aided finally by a robot (which looks suspiciously like the man from the Pringles tubes) who endeavours to not only save her, but also to warn her to be wary of the assailants her father always shielded her from. Her siblings.

At first I found this story a little slow to pick up and get going, but on the second and third read through it becomes apparent that this is necessary for providing a much more sombre feel and mood, mimicking Kate’s own feelings, and then also providing a very harsh contract when the action kicked in. As a writing ploy it did work very well, setting up a cliffhanger for the end of the issue.

Del Duca’s artwork for the issue is well thought out and detailed. In the flashbacks, there’s a certain grainy quality to imply the age, and when brought into the present there’s an extra level of clarity. Even the bystanders have had attention paid to them in the frames, but at the same time it’s not overly detailed and distracting. I may well have another new artist to add to my list of favourites.

As a new beginning it certainly comes across well (as long as you do tough it out through the slow-paced opening) and I’ve enjoyed reading it. Whether or not it can hold the interest is yet to be seen, and I have a feeling there will be flashbacks galore to come, but all the same it's a good first issue that is well worth your time and money.

Matt Puddy scored a zero.

Afterlife Inc. - The Book of Life Kickstarter

by Jon Lock

Hi gang,

Jon Lock here, writer and creator of AFTERLIFE INC.

AFTERLIFE INC. is the tale of con-artist Jack Fortune, who, following his untimely demise, discovers an afterlife in chaos and decides to take over and run it like a business.

Over the last three years I’ve been publishing the on-going adventures of Jack and Co. as they attempt to modernise the Great Beyond. Now, for the first time, I’m collecting volumes 1-3 of AFTERLIFE INC. in one luxury hardback edition, the Book of Life.

At 376 full-colour pages, the Book of Life charts the entire AFTERLIFE INC. story to date along with 70 pages of special features, including pin-ups, character profiles, behind-the-scenes material, a guide to the afterlife and even an exclusive never-before-seen AFTERLIFE INC. tale.

The Book of Life is available to pre-order through Kickstarter right now. While the Book will eventually retail at £40, backers can take advantage of a Kickstarter-only price of £35. There’s also the chance to secure a copy for the early bird price of just £30! These super-reduced copies are limited, however, so be sure to get in early to avoid disappointment.

For all the Book of Life news as it happens, be sure to join the official mailing list. No spam guaranteed!

Thanks for your time, everyone. The Book of Life is a major landmark for AFTERLIFE INC. I look forward to being able to share it with you.

Jon Lock

For more info about the world of AFTERLIFE INC., and even some free stories, check out Jon’s website.

AFTERLIFE INC. is also one of the top 100 indie comics on Comixology. You can also find the series on Proud Lion Digital.

The Book Of Life will also be available to buy from Proud Lion once it's released.