The Hidden Meaning of Supersoldiers in “Captain America”
How "Falcon and the Winter Solder" addresses the past and present of supersoldiers to help set up the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Unsurprisingly, the Captain America franchise – which now comprises three films and a six-episode television miniseries, with a fourth movie possibly on the way – has fundamentally revolved around the existence of supersoldiers. It is a device that helps form a broader pattern within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one that has served its overarching storytelling very well: a given protagonist, particularly for his first outing, has to contend with his equal and opposite. Whether this is Iron Man facing off against Iron Monger, the Hulk battling with the Abomination, Doctor Stranger dueling against Kaecilius, or, most recently, Scarlet Witch squaring off against Agatha Harkness, it is only appropriate that Captain America, the last recipient of the original supersoldier serum, would duke it out with the Red Skull, the first.
What has proven to be so interesting about the Cap series, however, is how the filmmakers have taken this rather general-but-effective conceit and used it to pivot to a larger, grander narrative, one that directly tackles theme as well as incorporates character. It is what has helped make this particular facet of Marvel Studios’s shared universe arguably the most creatively successful one yet – and why it has such a bright future that could last for another decade still.
This is how Marvel accomplished the feat.
The Sequential Succession of Supersoldiers
After Steve Rogers is chosen by the Strategic Scientific Reserve to become the first test subject of the newly completed supersoldier serum in Captain America: The First Avenger (July 2011), he quickly finds himself locked in combat against Johann Schmidt, the only other individual to have received a version of that formula, even if in prototype form. The so-called Red Skull’s apparent death at the end of that film left Captain America the sole remaining enhanced soldier on the planet – for just a few moments, that is, until he, too, is believed KIA.
While Captain America: The Winter Soldier (April 2014) doesn’t depict Steve’s rescue and return to the land of the living – those, after all, were handled by the tail-end of The First Avenger itself and, just glancingly, The Avengers (May 2012) – this second installment does devote itself to Cap’s efforts at integrating himself into the modern world. These efforts, of course, inevitably include fighting yet another serum recipient, the Winter Soldier; in the absence of any supersoldiers, the global superpowers rushed to fill the void, with both SHIELD (the replacement of the SSR) and Hydra (the remaining vestiges of Red Skull’s fanatical faction) laboring to recreate Dr. Abraham Erskine’s original solution from the 1930s and ‘40s. In this way, it would seem, Johann Schmidt acts almost as a placeholder threat until James Buchanan Barnes, the real foil for Capt. Rogers, can be revealed and permanently unleashed into the wild.
And it’s a narrative flourish that makes sense. The Red Skull, while powerful and more than a match for a young Captain America, was an incomplete product, one that wouldn’t be able to contend with the likes of his ultimate Hydra replacement, Winter Soldier, or, even, with a post-Avengers Cap. Bucky Barnes’s iteration of the serum, meanwhile, brings the ex-American GI into seeming parity with his former friend – he even possesses a metal arm that effectively acts as the counterpart to Cap’s indestructible (and iconic) shield.
The brilliance of Captain America: Civil War (May 2016) is how it plays upon these building audience expectations and increasing narrative stakes of the supersoldier, continuing to shift them time and again throughout its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. After further exploring Bucky’s past sins (namely, the assassination of SHIELD Director Howard Stark and his wife) and framing him for new ones (the murder of Wakanda’s King T’Chaka), the movie pivots to Baron Helmut Zemo and his crusade to track down Hydra’s last remaining Winter Soldiers, the enhanced death squad that Barnes was forced to help train decades ago. And yet, the expected climatic showdown between Captain America and his allies, on the one hand, and these final supersoldiers, on the other, is not to be; instead, the dramatic confrontation occurs between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark themselves, pitting friend against friend and one vision of a government-sanctioned Avengers against another, more individualistic one. This, it transpires, is what Zemo had in mind the entire time: the elimination of superpowered beings, whether of a chemical or technological nature – including the five additional Winter Soldiers, who the baron murdered in their cryostatic sleep.
With the (initial) Captain America trilogy’s ending, it would seem that the threat that had originally emanated from Abraham Erskine’s serum 70 years ago was similarly ended, paving the way for Capt. Rogers to reach closure of his own in the two-part Avengers extravaganza, Infinity War (April 2018) and Endgame (April 2019).
But then The Falcon and the Winter Soldier came along.
How Falcon Handles – and Changes Our Understanding of – the Supersoldier Paradigm
In retrospect, it isn’t at all shocking that Falcon and the Winter Soldier would inevitably resurrect the supersoldier formula, even if the television miniseries would see not one, but two non-enhanced individuals take up the mantle of Captain America for the very first time. Neither is it surprising, then, that this latest chapter would also take a page from Civil War and continue to use the conceit in new and unexpected ways.
The move starts by filling in the historical gaps that the three Cap movies left wide open, even if audiences didn’t know they existed. Sam Wilson learns that SHIELD’s earliest efforts to produce another Steve Rogers, in the years immediately following World War II’s conclusion, revolved around recruiting unwitting African American test subjects for further illicit experimentation. The sole stable success was Isaiah Bradley, who would ultimately prove to be a liability after the various governmental departments involved in his secret creation wanted to cover the whole operation up; he would be resigned to a 30-year stint in prison for his troubles, with his bloodwork going on to become the basis for all the subsequent attempts at supersoldier revival (including, eventually, the five additional Winter Soldiers). This makes him – at least, as far as Sam is concerned – just as much Captain America as Steve was, carrying on the country’s good work of fighting for freedom and justice on the battlefield even while being denied it at home.
Concurrent with Isaiah is the introduction of Dr. Wilfred Nagel, the Abraham Erskine of the modern era. It is he who toiled away on the (successful) replication of the original solution year after year and for one organization after another, ranging from Hydra to the CIA to, finally, the Power Broker, the de facto ruler of the criminal haven known as Madripoor. His story, as such, runs through nearly every single facet of the Captain America series to date, helping to bind together all the various plot twists and turns – before serving to completely scatter that status quo to the narrative winds.
The Power Broker is not the government of a nation-state – not even a wanna-be one, like with Red Skull and Hydra – and developing the next-generation serum in the cesspool of Madripoor has the consequence of rogue actors stealing it and using it for their own ends: initially, Karli Morgenthau and her compatriots inject themselves with the substance to lend a bit of superpowered heft to their fledgling Flag Smashers movement to rewrite the map of the world; subsequently, John Walker, the American military’s first choice to don the mantle of Captain America, also avails himself of the solution in an effort to compete with his newfound adversaries (there’s that parity between Cap and his enemies rearing up again, albeit in reverse this time).
And it is Walker’s final position in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that so perfectly illustrates the overarching franchise’s new state of affairs. The military officer that was chosen as a non-enhanced Captain America is now the superpowered US Agent, an ambiguous identity working for an ambiguous individual (in the form of Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) that represents an ambiguous organization of one sort or another. His future is now just as malleable as that of Captain America’s as a whole, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a richer, denser, more ambiguous (and ambitious!) place for it.
The supersoldiers will return.