User Reviews

Four episodes in and I still have no idea what the hell she's mad about. I enjoy the locations, Sam, Bucky, and Zemo are all super cool. But this mopey brat that sounds like she just discovered Rage Against the Machine is sooooo lame. It's just vauge social commentary about displaced people or something? She complains constantly about how unfair everything is and why her violence is justified. I guess this is Disney's idea of an Anti-hero. It's not working. I'm just hoping the discount Captian America crushes her head.

Bucky and Sam are good together and Zemo is a really charismatic villian. They should have just left this Flag Smasher business as a subplot.

So, I will hit the pros and cons for this (I will update this review over the shows run)

Pros:

I like the actors, they do good with their script and their onscreen chemistry is great I like a lot of the loose plotholes this show is tying up. There were a lot of them left dangling and so they should be wrapped up. (Zemo, Other Winter Soldiers) I like they are shedding light on forgotten Avengers like Winter Soldier and Falcon. It was good when they did that in Wandavision and it is important to remember supporting characters

Now, for my least favorite/favorite part of a review: the cons

(I will try to be quick as I am fond of this show and while it has flaws my low rating will get higher)

It is taking a long time to build up. For Wanda Vision it worked well, but for such a quick paced show it needs to get somewhere faster We kind of skipped over Sam's family issues and Bucky's trauma in favor of more action. While I like action, those were important story elements.

There are too many names to keep up with and it isn't explained well what is going on. That I think they could have done better.

Final thoughts:

It is too early to review this show. I am leaving my review so far and intend to update it, so most of the issues will probably get addressed. If you are questioning the authenticity of my review, be aware it is of the quality of the show itself and how I feel, for clarification, so this is my opinion and please feel free to disagree.

Review By Kamal K

I was looking forward to this for so long and it just flopped for me. First, the acting was bland across the board. Second, the story tries to add in too many characters we're supposed to care about, without really building any of these characters. Third, convoluted storylines and tons of plot holes and unanswered questions.

And Fourth

Racial politics are littered throughout the show, often in ways that are at once preachy and puzzling. Before I stopped recapping the show, I wrote about the episode where Bucky takes Sam to meet Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) a Super Soldier the US government used during Vietnam to track down the Winter Soldier. He was badly mistreated by the government following his service and is justifiably unwilling to help.

When they leave, the two start arguing in the street and moments later cops pull up and start harassing Sam (somehow not recognizing the famous Avenger).

It followed the absurd bank scene in the first episode in which Sam is turned down for a loan because he was vanished in the Snappening and has no income record for five years. But Sam is friends with powerful-and rich-people like Tony Stark's widow, Pepper Potts. He's also clearly working on high-level missions that must pay some sort of fee-surely he's not working for the richest, most powerful government in the world for free. (Also banks would be dying to loan money to all these newcomers in need of money. It would be hugely lucrative. And if they weren't, legislation would surely be passed to make it so).

The heavy-handed politics just keep coming, unfortunately. The idea that Sam was passed over for the job of Captain America and it was given to a white dude who is clearly the World's Greatest Monster for taking said job permeates the show. By the end, when Sam just decides to take the mantle of Captain America for himself, it's not just the right man for the job stepping up, it's driven home over and over again that he's black and that this is somehow (because the show tells us, mainly) a Very Big Deal. This despite the numerous black superheroes that nobody has a problem with. If you'd just left the discussion of race out of the equation entirely, nobody would bat an eye. We were already expecting Sam to become Captain America after Endgame, and nobody cared one way or another.

After Sam beats the Flag Smashers and saves the GRC members with his super suit, he lays into the senators and global representatives telling them to check their privilege and "do better."

It's almost a good speech until you think about the particulars. The GRC has been working for six months on an impossible task. Half the world's population disappeared for five years and then suddenly reappeared. In the meantime, people just sort of divided the spoils. The GRC has been tasked with figuring out what to do with all the newly reappeared people, long-term squatters, governments and civil society in complete disarray. It was hard enough to figure out what to do when everyone vanished; piecing the world back together now is a monumental task and not everyone is going to be happy. That's the hard truth of actually governing, actually leading people: You can't make everybody happy. That doesn't mean you coddle violent extremists who blow up innocents

Sam flying in with his fancy new Captain America suit chastising a bunch of people who very nearly died moments earlier to "do better" and shame them for referring to the Flag Smashers as "terrorists" isn't actually that awesome, cheering onlookers notwithstanding. It might feel awesome in a very generic, platitudinous way, but it's not. It's empty.

Sam is a soldier. His job is to stop bad guys. He hasn't spent a day in the shoes of these world leaders, bickering and wheeling and dealing in an often fruitless attempt to figure out how to make the world whole again. The fact that he's touting Karli Morgenthau's politics at this point is just . . . Weird. Karli (Erin Kellyman) is a terrorist and a murderer and her idealism is based on lies.

Lots of low reviews after one episode. Complaints include that there's not enough action and that the main character's storylines are played out tropes. First of all, if you're really just looking for non-stop action, you have no business reviewing anything. Second of all, the first episode explored aspects of superhero universes that we haven't seen yet. Superheros struggling to make ends meet, and trying to make amends for things they did while literally being brainwashed. Show me where we've seen that before. How those are supposed to be played out tropes is beyond me. Be better, people. I'm just happy that Bucky finally has lines.

The amount of people complaining about racial issues and politics being in a Marvel property are complete morons. The comics were embroiled in racial and political situations regularly. From the X-Men being an allegory to the civil rights movement to the Tuskegee Experiments being a mirror of the failed Super Soldier tests. Not to mention that it's central to Sam's character development. These reviewers are looking to be mad at anything that includes black people at this point and you can tell most haven't even watched the show. They started getting angry the second any mention of Sam being black came up. The action is great, the pacing is a little off in places but I'm loving the cameos and their commitment to showing almost all the comic iterations of Cap. Seriously, as a white guy, if the show hurt your feelings then I really don't know what would've even caused that reaction. You might be looking for a reason to be upset at a superhero show.

Honestly the first 2 episodes were okay. However the 3rd episode was very entertaining and got me excited. Hopefully the rest of the show keeps it up.

Spoiler: i love that they brought wakanda into this. Im intrigued on how they're going to go with it.

Marvel should have paid the Russo brother's any amount of money to be the show runners. Passing off the mantle of "Cap" should have been done with the utmost care and it just wasn't. I love that Sam is Cap. I have no problems with the political/race conversations. But the execution, script, writing, action, and story-telling was all mediocre. I will sincerely hope this is not the new level of quality of the MCU. If you are going to put out multiple mini-series per year, and put "MCU" on it, you need to uphold that standard. This wasn't it.

Is it political? Yes. Did that annoy me? Yes. But I can typically look past that and still enjoy the show or film, so that actually has very little to do with my low score here. I thought it started out strong but after finishing the last episode, I have no idea why winter soldier is even in the title, because he had very little to do with anything. Anything they set up for Bucky in the first few episodes were barely skimmed over by the end. What was the point?! This was all about setting up future Captain America movies, and not done well at all. The ending was so extremely cheesey that I didn't even want to finish the last 5 minutes of it. All I know is that this is not the same marvel that's been pumping out awesome movies for the last 10+ years. At least WandaVision had heart and soul and a great villain... this had none of that. I was excited for this but I'm left sorely disappointed.