5 Things To Watch Before Captain America: The Winter Soldier

4. The Parallax View

Marvel producer/mastermind Kevin Feige says a lot of things, but something he's said in relation to The Winter Soldier is particularly interesting: he describes the film not as a regular superhero movie, or an action flick, but a "political thriller". To be more specific, he compares the tone of the new Captain America movie to the spate of American films that came out following the Watergate scandal that reflected the fraught, paranoid times most of America found itself living in, such as Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, and especially The Parallax View. The second in director Alan J. Pakula's aptly-named "Political Paranoia trilogy", The Parallax View tells the story of journalist Joe Frady (played by Warren Beatty), who stumbles across a clandestine organisation that specialises in political assassinations. And that organisation may just have a connection to the very people who benefit from bumping off errant senators.... In fact the central theme of the film is that there are sinister goings on beneath the seemingly benevolent guise of those suits up in Washington, all under the pretense that it's for the greater good of the country. Which is not unlike SHIELD figurehead Alexander Pierce's (played by Robert Redford, himself a star in a lot of post-Watergate thrillers) assertion in The Winter Soldier trailer that "sometimes, to make a better world, you have to tear the old one down."