MCU: 10 Things You Learn Rewatching Captain America: The Winter Soldier

10. It's A Product Of The Seventies

The true genius of The Winter Soldier lies in how it tells its story. This isn't a typical superhero film, and while comparisons to spy films are apt, there is another genre that fits it better - that of the conspiracy thriller.

Although they existed prior to the Nixon presidency, conspiracy fiction exploded during the early 1970s. Directors like Alan Pakula, Francis Ford Coppola and Sydney Pollack were its greatest proponents, and star Robert Redford - who starred in Pakula's All The President's Men and, in another of TWS' biggest inspirations, Pollack's Three Days of the Condor - played a key role too.

The Winter Soldier's story of an Agency compromised by a sinister force bears the echo of Three Days in particular - as does its structure - and in creating a pervasive kind of paranoia on the screen, the film follows Pakula (Klute, The Parallax Man) and Coppola (The Conversation) excellently. Redford's casting as an establishment villain - ironic though it may be - is also derivative of those works, and while there's action to match the tension, it's made apparent where TWS' takes its inspiration from right from the start.