MCU: 10 Things You Learn Rewatching Captain America: The Winter Soldier
3. Alexander Pierce Is A Fantastic Villain
Marvel Studios
You know, with all these good villains coming around these days, to say the MCU has a bad guy problem would probably be a tad bit disingenuous.
There's Loki, Vulture, Ego and of course Erik Killmonger, but one villain who (both in and out of the film) has managed to eschew the spotlight is Alexander Pierce, Robert Redford's sinister antagonist who preserves Hydra's presence in the modern day.
Pierce is the very manner of a modern major nasty - the kind of villain who utilises any and all means at his disposal but who's able to mask it all with a welcoming presence. It's the perfect role for Redford, who - in the seventies - played the exact antithesis of this character, as crusading journalist Bob Woodward in All the President's Men, and as an analyst on the run in Three Days of the Condor.
It makes his deception all the more convincing, and while he leaves the dirty work for the Winter Soldier himself, he's a villain in the truest sense.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
