3) Furthermore, the ambiguous nature of the villains was sort of the entire point. The point here is that the world has changed, that the obvious black-and-white distinction between good and evil from Cap's original time (as portrayed in the first movie) has been blurred. Before the bad guys were clearly identifiable and out in the open. Here they were working behind the scenes. Many of them even believed that they were doing what was right, or were just cogs in a machine, being manipulated towards some end goal. This directly ties into Nick Fury's trust issues. It's reflected in Falcon's words when he asks how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The real "villain" here is far more abstract than the standard super-powered bad guy. The villain is a culture of fear, the technological ability to strike preemptively, and how those things can erode our values and cause us to become that which we have dedicated ourselves to fighting against. Not to say that the movie isn't without its flaws. Personally I think that the reemergence of Hydra was unnecessary and dilutes the point about how the world and its threats have changed. The same point could have been gotten across without basically making the bad guys Nazis. If anything, that just waters down the difference between Cap's new world and old world by basically saying, "yep, we say that the world has changed, but we're still gonna have him fight the same cartoon bad guys that he was fighting back in the 1940's." But for the most part, I think that it was handled in an appropriate and clever manner.
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