Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the sequel to 2011’s The First Avenger, set records for an April movie opening, bringing in close to $100 million. The movie is a two-hour long special effects blow-out, which Hollywood expects to bring in massive revenue.
Trading on the recent trend of comic-book movies that take their source material seriously, The Winter Soldier dabbles in some current themes that might surprise those skeptical of Hollywood blockbusters. SHIELD, the super-secret security agency that Captain America belongs to, is revealed to be not all that it seems, as its secrecy is shown to make it prone to extraordinary abuses. It is clear that SHIELD’s mission is a metaphor for the war on terrorism and the abuses that have come from it. Revealing SHIELD’s secrets is seen as a great act of heroism, an allusion to Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents.
Still, these themes play second fiddle to the most popular notion in American action films, the siege mentality. At no point in The Winter Soldier (or any film in the Marvel Comics empire) is the world — and by world they naturally  mean the United States, since no other part of the world is ever shown on screen — not in mortal danger. Even as we learn that a secret military organization threatens our “freedom” (that amorphous concept at the center of all patriotic films), we discover that there actually are massive evil conspiracies to enslave people. So where does that leave us?
Whether the enemy is terrorism, the national enemy du jour (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, take your pick), crime, drugs or the fiscal cliff, we are kept in a constant state of fear by the media, and politicians. With so much fear-mongering it is easy to forget that the United States spends more on its military than the next ten biggest spenders combined. Movies like The Winter Soldier show a U.S. in constant danger of attack, but the historical facts show that it is the rest of the world that is in constant danger of attack from the United States.
In short, The Winter Soldier helps to perpetuate an image of the U.S. military as the victim of a dangerous world rather than as the imperialist villain that makes the world more dangerous. This inversion of victims and victimizers is an important ideological victory that justifies absurd military expenditures while quieting dissent against increasing U.S. military adventures abroad.
In The Winter Soldier the U.S. military mission can be salvaged so long as noble soldiers like Captain America are in charge of it. This is a vision of the world in which imperialism doesn’t exist as a concept and the villains are not bankers out to maximize profits, but evil-doers who do evil for evil’s sake. These movies construct a fantasy that the U.S. working class is supposed to live within, where uncomfortable questions of class and power never crop up. Far from mindless entertainment, these movies present an oversimplified view of the world that serves capitalism.