In the eight years before his heartbreaking send-off in Avengers: Endgame, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers enjoyed a captivating arc through the “Infinity Saga” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It started off with his origin movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, a pulpy WWII-era actioner about a superpowered American ass-kicker going behind enemy lines and singlehandedly taking down the most diabolical branch of the Nazi Party.
The First Avenger was followed up by two other Cap-centric solo movies: The Winter Soldier, a ‘70s-style paranoid political thriller about the death of freedom, and Civil War, often dubbed Avengers 2.5 due to the many high-profile Marvel cameos in its sprawling ensemble.
Arnim Zola
Toby Jones played Arnim Zola across the first couple of Captain America movies. The Russo brothers apparently enjoyed this character so much that they found a way to bring him back on the other side of a 70-year time jump. Zola is a Nazi biochemist who originally acted as Red Skull’s sidekick in The First Avenger, working out the kinks of his diabolical scientific projects to suit the whims of his grandeur.
The character didn’t get to really shine until he resurrected himself as a computer program in The Winter Soldier. It was pretty silly to bring him back as software, but at least he stood out on his own this time. The Zola-bot turns out to be the mastermind behind Hydra’s secret takeover of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Crossbones
Frank Grillo brought his usual grizzled edge to the role of mercenary Brock Rumlow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He’s the commander of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s counter-terrorism S.T.R.I.K.E. team who turns out to be one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who know that Hydra is really in charge and uses his brawn to keep them in power. Rumlow came back very briefly in his Crossbones guise in the opening scene of Civil War before being killed off a few minutes later.
Grillo has proven in countless other movie appearances that he’s a badass with a mesmerizing screen presence. The MCU should’ve utilized his talents a lot more. Crossbones could’ve been the main villain of an entire movie, not just a footnote in the opening scene of one. He ended up returning in Avengers: Endgame in the sequence in which Earth’s Mightiest Heroes go back in time to 2012.
Alexander Pierce
Introduced in The Winter Soldier, Alexander Pierce is a senior official at S.H.I.E.L.D. who turns out to be secretly running a modern-day Hydra from its headquarters. Pierce might not stand a chance in hand-to-hand combat with Captain America, but there’s more than one way to shake Cap to his core and rock his entire world (threatening his freedom being the top dog). Cap could easily beat up Pierce himself, but it’s not so easy to beat up the political corruption that Pierce represents.
Robert Redford was the perfect casting choice for this role. The Winter Soldier was inspired by paranoid political thrillers from the 1970s like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men, which starred Redford. The actor subverted his usual role in these thrillers in The Winter Soldier. This time, he plays the evil government bureaucrat.
Red Skull
Like the Joker to Batman or the Green Goblin to Spider-Man, Red Skull is Cap’s arch-nemesis in the comics. He stands for everything Cap stands against, and vice versa. Whereas Steve Rogers represents freedom, Red Skull represents oppression and tyranny. The commander of Hydra (and Adolf Hitler’s secretary of advanced weapons), Red Skull is the Marvel universe’s superpowered manifestation of the evils of Nazi Germany.
In The First Avenger, Red Skull was played by a classic villain actor – Hugo Weaving, best known as Agent Smith from the original Matrix trilogy – who elevates the thinly developed movie incarnation of this character. Weaving’s hammy performance fits the pulpy tone of the movie perfectly. Unfortunately, he’s let down by generic characterization as a typical one-note antagonist with diabolical dialogue.
Helmut Zemo
In Captain America: Civil War, Helmut Zemo manages to tear the Avengers apart. Zemo isn’t a cosmic overlord with limitless superpowers to bring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to their knees, like Loki or Thanos. Instead, he uses a cunning plot to turn them against each other. Zemo has a sympathetic motivation for wanting the Avengers to kill one another: he lost his family in one of their big city-wide battles.
Daniel Brühl brought plenty of pathos to Zemo’s role in Civil War, but he had more fun with the role when he returned as the Leo Getz-style wisecracker alongside Sam and Bucky’s Riggs and Murtaugh in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
The Winter Soldier
After Red Skull’s role in The First Avenger fell short of expectations – especially with the character’s iconic status as the anti-Captain America who represents what Cap represents for the Allied powers but for the Axis powers – the titular antagonist in The Winter Soldier managed to live up to the hype. Sebastian Stan’s eponymous Hydra assassin avoided the MCU’s usual “villain problem” by forging a personal connection between the hero and the villain.
The external conflict in The Winter Soldier isn’t as simple as just defeating the bad guy. Bucky is Steve’s childhood best friend who was brainwashed by Hydra and turned into a lean, mean killing machine singularly focused on assassinating Captain America. All his memories of Steve have been wiped away and replaced with murderous rage. Naturally, Steve doesn’t want to hurt Bucky; he wants to save him.