Since Captain America's appearance in Avengers #4, fifty years ago, Marvel Comics has portrayed him as an anachronism: A superhero of World War II displaced forward in time.

The first film about him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), maintained that theme, starting and ending with a framing narrative in the present for the story of his World War II career. The Avengers (2013) showed him leading a present-day superteam; now, his second solo film examines his experience of the twenty-first century in greater depth. The note is established in the opening scene, when the newly introduced character Sam Wilson tells him about Marvin Gaye, and he adds the name to a list of things to find out about written by hand, on paper, in a bound notebook. Much later, he refers to having been born in 1918, making him 96 years old — nearly seven decades more than his biological age.

The First Avenger made a point of being a period piece: A film whose hero lived by older, now half-forgotten American values. The Winter Soldier uses that same characterization to ask if those values may need to be better remembered now. In particular, it shows a United States and a world increasingly preoccupied with fear and eager for security, to the point where they are ready to give up liberty to obtain it (forgetting Benjamin Franklin's famous warning, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”). The same opposition was shown, briefly, in The Avengers, whose main villain, Loki, made a speech in Germany telling a crowd that he would save them from freedom — to be defied by an elderly man who said he had heard such offers before. The story of The Winter Soldier suggests that such fears have been deliberately created to make the bargain more appealing, and makes its hero a symbol of the rejection of fear. In doing so, it offers a pointed criticism of the security state — not only of the intensified form that has emerged over the past decade, but of its roots in the years following World War II.

Fitting this theme, a significant part of this film's conflict takes the form of debates. The film's opening action sequence features one over operational styles, between Captain America (Steve Rogers) and his fellow Avenger, the Black Widow (Natasha Romanov), who accompanies him on a mission, but is carrying out secret orders of which he wasn't informed. This expands into a debate between Rogers and Nick Fury, head of SHIELD, the ultrasecret agency Rogers and Romanov both work for, over the legitimacy of the preventive use of force. This in turn leads to the climactic struggle of the film, a battle within SHIELD itself over these very issues and thus, over whether SHIELD will defend freedom, if by questionable means, or will become wholly committed to a totalitarian conception of “order.”

These debates form part of a set of personal relationships portrayed with unusual subtlety for an action/adventure film. Fitting his portrayal as a man lost in time, Rogers has relationships both with people from his past (there's a moving scene of his visit to the woman he loved during World War II, now elderly and bedridden) and with people from the present. In an impressive piece of good judgment, the film doesn't show him falling in love with anyone new, and in particular it doesn't make him and Romanov a couple, showing how unsuited they are for each other. Instead, it makes them comrades in danger. Wilson becomes another comrade, a friendship growing out of the two men's shared experience of combat and the loss of friends, more than half a century apart; initially Rogers and Romanov look to him for a hiding place, but he turns out to have special skills that enable him to contribute to the final struggle.

There's also the Winter Soldier, who turns out both to be someone Rogers knows, and to be another super-soldier. In contrast to Rogers, who, as Thoreau describes it, serves the state not only with his body and his head but with his conscience, the Winter Soldier is only a tool, or a weapon, and is treated as such, sent on missions whose purpose is concealed from him — exactly the kind of missions that send Rogers to confront Fury in anger. The final struggle between them is not merely a physical fight, but a moral appeal.

And though the film is named for the Winter Soldier, he's not its true adversary; being deprived of moral choice, he can't be. Roger's greatest victory, and the true climax of the film, occurs earlier, when he takes over SHIELD's communication channels to warn against the threat to its mission — and the response of many of its agents reveals how much moral influence “the Captain” has gained. A further measure of that influence can be seen in Romanov's final decisive action, which shows how much of an example Rogers's integrity has set for her. This film genuinely is about heroism, in the sense not merely of physical courage but of using that courage to fight for the right things. “Captain America” is actually an embodiment of some important American values. And among these is reliance, ultimately, not on organizations, but on the men and women who make them and work for them.

This film is popular entertainment, but the best kind of popular entertainment. Its writers and directors understood that the essence of superheroes is not fights or superhuman powers, but embodiment of specific moral qualities. And its adversaries represent, in an iconic form, some of the most dangerous temptations to the further abandonment of liberty that currently emerging technology offers.