Steve Rogers’ reputation would place him as a staunchly principled character who’s always willing to stand up for what he believes in, even if that means getting into a fight with his fellow Avengers in Captain America: Civil War. Nonetheless, as a clip from Captain America: The Winter Soldier helps to emphasize, Chris Evans’ character isn’t always completely consistent in his behavior, faltering in his values when it comes to protecting his old friend Bucky Barnes.
The scene shows a gathering of a few familiar heroes, including The First Avenger and Nick Fury. In this exchange, Steve berates the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. for keeping important secrets from him. So far, so Cap, but then fast-forward to Civil War, when it’s revealed that our hero has been keeping a pretty big secret of his own, failing to tell Tony Stark that Bucky was the one who killed his parents. The Reddit user who shared this clip concludes that Steve’s moral outrage at Fury is a little hypocritical.
Here’s Cap complaining about Nick holding back secrets, bit hypocritical considering he went on to hold back the fact Bucky killed Tony’s parents from him?
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Yes, you could argue that the respective contexts of Cap and Fury’s secrets are very different, but such moral relativism seems a little out of line with the stubbornly righteous image we’ve come to associate with Steve.
Of course, though this may well be a sign of hypocrisy in the character, that doesn’t necessarily make it a flaw in his movies. As the Reddit replies point out, Captain America: Civil War seems to deliberately frame Steve’s choice to hold back the truth from Iron Man as a crucial mistake, causing their friendship to quickly fall apart in the film’s final battle. But even if Cap hasn’t been as squeaky clean as people sometimes think, the evidence certainly suggests that he’ll be getting a pretty heroic sendoff when Avengers 4 hits theaters on May 3rd, 2019.
