#this is all of tony’s baggage surfacing#because he’s seen the kind of war that steve has only heard about#he’s seen it first-hand#and watched those soldiers blown apart in front of his eyes#Tony knows what being a soldier today really means#and Captain America is only beginning to learn what modern warfare is#and here we see robert go to a whole other level of acting and leave everyone else in his wake
The man’s eyes contain worlds of emotion. WORLDS.
Ok here’s the thing, I don’t dispute the above, especially ref RDJ’s performance, but I have a point of order.
Steve has seen the kind of war Tony has only heard about. IDK about the US, but in the UK, every soldier KIA in Iraq, Afghanistan, their body gets flown home, they land at Wootton Bassett and they get a procession where they’re turned over to the families. Every individual death is mourned.
In the World Wars, in Steve’s war, that didn’t happen. It couldn’t because the casualties were so high, nothing else would have got done, they’d never have stopped. Bodies were often left where they fell because there was nothing else to be done.
Tony’s near tears because one man died. Steve would have personally seen hundreds, maybe thousands die (shot down, blown to bits, there’s nothing new about mortar fire). Who has a better understanding of warfare?
Modern soldiers have kevlar armour and idek what all else. WW2 soldiers mostly got a can to put on their head. Well, not counting the Russian soldiers, who often didn’t even get shoes.
Tony is a wealthy engineer. He’s a fighter, sure, but he doesn’t know jack about being a soldier, today or any other day. He’s seen modern warfare, sure, he’s played god with it too, as an arms manufacturer. He’s had a terrible experience, but that was a direct attack on him personally, not the indifferent mass destruction of the battlefields that Steve would have been part of. Steve is an experienced soldier, and it shows in this scene. A guy he knew a little died fighting, and that’s sad, but it’s also a day in ending in ‘y’ for him.
War is always terrible, and people suffer in it, but there isn’t a modern western conflict to compare with the sheer devastation of WW2.
Exactly. Steve asks, “is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?” because it isn’t the first time he himself lost someone on the battlefield–heck, Tony lost a guy whose first name he didn’t even know at the beginning of the movie, while Steve lost his best friend since childhood. And yet Steve still meets Tony as equals, one leader to another, respecting Tony’s shock and grief. However, Tony instantly shoots him down.
“We are not soldiers”? Steve is a soldier. Steve is two weeks away from WW2. Steve knows that in a war, people die. Sometimes people you care about. Tony has no idea what it means to be a soldier; watching someone else die doesn’t make you a hero.
At this point in the movie, Tony has yet to make the sacrifice play; Steve already did.
(Source: monets, via dubiousculturalartifact)
