Scoring “the sentinel of liberty”.

Film One of the impulses when listening to scores to action blockbusters is to assume there's a certain amount of technical mechanism about them, that a composer simply has to make things very LOUD or very quiet depending on the pacing of the story or editing.

 But as this interview Henry Jackman who worked on Captain America: The Winter Soldier demonstrates there can be a high level of artistry and wrestling with the moral and thematic elements of the characters:

"Exactly, you know, the phrase “the sentinel of liberty,” which sounds cheesy to us because we now live in such a morally complex world. In any modern political scenario it’s almost impossible to figure out who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. And that’s sort of what the film’s about. It’s a lot easier when you set Captain America in the context of the Second World War, it’s very easy and morally unambiguous to have the Nazis as the bad guys because what Hitler was up to was unquestionably bad and needed to be stopped, whereas the environment that Captain America finds himself in this film is way more nuanced, and that’s one of the reasons he struggles."

That's why it's always such a shame when critics dismiss franchise films out of hand.