Crashing Carriers

I saw the new Captain America movie the other night.  Which I liked just fine, it’s one of the best of the Marvel film adaptations, and it avoided several obvious pitfalls (like forcing Cap and Black Widow into a romance).

I don’t feel the need to analyze it.  There are plenty of analyses elsewhere, and I doubt I’d add anything to the conversation.

What I want to talk about is S.H.I.E.L.D.  Specifically the Helicarrier, which is this giant flying aircraft carrier that serves as its headquarters.

I believe I still possess my original copy of Strange Tales #135, which contains the first S.H.I.E.L.D. story and the introduction of the Helicarrier, and reading it even as a little kid, I went “Huh?”  Because even as a child, I understood the reasons why, even if you had the technology to build a Helicarrier, you really wouldn’t want one.

Firstly, a giant flying aircraft carrier sort of attracts the eye.  A super-secret spy organization you maybe want to put in an anonymous office building, but probably not in a giant floating structure that can be spied on by anybody with a pair of cheap binoculars.

Secondly: REALLY BIG TARGET.  Sort of too big to miss, really.  And you know the bad guys are going to shoot at it.  Because, y’know, they’re BAD GUYS, and they have super-science an’ stuff, and they blow things up on a monthly basis.

And thirdly: What happens when it falls down?  Because it will fall down.  Because the bad guys will blow it up, because they have super-science an’ stuff, and this is the Marvel universe, where things blow up all the time.  And if it falls down, you’d better hope it falls down in Antarctica or somewhere, because otherwise it will land on the people that S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to protect.

Which was made obvious enough in the Avengers movie, you’d think, when Loki’s zombie agents disabled the helicarrier and almost brought it crashing down on New York City.

(And the Wikipedia entry on the Helicarrier fleet shows that they are regularly crashed, scuttled, or hijacked.  Yet when the S.H.I.E.L.D. budget-crunchers get to work, and have to decide whether to hire 10,000 new agents or build a replacement helicarrier, they always go for the freakin’ big target in the sky.)

So anyway, in The Winter Soldier, S.H.I.E.L.D. doubles down— triples down, really— on the helicarrier concept, and builds three of them to, well, sort of rule the world, or at any rate kill any bad guy on the planet they want, without the necessity of a trial.  (And these are the good guys, remember.  Who also operate from a megalomaniac tower in D.C. that’s shaped like a three-legged swastika, which you’d think might be a clue as to what’s actually going on in your organization, don’t you think, Director Fury?!?  I mean, the way this thing looms over Washington, you’d think the architect’s previous project had been the Barad-dûr.)

So now we’ve got three of the beasts, which of course get blowed up and rain thousands of tons of flaming debris over the District of Columbia, doubtless mashing many national monuments in the process.  (Not like this is a spoiler or anything.)

Kudos, anyway, to the writers for noticing that an intelligence organization like S.H.I.E.L.D. is clearly the biggest threat to human liberty in the Marvel universe, even counting alien invaders and rampaging Norse gods.

But they’re stuck with legacy structures like the Helicarrier and the Triskelion, great big megalomaniacal symbols of omnipotence that are in reality little but missile magnets.  The actual future is orders of magnitude smaller.

The world doesn’t belong to Giant-Man, it belongs to Ant Man.  The guy with the headset filled with electronics.  The tiny, ubiquitous little character who can be anywhere, overhear anyone, listen to your conversations while inside your phone.   You don’t need a giant budget-killer like the helicarrier— or the F35— you just need some drones, and a headset, and some chips.

And then you’re Hydra for real.