Book Review: Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier: The Art of the Movie

Fine artbook companion to the film

This is one fine artbook to accompany the second Captain America movie. It's as good as the first artbook The Art of Captain America: The First Avenger. I like both books.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier: The Art of the Movie still comes with a slipcase. Inside, the 232-page hardcover book has the Winter Soldier facing off Captain America on the cover. That's the art for the limited edition poster released at San Diego Comic Con 2013, and it's in the book.

And just like the earlier artbook, this is also packed with lots of artwork.

You'll get to see Captain America with his new suits, the stealth one he used on The Lemurian Star ship, the old (but updated) suit he stole from his own memorial while Stan Lee was working a security guard there, and also the other suit variations.

The other characters with more coverage would be The Winter Soldier and Falcon. These two have more pages dedicated to their costume designs. Together with Captain America, they have the best costumes. As for Black Widow, Nick Fury, the pirates, mercenaries, they only have too few pages among themselves.

There are quite a lot of scene paintings, and those look great. Many are double page spreads.

Environment art are for The Triskelion, the offices inside, Helicarrier Bay and Camp Lehigh. There aren't a lot of prop art. Strangely, there's no overall shot of the Helicarrier, although we have Nick Fury's awesome SUV.

There is substantial amount of storyboards included for several key scenes, but they will leave you wanting more because the sequences are quite long and the full length storyboards cannot be included. They are real cool to look at though, to relive the moment. However, I would have preferred more painted illustrations or character designs than the storyboards because they are just better to look at for subsequent reference.

The text provides some behind-the-scenes commentary that explains what's going on with the film's plot, the design and a bit on how they shot the movie. It's a good read, but I'm sure there's a lot more material not included.

Overall, it's a fantastic artbook. Definitely worth getting.

Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier: The Art of the Movie is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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