The Parallax View is confusing, yet enticing. The plot is easy to understand, but the film’s subject matter is hard to keep up with. Viewers are introduced to Joseph Brady (played by Warren Beatty). Brady is an ambitious journalist that decides to investigate a senator’s assassination. This decision however, leads to complicated scenarios of conspiracies which involve multinational corporations behind every event in the world headlines. What is interesting though, is that the film somewhat relates to Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Captain America: Winter Soldier is a Marvel movie that involves battles of Liberty with historic events, but done from a fictional approach. The Parallax View focuses on terms of battling for Liberty as well, but in real-life situations. How both these movies compare is the start of the conflict. Both start off with an assassination of a major superior. Captain America: Winter Soldier is set off with fictional action, and The Parallax View is set off with real-life situations.

The paranoid feel of Captain America: Winter Soldier is like a war movie, but the sense of paranoia with the concepts of superheroes added. The main character Captain America (Chris Evans) has some horrid memories of being in the war. The sense of filming plays into this as his flashbacks are faded in white and gray. With the paranoia side of The Parallax View, it is more of the main character giving into his emotions and making disaster choices as a result of his actions. Evans has many war traumas, and Beatty has many people and lots of press trying to grab his attention, but not for anything positive. The filmmakers choose to use the same paranoid approach in 2014 to grab viewer’s attention so there can be excitement.

The similarities with the plots of both movies are conspiracies that turn into disasters. When this happens, situations do not calm down. There is rising action. The conspiracy in Captain America: Winter Soldier is that the main character is trying to adjust to the present time period. He is primarily from the generation of World War I. Now with conflicts from the past coming into the present, the conspiracy is that the main character struggles to figure out what to fix. That becomes a disaster because the enemy from his time period somehow made his way into the present as well, and now he has a puzzle to put together to try and salvage the conflict. In The Parallax View, an assassination takes place and the journalist becomes hooked on the issue. This makes him read much into the situation, which potentially puts his life on the line. This becomes a disaster because people believe that what he is writing is not the truth. This makes many people despise him, and want to potentially harm him. The rising action is similarly constructed in both films.