The Winter Soldier of the film's title is Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Steve Rogers' (Chris Evans) old sidekick who's been brainwashed, cybernetically enhanced, and tossed on ice to end up in the present with his former friend. He's a terrifying opponent, but he's a misdirect, a pawn, and not the film's Big Bad. That honor actually goes to Robert Redford's Alexander Pierce, a member of the World Security Council, a man who, as his old colleague Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) notes, once turned down the Nobel Peace Prize.

Alexander is not your typical supervillain, not in the sense that he wears a mask, has a dark past, and wants to destroy the world, and not in the way that he thinks about himself either. He's alarmingly ordinary, just slightly off from a plausible real world figure until the reveal that he's actually a part of HYDRA, a fascist terrorist organization. He's a politician, and he believes he's acting for the betterment of mankind. Even after his secret alliances and nefarious intentions to wipe out a sizable chunk of the population are revealed, he still tries to convince the others on the council to go along with his plans to control the public because he doesn't fundamentally believe what he's doing is wrong. We're not given the benefit of finding out about some formative moment that twisted him forever from his previous beliefs — he seems to be simply a wily man with too much power and a dark vision about what's best for humanity.