Gonna have to disagree with this. Yes, you’re completely correct about the way he fights. It’s completely natural, but there’s nothing we see that says he doesn’t talk or feel emotion.
When Steve calls him ‘Bucky’, he doesn’t speak with a voice that sounds unused, he speaks easily and colloquially–’Who the hell is Bucky?’
He doesn’t just look puzzled or grunt out a partial question. It’s fluid, it’s normal and it’s in the syntax of a man who’s verbally at ease.
He gives the Hydra soldiers orders with equal ease in Russian. Not only is he at ease with human speech, he’s at ease in multiple languages.
We also see him feeling emotion. He feels when Natasha shoots him in they eye, breaking his goggles. He feels when she immobilizes his arm. He feels when Steve stops him from killing Natasha and they fight. He feels when he remembers Steve–to the point that his brain is so busy trying to put the pieces together that everything Pierce says to him feels unimportant. He feels when he falls on the helecarrier, and feels even more when he’s trapped and thinks Steve will kill him as he lies there.
Yes, the Winter Soldier is all about self control. He understands the value of fear as a weapon. He understands that not letting your enemies see what you’re thinking and feeling gives you an advantage, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel, or is a machine. It means that he’s very good at his job and very used to controlling the stray thoughts and memories that (if his actor is correct) frequently go thorough his mind, inexplicable and distracting.
To consider the Winter Soldier a machine removes the most poignant part of his story–that while Bucky had no memories of who he’d been, he was still there. He wasn’t a machine, a computer programmed to kill. He was a man whose mind was so twisted that he wanted to do it.
They weren’t overwriting him with a new personality, they were continually wiping resurfacing memories of who he’d been and the values he’d had. They were erasing choices he made as the Winter Soldier while on missions, because learning from past choices and results is how we form individuality and personal ethics. They were making sure his loyalties didn’t change from the one’s they’d given him, because he was capable of both having them and change.
Pierce speaks of ‘one last mission’ because they didn’t plan on him surviving Washington, so apparently controlling him had become more trouble than it was worth, which is really saying something, given his level of skill.
The tragedy of the Winter Soldier isn’t that he was an unfeeling machine–it’s that he wasn’t.
