Marvel’s newest super hero film, the last on the road to
their big hero team-up movie The Avengers,
sees veteran director Joe Johnston take on the adventures of Captain America,
the super soldier. The year is 1940whatever and the Nazi’s are the scourge of
freethinking, compassionate people everywhere. Cap starts out as scrawny Steve
Rogers, a kid from Brooklyn who has tried to sign up for service and been
denied five times due to his diminutive stature and varied health problems. Salvation
comes when he is recruited for the government’s super soldier program, which
promises to take a normal man and inject him with a serum that will make him
the ultimate Hitler-punching force in the universe.
The main conceits of Captain America’s origin are pretty
dated, they look a bit corny to modern eyes, but they deal with fundamental
enough issues that they should still be relatable. Everybody can sympathize
with the little guy. Everyone gets the same cathartic thrill when they see him
stand up and defend himself against bullies. When you factor in that the Nazis
are pretty much the ultimate bullies, the Cap story still has a lot of
potential to thrill. All you have to do is handle the material with some
respect. Captain America: The First
Avenger does that. It’s a straight faced take on the Captain America mythos
that gets the look, feel, and casting right on the money. I think a lot of
people are going to come out of it liking it for that reason. But when you
strip all of that modern mythology stuff away and view it as just a standalone
film, I found it to be rushed, lacking focus, and in need of a couple rewrites.
I don’t think Captain America is a
movie that’s going to age well at all.
There were a handful of things that I liked. The 40s era
setting lent it a throwback charm, there were hidden passages behind book
cases, and the transformation scene where Steve turns into Cap involved a
ridiculously overblown and awesome amount of cranks, knobs, and dials. And when
Cap is first transformed and discovers his powers during a chase with a Nazi
spy through the Streets of New York, the scene is the most fun I’ve had with
onscreen super powers in a while. Plus, it becomes clear early on that this
isn’t going to be any sort of homogenized, kiddy take on Cap’s stories. People
get blown away in this movie right and left; we’re in a war and there is an
appropriate amount of violence and casualties. The tone of this film hit just
the right note, it was kind of a throwback to old serials, but it never
degenerated into camp.
Also, the casting was spot on. I didn’t know how I felt
about the snarky kid from Fantastic Four getting
cast as Captain America going into the film, but it didn’t take long before I
had completely forgotten that he ever appeared in another super hero movie.
From the early scenes of Rogers being a skinny wimp, to the late scenes of
Captain America being an unstoppable force, Chris Evans looked completely at
home as the character. Cap’s archenemy is the Red Skull, a Nazi scientist who
took an early, imperfect version of the super soldier serum that left him
strong but horribly deformed. Here he is portrayed by Hugo Weaving, and the
casting couldn’t have been any more perfect. Weaving is so compelling as the
Skull that I even found him more interesting when he was playing the character
with his own face. His ticks and mannerisms as the Skull were so magnetic that
it was almost a letdown when he removed his mask to reveal a flaming red skull.
Almost. And the Skull’s right hand toady Dr. Arnim Zola was a fun character as
well, mostly because he was played by veteran character actor Toby Jones, who
breathed life into an underwritten role and made the scientist especially
weasely. These should have been some great nemesis for a Captain America movie
to pit its hero against, but unfortunately this one didn’t give them anything
to do. There just wasn’t time.
Captain America had
to not only introduce us to and make us care about the character of Steve
Rogers, it also had to tell the story of Cap fighting against the Nazis in
World War II, and also set all of the pieces in place for the upcoming Avengers film. Something was bound to
get short shrift, and it was the WWII aspect of the film that ended up
suffering. The Red Skull plans to take over the world through the acquisition
of a mystical cube. An early scene sees him acquiring it from some sort of
ancient tomb. The cube glows, seems to be a source of great power, and the Red
Skull uses it to make a bunch of laser guns. But it never gets explained to us exactly
what it is, and Red Skull’s plan to rule the world never seems to amount to
more than making laser guns. Seeing as we see the lasers in action throughout
the movie and they never manage to be more effective than the American’s bullets
and missiles, I wasn’t quite convinced they were that much of a threat. Also, I
wasn’t ever sure who the Red Skull was. He was a Nazi scientist named Johann
Schmidt; that much was given. But where his quest for power started, where he
wanted it to end, why he did anything that he did never got explained. It
seemed to be chalked up to pure evil.
Which, okay, Captain America could be described as a force
of pure good, maybe having him fight a generic pure evil isn’t so bad. How is
all of the action when the two opposing forces finally clash then? I wouldn’t
really know, I blinked and I missed it. After Steve gets transformed into Cap,
the military takes an inexplicable left turn and decides that their super
soldier, who was meant to “personally escort Adolph Hitler to the gates of
Hell” wasn’t actually going to be doing any fighting after all. We get a
lengthy sequence where cap is relegated to traveling the country, putting on musical
numbers, and making short films meant to sell war bonds. When he is sent
overseas to entertain the troops he suggests to the commanding officer (a
typically gruff and awesome Tommy Lee Jones) that he be sent out into the field,
and he gets laughed off. Captain America, who is supposed to be the ultimate
soldier, never even gets trained in the ways of war.
And once Cap takes it upon himself to join the fray and
becomes (surprise, surprise), our country’s most effective weapon, the film
blows through all of World War II in a matter of minutes. We literally get a
map full of the locations of the enemy’s bases and a montage sequence of the
bases being crossed off the map, cut in with some random footage of Cap
punching people and throwing his shield. Once Cap and the Red Skull board the
Skull’s giant plane for their final showdown, I was incredulous. This was the
end already? Nothing had even happened. I wasn’t even sure of what the Red
Skull’s plan was!
