THE WACPINE OF ‘CAPTAIN AMERICA’
WRITING: 7
ATMOSPHERE: 8
CHARACTERS: 8
PRODUCTION: 8
INTRIGUE: 7
NOVELTY: 6
ENJOYMENT: 7
The Good:
The WWII era setting not only makes this superhero film unique among its peers, it also stands out within the MCU by being a mix of science fiction and a wartime thriller.
Marvel Studios has perfected their casting by now. Chris Evans is such a natural choice to play Steve Rogers that I couldn’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. The supporting cast is riddled with great names; from the wonderfully stereotypical German bad guy General Hugo Weaving to the mysterious German scientist Stanley Tucci and the gruffly American colonel Tommy Lee Jones.
Hayley Atwell is killing it as the badass Peggy Carter, a character who deserves a solo film.
Director Joe Johnston expertly manages to make this film feel like a modern superhero flick, despite the historical setting. Believable science, car chases and action sequences keep the spirits high.
A lesser actor wouldn't be able to pull off the overblown qualities of the Red Skull, but Hugo Weaving fits the role perfectly and embraces the comical aspects of the character with full force.
The script cleverly taps into Captain America's real-life role as an icon for the US war effort at the time as well as Germany's reported obsession with finding supernatural and possibly alien technologies to win the war.
The pacing is pretty good. The story allows each act to play out properly before moving gout to next and the villains are used evenly throughout. Steve’s journey from zero to hero feels natural and well developed.
The Bad:
This film largely feels like the first typical MCU film, following a pattern most films will follow from this film onwards. Having seen the later films before this one, Captain America feels unoriginal and less inventive than other MCU entries.
Generic action sequences and a generic, straightforward plot could have been pulled from a plethora of other superhero movies (or war movies or spy movies).
In retrospect, while there is little inherently bad with this film, it's just not as inventive, exciting or interesting as some later entries, and therefore feels very safely middle-of-the-road.
The Ugly:
Skinny Chris Evans before turning into the postmodern sex icon we all know and love.
WACPINE RATING: 7.29 / 10 = 3,5 stars
Easily the most faithful interpretation of the character ever to grace the screen, although it admittedly doesn't have much in the way of competition. Cap's is a story that's terribly tricky to translate from the printed page without slipping into an ocean of cheese somewhere along the way, and though this latest attempt does lose its footing from time to time, it always seems to recover with grace and dignity.
It's more a living, breathing comic book than any of Marvel's big screen properties to make the leap thus far, with motorcycle chases, laser beams, crisply uniformed enemy forces and pseudo-iconic freeze frames around every corner. Chris Evans lives his role as the star-spangled Avenger, the white bread everyman with an unnervingly positive disposition, Hugo Weaving clearly relishes his chance to play the thoroughly evil, black leather-clad Red Skull and Tommy Lee Jones enjoys more than just a cameo as the brilliantly-cast drill sergeant in charge of the whole operation.
Though I had hoped for a more honest depiction of the period, as I think a genuine WW2 setting is when the Captain is truly in his element, it's tough to maintain that perspective when bright blue lights are firing from the enemy's hands throughout the picture. This is a solid effort, at least as good as I was hoping it would be, but not the heralding triumph it had the potential to become. Smack in the middle of summer blockbuster season was the right time and place for its debut.
Film 138 (Goal: 300) of 2024:
Just like the previous film, Thor, I seem to be in the minority when I say this is an excellent film. Maybe 4 is generous and that it's more likely a 3.5 but everything just works for me here. With Joe Johnston applying the pulping feel of The Rocketeer to the early days of the Captain America mythos. The first act is fantastic, from learning who Steve Rogers is, to the unveiling of Rogers post-Super Soldier serum. Chris Evans is such a fantastic casting, in a role he would come to define for a decade.
Perhaps Act 2 slows things down a little. The film relies a little on a montage that feels overly CGI heavy and it lacks a big finish but it's the characters that really make this work for me. Particularly the relationship between Evans' Rogers and Atwell's Carter, which would be a centerpiece of the Infinity Saga, all the way to the end. I also really enjoyed the brief relationship between Rogers and Erskine (played by Stanley Tucci). Weaving is as always a great villain in The Red Skull. The script let's him down at times. We see his menace, and understand his desires but I don't think the film really shows the potential repercussions of his threats.
That aside, I really enjoyed Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a film that gets overlooked among some of the bigger and better films in the MCU, including the two beloved Captain America sequels that follow this. But it slots really well between Thor and The Avengers for me, and is a perfect launching pad for Chris Evans' Captain America, which would come to be a defining character for the next decade to come.
WELL AFTER 5 FILMS IN, IN ORDER OF COURSE, FINALLY WE GET TO MY MAN, MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE AVENGER OF THEM ALL,
TEAM-CAP ALL THE WAY.
THIS 1st INSTALLMENT IS JUST AWESOME SUPER FREAKING AWESOME AND CAPTAIN AMERICA WAS MADE FOR CHRIS, NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND. LOVE BUCKY AND PEGGY & STARK. LOVED HOW BUCKY AND PEGGY BELIEVED IN STEAVE RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING AND STUCK BY HIM AND BACKED HIM UP NO MATTER WHAT.
THE SETTING OF 1942 WAS JUST AMAZING AND THEY CAPTURED THAT PERFECTLY,
CAPS ORIGIN STORY WAS PHENOMENAL AND A WONDER TO WATCH IT UNFOLD, IT'S AN HONOUR AND A PRIVILEGE TO BE ON HIS JOURNEY WITH HIM. HE INSPIRES ME THROUGH MY TV SO GOD KNOWS WHAT HE DOE'S TO THOSE AROUND HIM, NO WONDER YOU FEEL INVINCIBLE WITH CAP ON YOUR SIDE, I WOULD FOLLOW HIM INTO THE JAWS
OF HELL
NO QUESTIONS ASKED. THE GUY'S A COMPLETE LEGEND AND A GOD TO ME, HE'S JUST THE BEST....PERIOD. AND HE'S PUNCHED ADOLF HITLER OVER 200times HE DESERVES ANOTHER MEDAL JUST FOR THAT. THE SETTING WAS SO AUTHENTIC REALLY GOT A FEEL FOR BEING THERE AND THE TECHNOLOGIES THEY USED SUITED THE ERA AND MOVIE SO VERY VERY WELL.
KEPT THING'S SO INTERESTING. RED SKULL WAS A GREAT BAD GUY, REALLY SUITED THE STORY WELL AND TO GIVE CAP SOMEONE MAIN TO GO UP AGAINST WHILE HE WORKED OUT JUST HOW AWESOME HE IS AND JUST WHAT HE IS CAPABLE OF AND JUST WHAT HE CAN ACHIEVE. LOOK THERE'S NOTHING MORE TO SAY ACCEPT SHAME WE NEVER GOT WOLVERINE AND MAGNETO POPPING UP IN IT LIKE MARVEL ORIGINALLY WANTED AS THEY WERE BOTH AROUND IN THAT TIME PERIOD BUT AT THE TIME FOX WOULD NOT ALLOW IT, MARVEL WASN'T EVEN ALLOWED TO SAY THE WORD ADAMANTIUM TO MENTION HOW CAPS SHIELD IS NOT JUST MADE OUT OF VIBRANIUM BUT ALSO ADAMANTIUM
BUT FOX WAS HAVING NONE OF IT.
WELL NOW YOUR OURS SO NO MORE AWESOME AMAZING MISSED OPPORTUNITIES,
NOT NOW. WELL:
"I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY"
WHAT'S MORE TO SAY ACCEPT
CAP IS JUST A KID FROM BROOKLYN
BUT TO ME HE IS VERY VERY SPECIAL
AND THE REASON I'M HERE.
TO CAP- The first Avenger
"HE IS WORTHY"
10/10
(GENTLEMEN....YOUR UP)..................
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-04-12T01:36:56Z
[7.0/10] It’s hard to disaggregate Captain America: The First Avenger from the scores of projects (frankly, better projects) that followed in its wake. The MCU was barely off the ground in 2011, and The Avengers was still a big gamble and nearly a year away from its enormous debut. It’s hard to watch Cap’s first outing free from the context of seeing it as the introduction of Agent Carter, the establishment of Bucky, the first appearance of Hydra, and scores of other little details, big and small, that would come to give texture and form to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
And yet, if you evaluate it as a standalone film it’s...a pretty standard late 2000s/early 2010s superhero flick. It gains some juice from the period setting, and it has a murderer’s row of character actors to liven things up. But apart from that cinematic universe firmament, Captain America 1 is a perfectly fine but hardly overwhelming initial outing for the character, which has more in common tonally with the X-Men movies than with the later MCU films.
The film is surprisingly episodic, which perhaps makes sense for a superhero origin story. The movie feels less like one complete story than it does a series of vignettes from Steve’s life up until the point he was frozen. There’s his time as a wannabe pipsqueak eventually chosen to become America’s first supersoldier. There’s his interlude as a war bonds mascot. There’s his secret escapade to rescue his best friend. There’s a montage of his adventures with the Howling Commandos. And there’s a final effort to take out Red Skull that leads to Steve’s big sacrifice.
These various events don’t so much feed into one another as they just so happen to occur in sequence. There’s little sense of cause and effect connecting them. Instead, the film seems content to trace the various adventures of Steve Rogers, at times pausing to move the various pieces into place for tidbits familiar to comic book fans or set up his unfreezing in the future. In that way, the film is creaky in places, seeming more a collection of checked boxes for the canonical origin story of the character and his corner of the Marvel Universe, along with a smattering of cross-movie connections.
But a few things do provide a throughline for the film, and even boost it into something occasionally quite memorable. The major throughline is Steve himself. Captain America doesn’t have much of an arc here, or if he does, it’s largely over halfway through the movie. He’s more or less the same person he was at the end of the film as he was in the beginning. Only, after the first act, he has a body to match his heart and his will.
That is, however, kind of the point. The First Avenger quickly establishes a few key details about Steve: that he never gives up, that he has a will to help stop bullies in any form, and that he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save others. It’s those qualities that provide what Dr. Erskine is looking for when he wants Steve to be his test subject for the super soldier serum. The serum magnifies not only strength and ability, but who a person is, a fact which makes Steve ideal for the program, regardless of whether he’s “still skinny.” He knows what it’s like to be powerless, which means he’ll treat power as a gift, something to be appreciated and used for greater good, rather than taken for granted.
It’s a little cheesy, but Stanley Tucci sells the hell out of the idea and makes a big impression in a short amount of screentime. He’s just one of the stellar character actors the movie brings aboard to help breathe some life into a semi-typical hero origin tale. Tucci’s iconoclastic earnestness comes through in Dr. Erskine. Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious as Steve’s sharp-witted and sharp-tongued commanding officer. Hugo Weaving and Toby Jones chew scenery with aplomb as the bad guys. And even bit parts for Dominic Chase as Howard Stark create something memorable.
This is all especially good, because Chris Evans is pretty flat as Rogers. He would go on to become a strength of the MCU, finding a way to convey that inner goodness of the character without being boring. But here, he’s basically a blank slate for milquetoast platitudes. Even Hayley Atwell, who’s more than proven herself as a charismatic actress, sees her light obscured given her prominent yet underwritten role, even if she still manages to shine in a few choice moments. The center of the piece isn’t strong enough to carry it yet, which means a superb cast has to pick up the rest of the slack.
The casting livens up some quick-hit stops through the various phases of Steve’s life. None of these little miniature episodes are bad exactly, but they don’t fit together and play as somewhat generic. Indifferent and/or unconvincing action sequences are dutifully sprinkled in, and the various comic book canon necessities, like the Howling Commandos, are dropped in without really being established or developed. The First Avenger tries to cram all of these random bits and pieces together because the inevitable time jump, and it makes the whole thing feel scattered in places.
Still, there’s something compelling about watching those three essential qualities in Steve emerge and blossom once he has the might to go along with his desire. He still never stops fighting, whether he’s going against local brutes in an alley or a power mad Nazi lieutenant. He still stands up to bullies, whether they’re shouting at a movie theater or propping up the Axis powers. And he’s still willing to make the sacrifice play, whether he’s a pipsqueak falling on a grenade or a literal posterboy taking down a dangerous enemy ship lest it reach his hometown.
The rendition of this is more solid than sparkling. But it lays the groundwork for the character and his animating impulses in a way that creates room to grow. His relationship with Peggy isn’t the deepest or the most explored, but it’s sketched just enough for us to understand their connection. His loss of Bucky isn’t fully examined, but we see enough of his reaction and understanding of his friend’s choice to appreciate his. And the character isn’t exactly the most memorable out of the gate, but the core parts of his personality and M.O. find their way onto the screen, ready to be fleshed out and challenged by later stories and events.
If the MCU had puttered out and all we got were these first few movies, Captain America: The First Avenger would likely have been a footnote, held dear by few beyond dedicated superhero fans. But as one of the major roots of the interconnected storytelling universe of the MCU, there’s enough for fans of later work to appreciate in the film as a shaky, but important first step.