Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

[Dusty starts reviewing]

Comment 1: Shut it down!
Comment 2: Kill the blog, Mr. Reviews! Turn it off! Kill it! Kill the blog!
Dusty Reviews: [from behind the keyboard] No! C’mon guys! I can do this!

Rating: PG-13
Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Joe Simon
Stars: Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving
Release Date: July 22, 2011
Run time: 2 hours, 4 minutes

THE PLOT

(via wiki)

In the present day, scientists in the Arctic uncover an old aircraft with someone frozen inside and a circular shield. In March 1942, during World War II, Nazi lieutenant general and Hydra leader Johann Schmidt steals a mysterious relic called the Tesseract, which possesses untold godly powers, from the town of Tønsberg in German-occupied Norway.

In New York City, Steve Rogers is rejected for U.S. Army recruitment due to his small stature and poor health. While attending the Stark Expo, an event held by famous engineer Howard Stark, Rogers attempts to enlist again. Overhearing Rogers tell his best friend, James “Bucky” Barnes, that he wants to fight for his country, Dr. Abraham Erskine allows Rogers to enlist. He is recruited into the Strategic Scientific Reserve as part of a “super-soldier” experiment under Erskine, Stark, Colonel Chester Phillips, and British MI6 agent Peggy Carter. Phillips is not convinced by Erskine’s claims that Rogers is the right person for the procedure until Rogers selflessly jumps on a grenade as part of a test. Erskine reveals to Rogers that he was a scientist under Schmidt, until the latter took a prototype version of the super-soldier formula that gave him superhuman strength but painfully changed his appearance.

Schmidt and Dr. Arnim Zola harness the energies of the Tesseract to fuel Zola’s inventions and Hydra’s planned worldwide offensive. Schmidt discovers Erskine’s location and sends an assassin, Heinz Kruger, to kill him. Erskine and Stark put Rogers through the super-soldier treatment, injecting him with the formula and dosing him with “vita-rays”. After Rogers emerges from the experiment taller and more muscular, Kruger kills Erskine and flees with the last vial of the formula. Rogers pursues and captures Kruger, but the assassin avoids interrogation by killing himself with a cyanide capsule. The vial is destroyed during the chase. With Erskine dead and his formula lost, U.S. Senator Brandt has Rogers tour the nation as “Captain America” to promote war bonds while scientists study his blood and attempt to reverse-engineer the formula. In 1943, while on tour in Italy performing for active servicemen, Rogers learns that Barnes’s unit is MIA following a battle against Schmidt’s forces. Rogers has Carter and Stark fly him behind enemy lines to mount a rescue. Rogers infiltrates Schmidt’s fortress, frees Barnes and the other prisoners, and confronts Schmidt. The latter escapes, but first he removes a mask to reveal his red, skull-like visage that has earned him the sobriquet “Red Skull”.

Rogers recruits Barnes and other freed prisoners to form the Howling Commandos. Stark outfits Rogers with a circular shield made of a rare, nearly indestructible metal called vibranium. Rogers and his team sabotage various Hydra operations while he and Carter begin to fall in love. In 1945, the team assaults a train carrying Zola. They capture him, but Barnes falls from the train to his apparent death. Using information extracted from Zola, the final Hydra stronghold is located, and Rogers leads an attack to stop Schmidt from using weapons of mass destruction on major American cities. Rogers climbs aboard Schmidt’s super-bomber as it takes off. During the subsequent fight, the Tesseract is freed from its container, and Schmidt picks it up, opening a portal into space through which he is pulled. The Tesseract burns through the plane and falls into the ocean. Seeing no way to land the plane without risking its weapons detonating, Rogers radios Carter to say goodbye before crashing in the Arctic. After the war ends, Stark recovers the Tesseract from the ocean floor but is unable to locate the aircraft, and Rogers is presumed dead.

Rogers awakens in a 1940s-style hospital room. Hearing a radio broadcast of a baseball game that he attended in 1941, Rogers grows suspicious and escapes from the room. He finds himself in contemporary Times Square, where S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury informs him that he has been asleep for almost 70 years. In a post-credits scene, Fury approaches Rogers and proposes a mission with worldwide ramifications.

My Review

In the middle of the 2020s, the superhero film feels a little bit overdone, or at least there is a common perception that Hollywood has simply made too many of them. This got me to wondering, though, whether the problem is over-saturation or whether the problem is a reduction in the quality of the product. If the problem is that we’ve all just seen too many of them, then it would stand to reason that the older MCU films just would not hold up that well on a rewatch. Here’s the thing, though – Captain America: The First Avenger is a great movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The story was fantastic. The pacing great. I loved the score, cinematography, and special effects. The cast was superb (imagine being so rich with talent that you can just have Neal McDonough, Samuel L. Jackson, and Stanley Tucci playing small side characters.) I am left to conclude that the problem is not an overabundance of these types of movies, it’s that the ones being made lately aren’t nearly as good as they were fifteen years ago. Is that an endorsement of this movie? I hope so. That’s my intention.

What has changed then? My suspicion is that we went from making movies with superheroes in them, to making movies about superheroes. Captain America is a heroic war movie, with characters who have fantastic abilities. You could make a few changes to the script and this general plot arc would work as a more standard issue war movie. It would still work. It’s a hero journey movie that doesn’t *require* that the hero have special physical abilities. It works because of his character, rather than because of his powers. You want to believe that people like Steve Rogers exist in the world whether he ever got the super soldier serum, or not. He represents a hopeful, inspiring type of escapism. You leave the movie wanting to be a better person. I wonder if maybe the more recent genre films spend too much time focused on what separates the characters from the rest of us, rather than what we might realistically be inspired to emulate.

I also really enjoyed the final moments, as he wakes up in the modern world. The scene manages to convey without words that the world Steve Rogers fell asleep in no longer exists. The Allies won the war, he saved the world, but nevertheless everyone lost the world they were defending. There’s something powerfully sad in that. There’s something hopeful, too, in seeing Steve in the modern world. It tells us that that old world isn’t all the way out of our reach. I suppose if you are ever feeling wistful about the fact that the world of your youth is no longer with us, you can take heart, because you are still with us. Hope is not gone.

This movie is extremely well cast. Chris Evans was obviously on the front end of a career arc wherein he is now an A-lister. Hugo Weaving was in the midst of one of the greatest 12 year runs of box office hits of all time (all three Matrix films, all three Lord of the Rings films, Transformers, V for Vendetta.) And then you’ve got the legendary Tommy Lee Jones, who lends gravitas to the whole project and makes every scene he’s in feel important. I could go on, though. Everyone in this film is great. The performances manage to feel like the 1940s (Hollywood’s version of it, anyway) but while also incorporating the supernatural seemlessly into that aesthetic.

I was watching closely to see how well the movie holds up visually and I have come to the conclusion that the technology of filmmaking must not have improved much since 2011. Everything from the CGI to the practical effects still looks extremely current, if not even a little better than what is current.

With the benefit of knowing how the MCU movies subsequently unfold, it was also really fun to rewatch this and see things in play here that subsequently matter a lot in later films. We get our first look at the Tesseract in this movie – something we later come to know as the Space Stone (one of the Infinity Stones.) The MCU did a really great job between 2008 and 2019 simultaneously telling compact stories in each of its films while simultaneously telling an over-arching story across a couple dozen movies. This movie also makes a big deal about Captain America missing his scheduled dance with Agent Peggy Carter – something that will be paid off nearly a decade later.

Captain America has one of my favorite MCU themes. It’s hard to explain how a piece of classical music can embody a wholesome courageous America vibe, but this one succeeds.

Overall, I am very happy I decided to rewatch this. Captain America is a great character and this was an excellent origin story.

Have you seen Captain America: The First Avenger? If so, what did you think?