I had the privilege of going to see Captain America: The First Avenger with a lovely group of friends this past Monday, and I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it immensely, way more than I expected to.
I confess, I’ve never really been interested in Captain America as a character. Yes, I know I tend to penalize superheroes too much for the crime of not being Batman, but while I’m not saying they all have to be dark, gritty angst-fests bordering on psychosis, I tend to prefer my heroes with a little more inner struggle. I always found Cap slightly boring because his unerring moral compass always directs him exactly to the one true right thing to do, with the only conflicts he ever encounters being external ones brought by the bad guy. And what is to me the most interesting part of his character, the “a man out of his time” thing, never gets explored much because of course the comics would rather spend more time depicting him fighting evil or saving the world from crisis.
And yet in this film, far from finding it boring, I was oddly charmed by Steve being simply and purely a Good Guy. Like, not even in the “hero” sense, but in the sense women talk about the men they date— “He’s a Good Guy.” It actually really was, as some of the critics have said, a refreshing change from reluctant Spider-Man, dickish Iron Man, or even my beloved dark Batman. My biggest fear about this movie was that Chris Evans was going to blow it. He would not have been my choice at all, both because he already played one Marvel character (the Human Torch) and because he was pretty lousy at it. But he nailed it. He was so unaffected, so forthright, and God damn it, I really liked this genuine, honest, brave, moral, modest, uncomplicated little virgin who didn’t want to kill anybody; he just doesn’t like bullies.
I mean, seriously. When was the last time you saw a movie portray a tough, masculine hero who basically had the word “VIRGIN” stamped on his forehead? I found that extremely endearing.
Yeah, Captain America is intrinsically at least a little bit corny, something I usually have very little tolerance for. But context is everything. The movie actually addressed that by putting it in context. Captain America, both as a comic book character and as a superhero identity in-universe, was conceived in the forties, a time when people’s sensibilities were not so jaded and, perhaps more to the point, advertising was still a young medium without all the baggage and tiredness it has today. The fact that the government in this movie originally comes up with the idea of Captain America as a living propaganda piece, a cheesy stage show character Steve would play to encourage people to buy war bonds, is so fucking period that it’s perfect. That is totally something the WWII-era government would do. Steve has to desire to be something more than that in order to transcend that cheesiness become something that we can take seriously.
World War II-era America is a fascinating setting. I love the aesthetic and the attitudes. It was a war people believed in, that young men showed up in droves to enlist for, so it’s the perfect milieu for a story about a brave, goodhearted young man whose desire to serve the country and cause he finds righteous leads him to becoming the ultimate valiant soldier. The moment I saw Bucky show up in that uniform, I flashed to the framed photo we have in my parents’ house of a young man, handsome as a movie star, wearing that same uniform in a picture taken the day he enlisted at no more than nineteen years old. That was my grandfather Arthur Roberts, who served as an infantryman in Britain and Germany. He still has shrapnel in him from combat. My other grandfather Joe Leone was a little older, and was an airplane mechanic stationed in the Pacific. Both of them volunteers who went because it was the right thing to do. That resonates with me, and probably most people, which explains why World War II is such fertile ground for heroic storytelling.
Abraham Erskine was played by Stanley Tucci, who I’ve loved since I saw him in an embarrassing disaster movie that I like to this day just because of him. His Erskine was ponderous and warm, the articulator of the heart of the movie in how he saw the real goodness in Steve and gave him a chance to have it make a difference in the world. For flavor-of-the-times reasons, I wanted him to get a bit more trouble for being German in America, but as Hyde pointed out, he is supposed to be Albert Einstein. Though I knew it was coming, I was sorry when he died, as I tend to like the character who has his eye on the bigger picture when everyone else is caught up in the smaller things of the here-and-now.
I really, really liked how they portrayed the romance between Steve and Peggy. It feels both genuine to the way things worked in that period and to Steve’s character. In the forties, respectable boys and good girls dated around if they pleased, they treated each other like gentlemen and ladies, and they didn’t sleep with each other until they were quite serious, or possibly not even until they were engaged or even married. Peggy may be worldly, but Steve has always been invisible to girls and too shy to seek them out— a Nice Boy with “VIRGIN” stamped on his forward. It takes time for them to be charmed by each other, and their progress toward romance is slow and careful. A few vaguely meaningful conversations, an exchange about dancing, the newspaper-cutout picture of Peggy Steve puts in his pocket watch. It takes them the whole movie to even arrange a date. I also liked how they started building it even while Steve was still a scrawny wuss boy— it wouldn’t have reflected well on Peggy if she weren’t starting to develop esteem for him until he got the sexy sexy abs and pecs.
Which brings us to the obligatory beefcake portion of my review. What can I say, I have a weakness for cut abs. Chris Evans is pretty hot, as he is good-looking, the uniform suits him, and he really works the neat, clean-cut forties hair, but he’s too delicately pretty for my tastes, so I confine my dirty, dirty objectification of him to below the neck. When he first comes out of the chamber after treatment with the super-soldier serum, I had to put my eyes back in my head. But to be honest, I thought the handsomest guy in the movie was his sidekick Bucky. First let me say that they made the choice to make Bucky Steve’s old friend and age contemporary, who enlisted before Steve was able to. It surprised me but I found the choice really worked and made their friendship more genuine. And more to the beefcake point, Bucky was played by a pretty, pretty man with the more overtly masculine aspect I prefer who ROCKED the uniform like whoa. Though I find myself slightly weirded out by the notion of being attracted to Bucky, particularly finding him significantly more attractive than Cap. Shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, I almost never go for the blond if there’s a hot brunet.
I enjoyed Peggy Carter quite a bit, though she brought a lot of little nitpicky issues for me. For one, I think she should have been an American. It’s slightly weird to pair the All-American Hero with an Englishwoman. I liked how capable and non-squishy she was without having to be a ball-buster, and how she was practically an officer like any other, but it seemed a little whitewashed that a woman in the army in the forties should get so little flak. And I loved her styling, with her fabulous victory roles and her awesome on-period clothes with their square shoulders and nipped-in waists, but it irked me that all the skirts were knee-length when they should have been tea-length— more flattering, sure, but less accurate. Still, I think she narrowly beats out Pepper as my favorite Marvel movie love-interest, because the Iron Man movies couldn’t balance her being put-upon with her being impotent, because Betsy Ross barely registered on me, and because I thought Jane Foster was a totally unbelievable character in every conceivable way.
Now let’s just hope if fucking Sharon Carter shows up she is not Peggy’s daughter, or granddaughter, or niece, or grandniece, or any other kind of close descendent or relation, or if she is, she does not get together with Cap. I AM SORRY, but even in Cap’s weird situation, being attracted to somebody because SHE REMINDS YOU OF HER MOM OR GRANDMA is CREEPY AS SHIT. Hate, hate, hate that.
I was pleasantly surprised by how involved Howard Stark was in the plot. I thought he was basically just going to be a neat little cameo to connect Steve and Tony, but it turned out he was around a lot and served as the American army’s primary mechanical engineer. I liked the actor who played him, even with his slightly exaggerated forties speech style, and he even looked a bit like Robert Downey, Jr., but I was slightly disappointed that they didn’t get the silver fox back from the Disney-esque filmstrip in the second Iron Man. His name is actually John Slattery and he’s most recently been known for being on Mad Men, but I can never remember and always just call him the silver fox. Anyway, I look forward to seeing Steve knowing Tony’s father factors into the Avengers movie.
As a total side note, I liked the little moment where Steve was drawing. It was a nice nod to the fact that in the comics he was an art student and illustrator before he enlisted. By the way, the similarity that bears to Hitler’s pre-political career always jumped out at me. Was that intentional? If so, what in the world would they mean by drawing that parallel?
The Howling Commandoes were fun. Dum Dum Duggan was a fabulous representation of the character. I had to roll my eyes a little at their politically correct racial diversity that nobody ever commented on, which is not exactly the norm for the period. I can’t exactly remember the makeup of the team in the comics, but I was a bit sorry the black guy wasn’t Jack Fury, granddad of Nick, and I know that in some continuities Wolverine was a member, which would have been a pretty hilarious cameo (if not quite as hilarious as the one in X-Men: First Class.)
I thought Bucky’s death was well done and mostly stuck to the canon, though it came earlier in the movie than I thought it would. I believe it traditionally basically happens at the same time as Cap’s “death,” but I guess they moved it up to give Cap an emotional blow for the end of the second act of the movie. (See, I have paid attention in my screenwriting classes.) I liked the bit where Steve realized he can’t get drunk anymore because of how his super-body now works, and I loved how when Steve was blaming himself for not protecting Bucky, Peggy told him that he can only shoulder that blame if he didn’t trust and respect Bucky enough to allow him to accept the risks for himself. It’s a remarkably pointed contrast with an issue of Batman’s—Batman never allows any of his teammates to become true partners because he’s incapable of trusting them enough to let them shoulder the same burdens that he carries. It leads to them feeling disrespected and pushed away, so they all eventually leave him. Captain America does, and respected Bucky enough to share his burdens. Which is why Cap makes true friends, and Batman is forever alone.
Hugo Weaving was of course awesome as Johann Schmitt the Red Skull, THE MAN HITLER KICKED OUT OF THE NAZIS FOR BEING TOO EVIL. I’ve always particularly liked him as an actor, and I love the sound of his voice. I’ve read he based his German accent on Werner Herzog and Klaus Maria Brandauer. I was surprised to see that he spent the first half of the movie looking human, as opposed to like the Red Skull, but that way it makes for a better reveal. How about the neat little detail of the portrait artist looking extremely distasteful as he was painting Schmitt’s portrait sans human mask? The depiction of the Skull was really cool, all the way down to his awesome floor-length leather duster. As witticaster* said, his tailor must have had the most job security of any member of the organization.
Speaking of that organization, my feelings are very ambivalent in regards to HYDRA. I guess it makes sense as a “deep science,” as Peggy says, division of the regime that went off the deep end with it. The idea of obscure “Nazi occultism” is a common story trope. But I just can’t decide whether I think its inclusion is appropriate or not in regards to respectfully portraying a story in the WWII setting. Part of it feels like an excuse to just not have to talk about Nazis, which surprises me, since them and large corporations are one of the few totally acceptable real-world generic movie villains. I certainly don’t like the way the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes cartoon uses it as a wholesale replacement for the Nazis. But still, torn about it even as a Nazi-offshoot. On the one hand, I don’t know if it’s totally respectful to the REAL soldiers who did this huge thing of defeating them to include an EVEN SCARIER VERSION RAWR that we need a superdude to take down. But on the other hand, maybe it allows Cap to not take credit away from those real soldiers if he’s busy with a personal, separate but still related nemesis while everyone else tackles the main threat.
I was fine with the ending, though I can see why some people might have felt it was a bit off. I liked how you could be easily tempted into thinking the Red Skull was destroyed, but the way he disappeared looked so much like the expression of Asgardian magic that you can guess something else entirely happened. I loved the last conversation between Steve and Peggy; I was very touched, and found myself both simultaneously wishing that he’d told her he loved her and glad that even then he didn’t—because he knew something that important couldn’t be forced, that they weren’t at that point yet, and he still wasn’t without hope that they still had the chance to get to that point together. That’s why he made the date with her, because he never ever loses hope. I think many found the need to run the ship into the ground a bit abrupt. I am steeped in the comic continuity, so I got that Cap had to end up buried in that ice one way or another, but several of the others I saw it with thought that if you didn’t realize that, you might have found the fact that Cap couldn’t do anything but crash the ship out of the way kind of... weird.
And then Cap wakes up in the present day. Unfortunately he did not body slam Nick Fury, yelling about how he knew all seven Negro agents of SHIELD and Nick sure wasn’t one of them. Heh. I love how easily it is to update the Captain America timeline—just add to the amount of time he’s been frozen since WWII! I really hope they’ll include him having to deal with some “man out of his time” stuff when they bring him back in the Avengers movie.
Ah, yes, the Avengers movie can happen now. That means Chris Evans, Robert Downey, Jr., and Chris Hemsworth. If that is the case, I have but one request, and anything else can be forgiven.
No shirts, please.
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