Before I deconstruct everything that was perfect and the few things that were terrible about Captain America, I would like to write about something personal. In a very odd, tragic and undeniably funny twist, my grandfather passed away while I was in the theater. He was a great man who had been battling cancer for nearly five years. This just goes to show how stubborn my family is, considering the doctors gave him 6 months to a year in the first place.
The reason I mention this is because during WWII my grandfather spent some time in a Nazi work camp. He was Catholic and Ukrainian, so he was not treated *as* harshly as the Nazis treated POWs and Jews. Even so it was not exactly a happy time. I'll never forget one particular story about his time in the work camp and some of the tragedies within. Strangely enough this tragedy was not caused by the camp operators, but by other prisoners.
You need to first understand that Ukrainians and the Polish do not get along at all. Despite the fact that they were both prisoners forced to work against their will for an occupying force, there was still an impressive amount of enmity between the two nationalities.
At one point when there was actually a morale boosting event that included a dance held in one of the larger buildings for all the prisoners. (Like I said, they were treated a little better since they were forced labor rather than so-called enemies of the Reich.) Well, the Polish decided that this would be a perfect time to trim down on the number of Ukrainians within the camp. To accomplish this, they had people within the building suddenly yell out ‘Fire! Fire!’ during the dance. As everyone came streaming out of the building, men stationed just outside the doors with makeshift knives stabbed out and tried to wound or kill specific Ukrainians as they exited the building. Yeah, that's freaking ridiculous, but it just goes to show how powerful deep-seated hatred and ignorance can be.
After being freed by the Allied forces, my grandfather used his linguistic talents (at one point he spoke half a dozen languages) to become a translator, working his way westward until he found himself in Wales, where he met and married my grandmother. They then came here to America and raised a family. Their children in turn raised their own family and, like it or not, I am a direct result of that second generation. If it wasn’t for my grandfather’s harrowing early life, his dedication, drive and determination to make a better life for his children and grandchildren…well, I would not be here today.
So what the hell does all this storytelling and reminiscing have to do with watching a movie? Much like my grandfather, Steve Rodgers was not satisfied with his place in life. He wanted to do something more than what the world around him thought he should do. Unlike my grandfather, however, Rodgers was given access to a certain Super Soldier Serum….
After sitting through no less than four superhero movies this summer, it was nice of the studios to save the best for last. Does Captain America do everything right? Hell no. This is still a studio movie, and you still have to sit through a certain amount of useless and mandatory crap that only the dumbest among us actually need, and the most gullible actually want. Whatever you want to say about this film it’s still an origin story. Marvel just happened to do a fantastic job of making it better than the rest.
Unlike Thor, which forces you to accept the whole multiple-universes angle, X-Men, which has to develop several characters at once and Green Lantern. which failed to be good on any level, Captain America takes advantage of only needing to focus on one man in a realistic setting to become the most realistic and most strikingly human of all the summer superhero films.
Steve Rodgers was a 90 lb. weakling who was turned into our nation’s greatest hero, giving the American people someone to rally around during the dark days of World War II. The movie does its best to impart all this in a short amount of time. Most of you already know the plot and are well aware of how he went from 1940’s war hero to 21st Century Avenger so I will skip ahead to the acting…..
…which is fantastic. Chris Evans does a much better job than I had hoped for as the titular hero. It doesn’t take much to be an action hero, so the second half was not nearly as hard to pull off as the beginning of the film, when his head is pasted on a tiny guy’s body and he is forced to use actual acting and emotion. The fact that the former Johnny Storm can act so well was a pleasant surprise, and nothing seemed forced or awkward.
Hugo Weaving showed us once again that he can do a fantastic job of picking iconic characters and making them even better than hoped for. As our antagonist Red Skull, the man most known for being both Elrond and Agent Smith once again shows why Hollywood keeps calling on him when they need some scenery properly chewed. Seriously, every early scene that he was in was fun and ridiculous without being campy.
Everyone else seems perfectly cast in their supporting roles, even way-too-old-to-be-on-active-duty-status Tommy Lee Jones as the Army Colonel in charge of the Super Soldier Program. Then again, at this point Tommy Lee can still make a movie better just by showing up in it. When he decides to actually act, as he does here, there is no disappointment. Throw in Tony Stark’s grandfather and a few crazy soldiers to help Captain America pull off a few raids and you’ve got yourself a party.
Special effects were also a nice surprise. There are a lot of cool gadgets and gewgaws that could have been cheesy as hell but stayed believable and were still cool to look at. There were a few green screen FX that didn’t quite pull off the awe they were going for, and the 'Chris Evans’ head on a scrawny guy' part was jarring and didn’t quite work from a technical standpoint. Otherwise you had yourself a good example of how a movie can be FX laden and still look realistic.
The terrible that I could have done without was the painful stormtrooper effect and the incredibly stale ‘mandatory love interest.’ The Hydra soldiers were laughably ineffective and really only existed to add to the action. The body count was ridiculous on both sides, but as is too often the case in big noisy movies, the heroes easily killed a dozen bad guys for every one of their own lost. The love interest just irks me because it added nothing. Especially since much of the audience knows exactly how this particular story ends, having someone fall in love with him over the course of a few minutes' screen time is just irritating. This can partially be blamed on Evans’ acting. He did such a fine job of making the theater audience care about Captain America and root for him, as well as making us feel his sense of loss in a later scene, that the love angle was superfluous.
All in all this is a great summer flick and it finally delivers on the promise of all the other superhero movies that came before it this year.
Two stray observations:
-“How the hell do you STILL not know that Marvel has something after the credits EVERY SINGLE TIME, people? Seriously?” My wife totally smacked me down when I said this in the theater with her reply of “Not everyone here is a huge nerd, honey.”
-If you have a tiny little plane shaped like a bomb whose sole purpose is to blow up a city with no chance of survival, why the hell would you install an ejection seat?
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