I’ve been reading CAPTAIN AMERICA comics for about 40 years, and I have to say, I was disappointed by the new CAPTAIN AMERICA movie. ( I know -- big surprise, right?)
Mostly I was upset by too many changes to the comic book continuity. My feeling is that half the changes worked and half of them didn’t, and the half that didn’t work were so vastly different from the comic, they were a huge distraction to me.
Among the big changes: 1) the government initially using Cap as a propaganda tool instead of as the Super-Soldier he was created to be; 2) the origin of the Red Skull; 3) the relationship between Cap and Bucky; 4) the relationship between Cap and Peggy Carter; 5) the role of Tony Stark’s father in Cap’s origin; 6) the relationship between Cap & Nick Fury; 7) the origin of HYDRAl and 8) the way Cap gets frozen in ice. (I’m not giving anything away -- anyone who has read a Marvel Comic in the last 5 decades knows that Cap gets frozen in ice at the end of WWII!)
My biggest problem is that the movie doesn’t show Cap fighting any Nazis. This was apparently done in the name of political correctness, which I still don’t understand. The filmmakers didn’t want kids to know what Nazis were? They were afraid if offending Germans? This summer’s X-MEN FIRST CLASS had scenes of Nazis torturing Magnetos parents and then Magneto roaming the world as a Nazi-hunter years later. Why is it that it’s okay to show Nazis in the X-Men movies but not in CAPTAIN AMERICA -- a movie set in World War II?
I really wanted to see Cap punching out the real Hitler -- not some goofy Hitler impersonator in a stage show. Having Cap fight the hordes of HYDRA makes this movie look a lot like a GI JOE sequel. (Try watching GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA just before you watch the CAP movie, and you’ll see some awkward similarities.)
Chris Evans does a nice job as Cap, overcoming any lingering ill will fans may have had toward his cocky Human Torch from the FANTASTIC FOUR films. He must be a better actor than I thought he was, because not once in this movie did I think of the Human Torch.
The love story in this movie doesn’t work at all, mostly because the Peggy Carter character is a little too modern. A hard-hitting British woman who seems to be in some high-ranking position in the America military -- this character would not have existed in World War II. This is a bigger fantasy than even CAPTAIN AMERICA himself. I’m sorry, I just didn’t buy it.
I realize the filmmakers had to get a love story in there somewhere, but this one really felt forced. To me, a far more interesting story would have been if Peggy was a girl from Cap’s old neighborhood in Brooklyn, maybe she loved him when she was skinny, then she sees him after his transformation and has to deal with her scrawny boyfriend becoming a super-hero!
Hugo Weaving does a fine job as the Red Skull, even if you never get to see him interact with Hitler and you’re never quite sure exactly what his plans are. (At least the Skull gets to be German in this film, not like the Italian Red Skull from the lame 1990 Cap movie!) As far as I can piece it together, the Skull hopes to harness the power of the Cosmic Cube, the mightiest weapon on Earth, to… uh… blow up some American cities? I liked it better in the comics when the Skull used the cube to reshape the world in his own image. That was a better use of the cube, I thought. (Maybe they’re saving that for THE AVENGERS!)
I liked the way they included Arnim Zola in the movie, but we never got to see him in his robot form. I guess they are saving that for the AVENGERS, too.
I liked the way the movie established Steve and Bucky Barnes as friends -- that was a fresh take on Bucky, and more in keeping with the recent portrayal of the character. In these sophisticated times, giving Cap a teen sidekick just wouldn’t have worked.
The fate of Bucky in the movie is very different from the comics. I’m not so sure that a train is a better vehicle than a plain when showing the demise of a major character. In the comic, the scene of Cap failing to save Bucky from the plane crash is one of the most iconic images of all time. Surely the filmmakers could have recreated it faithfully here.
The scenes where Cap goes on a USO tour made the least sense to me. The government invests all this time and money in making Steve Rogers the greatest super-soldier the world has ever known -- and then, instead of sending him off to war, they use him to drum up sales for war bonds. I liked Cap’s origin better in the comics, where as soon as Steve Rogers become Cap, he is sent undercover as a bumbling army private by day so he can go kick some Nazi butt by night.
Samuel L. Jackson has a couple of lines at the end in his role as Nick Fury, the glue that holds the Marvel movie universe together. Unfortunately, his presence here means we don’t get to see Fury in action along with the Howling Commandos in the WW II scenes. It seems kind of blasphemous to have the Howling Commandos without Nick Fury, but such is the way of the world in the Marvel movie universe, which is a bizarre amalgam of both the original Marvel universe and the Ultimate Universe.
As far as the part where Cap gets frozen -- again, the way they did it in the comics was better. In the original version, Cap is lost at sea and presumed dead. In the new movie, he crashes a huge jet, seemingly intact, into the ocean. And in 70 years, no one ever thinks to look for it.
Look, we all know that in real life, a man can’t be frozen in an iceberg for decades and come out alive. Since we’re dealing with a very implausible situation, they could have just stuck with the original version of the story instead of making it even more implausible.
Just like the first SPIDER-MAN movie, the first half of this movie is very slow, and could have really benefited from getting the title character into costume and into action faster.
The movie ends with a tease of the AVENGERS movie, which looks kind of cool, but both HAWKEYE and the BLACK WIDOW seem woefully out of place among real super-heroes who actually have powers… Also: no HULK in the
AVENGERS teaser? Come on! Where is ol’ Greenskin?
It will be very interesting to see how it all comes together.
Overall I rate CAPTAIN AMERICA behind X-MEN FIRST CLASS and THOR as far as this year’s super-hero movies. Oh well. At least it was better than GREEN LANTERN!
