As I have mentioned on the show, I am quite cheap/poor, so I don't get to go to the theater very often. However, I try and catch movies that look interesting when they come out on DVD. Captain America just came out on the 25th and I was able to score a copy and watch it and I have to say that I was very impressed. The following review will contain plot spoilers, much as my show does. If you haven't seen the movie and care about it being spoiled, move on to the next post!
(SPOILER ALERT!!)
I am not a big comic book fan, but I do love comic book/super hero movies. Sure, they can be silly and sometimes they are awful, but I'll usually go to see them. This movie was neither silly nor awful. I didn't know a lot about the Cap going into this movie, but I feel as though I should have been paying more attention and clamoring for this movie adaptation. A few things I liked:
1. They payed homage to the costume from the comic and iconic comic imagery in a clever, but not derivative way. Having the newly bulked up Steve Rogers going to USO shows and becoming a figurehead of the war effort before he had done all that many heroic things was a stroke of genius. It showed where the (later toned down) version of the uniform came from, why he carried a shield in the first place (so he could read his lines from it) and, of course, him punching out Hitler. Classic. Also, the song was pretty funny.
2. Steve Rogers is a very likable character. It's not often that you can root for the little guy and the hero and have them be the same person. While he doesn't have much of a character arc, he doesn't really need one. He represents, not just the best of America, but the best of humanity: a humble, self-sacrificing person who puts the greater good above all else and refuses to back down no matter what. He was a hero before he had super powers, not because of them. That's rare in modern emo-heroes.
3. Least obnoxious gear-up scene I can recall. In a lot of comic/sci-fi/fantasy movies, there will inevitably be a bond-esque gearing up scene where the hero (and audience) are introduced to the hi-tech gadgets they will use to defeat the enemy. I usually dread these scenes because, for me, they tend to highlight the most ridiculous aspects of the source material and bring them front and center. Examples of bad ones can be found in the Blade movies, Van Helsing, XXX and the Hellboy films. Decent examples would be Batman Begins/Dark Knight where everything is a little bit more realistic and the first Matrix movie where they downloaded all the weapons they were going to use. In Captain America, the scene was short, featured an interesting tech guy in the elder Stark (Iron man's dad, for anyone who doesn't know) and seemed realistic. I helped that Cap basically just uses shield and not many other gadgets.
4. He was more of a good leader than a lone wolf, like many super heroes. His physical abilities, while impressive, serve as only tools to inspire those that follow him. The movie shows an awesome montage of the Captain working closely with the men in his unit to bring down the bad guys. After seeing so many solo heroes, this was a nice change of pace.
And here are a few things I didn't like:
1. Vibranium. The substance that his shield is made of. This may be from the comic, but is a super lame name almost up there with Avatar's unobtainium, and it bumped me out of the movie for a few minutes while I though of how dumb that was. If it is from the comics, they almost have to include it, but some things "sound" better on paper than they do when spoken aloud.
2. The death of Bucky seemed sudden and didn't carry as much weight as I felt it should. Not much more to say about it. I can't really explain why I felt this way and I can't think of any way they should have done it differently, but there it is.
So that's my opinion of the new Captain America movie. In short, I am looking forward to the Avengers movie. They seem to be giving these characters (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and, to a lesser extent the Hulk) just the right amount of reality and fantasy. Also, I would like this experiment that Marvel is conducting (inter-movie continuity) to work so that other studios will be able to go the same way. Consider me tentatively sold!
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