Captain America: The First Avenger

Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeeley
Starring: Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones
Release date: July 29, 2011
Length: 2 hours 4 minutes

One of the only popular comic book series to be untouched by film studios, Captain America is finally coming to theatres with the brooding Chris Evans from Fantastic Four and Push in the title role. One of the twenty comic book movies to come out this summer, Captain America: The First Avenger takes us back to 1940s New York, where the scrawny little Steve Rogers (Evans) desperately wants to fight in the army but keeps getting rejected from different stations. German scientist Abraham Erskine, played by Stanley Tucci, who sees Rogers’ eagerness and likability, eventually approaches him. He asks Rogers to be the first of many men to go through the newly created super soldier transformation with an original serum he has invented, much to the dismay of Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), who believes Steve is the wrong choice. Steve excitedly accepts and is thrown into the world he’s always dreamed of being in. However when an unidentified German assassinates Erskine and the super-soldier formula is lost, Rogers is put on a glitzy self-parodied tour across the country as Captain America, to promote war bonds. When he learns that his best friend Barnes’ unit was lost in battle against Nazi Johann Schmidt’s forces, Steve secretly teams up with the British commanding officer Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and the slick inventor and engineer Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) to find and bring back the troupe. However, Rogers is unprepared for what he will find when he lands on German soil, including the strength and power of Mr. Schmidt. Captain America: First Avenger is one of those movies that shows you, no matter how beautiful the special effects, the production design and the cinematography of the dazzling 1940s is, how vital a good script is. It’s easy to say, “well that wasn’t an amazing movie, but it was a lot of fun”, but that unfortunately can’t even apply to this film. The cheesiness and predictability of so many jokes and lines like when Schmidt asks Rogers “what makes you so special?” and he replies “Nothing. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” gets in the way of you being fully able to enjoy this gorgeous film. It’s all right to have a few zingers throughout a comic book movie, but you can’t let that be your basis of all dialogue so that it literally feels like your watching a movie from the 40s. This also means that all the talented actors in the film have to play up to the hackneyed conversation especially lead actor Chris Evans. People who are new to him, may not know his great down to earth performances in previous films like The Perfect Score, Push and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and will probably assume him to be a very cheesy bad actor, which he is not. He does what he can in Captain America: First Avenger, playing to the tone of the script, while British actress Hayley Atwell from The Duchess and BBC’s The Tudors, strongly holds her own as the outspoken hard dame Peggy Carter, the love interest of Rogers. Stanley Tucci is lovable for his few scenes as a fictionalized version of Albert Einstein while Tommy Lee Jones is great as the cynical and tough Colonel leading Rogers. Chris Evans had it tough being the hero of an incredibly old-fashioned clichéd script, but no one had it worse than Hugo Weaving who amazingly had to play the always-malicious villain, Schmidt, AKA Red Skull. All the evil threats and crazy excitement for taking over the world made me sympathize for Weaving, who took on the role and gave a performance just as absurd as the script. Despite all of this, the setting of the 1940s was absolutely stunning. The 8 art directors on this film as well as costume designer Anna B. Shepherd captured all the glitz and fun of the 1940s incredibly well in every single shot, so much so that it shielded the ridiculous script sometimes. With the beauty of Captain America, I thought it would be easy to swipe all the obnoxious lines away, but they were constantly impossible to ignore and makes me think “What a waste”. A waste of wonderful actors, a waste of extraordinary visual effects, and a waste of a beloved comic book story that cannot be redone. However much the script prevented the film from being good, it was amazingly not the worst part about it. The most agonizing element of Captain America: The First Avenger is that all the actors, writers, art and production designers didn’t do all that work for a movie but for a two hour introduction of Steve Rogers to 2012’s highly anticipated The Avengers. Sorry for the spoiler, but at the end of the film Steve wakes some odd 70 years later in present day still looking in his twenties and meets Samuel L. Jackson’s character Nick Fury from the Iron Man films. With that ridiculous ending, you can’t help but feel gypped out of seeing a real movie with a pre-cursor to another instead. All there is to say about this film is that it’s a real shame. Without pondering over what it could have been, I will advise you to see another better superhero film this summer, like X-Men: Origins because Captain America: The First Avenger is not it.