A Few Thoughts on Captain America: The First Avenger
Dear Posterity
What a hoot! This is such a fun and pitch perfect piece of escapism.
I had grave fears about this movie, because in the wrong hands this character could be disastrously one-dimensional and jingoistic. (And indeed it has been done so, go here to read my good friend Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull's re-examination of the official comic-book adaptation of the Captain America movie of the early 90s.) Such fears were somewhat allayed when I was reminded that Joe Johnson, the director, had also directed one of my favorite underrated fillums of the early nineties, The Rocketeer, but I still wasn't expecting to enjoy this one quite so much.
This is a fillum which does exactly what it needs to in the larger Marvel Comics movie franchise. Unlike some of the other Marvel movies, (yes, I am looking at you Ken Brannagh,) this is plotted with magnificent economy and scripted with occasionally magnificent insouciance. There is not a moment of wasted screen-time. It is a fillum that knows what it needs to do and just does it.
So no lingering scenes set to moody music of our hero staring at his own navel and brooding about his inner demons. Steve Rogers wears his heart on his sleeve and his self-doubt, guilt and anger can be shown in a couple of lines of dialogue at the start of a scene and then we move on to telling the story and again, the fillum knows what it has to do, which is simply tell the audience who Captain America is.
One of the things I liked was that the writers, when faced with the task of taking a character called "Captain America" who is pretty much literally wrapped in the American flag, found a way to turn the concept on its head and make the character's motivations the exact opposite of shallow jingoistic nationalism, and manage to cast scorn on such sentiments as personified by Michael Brandon's avuncular yet slimy Senator Brandt.
The character's real motivations are elegantly established in the first twenty minutes of the fillum, in what I saw as one of many little Easter Eggs for comic book fans that this movie sneaks in. He's the little guy in the Charles Atlas adverts who's had bullies kicking sand in his face all his life, but in Steve's case it is literally a case of him being beaten up rather than beaten down. He doesn't dream of being bigger and tougher than the bullies, he just won't be bullied and won't stand by while others are being bullied, which is why he wants to go and fight nazis.
When his personal Charles Atlas comes along, played with incredible gentleness and warmth by Stanley Tucci, this is articulated ii the advice Tucci's Dr Erskine gives him. "Whatever happens, it doesn't matter if you become a Super Soldier, it matters that you remain a good man."
Meanwhile, in various places in Europe Hugo "Mr Giraffe-Face" Weaving is single-mindedly refusing to chew the scenery as a meglomaniac so hardcore that he finds the Nazis a bit too milquetoast to serve his ambitions. You never doubt his insanity, but what chills you about his performance is that you find yourself thinking "Thank God they had an emotially unstable, irrational Austrian man-toddler like Hitler as their absolute leader rather than an utterly focussed, Prussianly meticulous omniopath like this." There are no tantrums or Erich von Strohiem stile histrionics. He is just a very, very frightening man. (And he also had the first inter-textual gag line in the fillum. You'll have to think fast to spot it, but it does pay out really nicely in the end.)
Again though, the brakes are never put on the plot to give his character a defining scene. What this fillum does is define the characters by their involvement with the plot.
Well, apart from Colonel Phillips, but since he's played by Tommy Lee Jones, he doesn't need any character establishment. He just is.
And the battle scene direction in this is really refreshing too. Finally a modern director who doesn't think that the way to make fight scenes more exciting is to put in as many cuts as you can without having to put the film out with a health warning that some scenes may induce epileptic seizures. (I'm not picking on anyone in particular here Michael Bay.) Johnson seems to know how to position and move a camera for a sustained shot, which makes a set-piece battle-scene far more dynamic and coherent. The fact that this is a period piece set during World War II does give some license for this approach, but I have to say that I found it worked. I was waiting for Lee Marvin, Richard Jaeckel, John Cassavetes and Tele Savalas to make uncredited cameos, and the CGI in this film is so well done and so minimally used that the could have.
But the fact that they didn't appear doesn't matter, because one of the little Easter Eggs in there for comics fans is the appearance of their Marvel Comics predecessors, although their sargeant is missing for some inexplicable reason. There are lots of other nice little gifts for those who know comics, but will in no way detract from the fillum for those who aren't quite so familiar with comics.
Best of all, this fillum knows exactly when to end. Some directors, (Ang Lee, face the front when I'm speaking,) could have dragged this fillum on for another forty minutes with the character agonising over what has happened to him. All Joe Johnson needs to demonstrate all that emotional turmoil in his character is the single line: "I had a date."
As with all recent Marvel Comics movies, if you stay until the end of the credits you get a little bonus.
ETA: I saw this in normal format rather than 3-D and I strongly urge anyone else to do the same. There is nothing in this film apart from the beginning of the end-credits that would look better in 3-D and the fillum has a distinctive colour-palette, specifically, a contrast between the muted autumnals of the US bases, the wintry greys and blacks of the Hydra bases and the gaudy over-bright hues of the publicity tour scenes and watching through 3-D glasses will rob the viewer of that subtlety and be a disservice to the cinematographer.
What a hoot! This is such a fun and pitch perfect piece of escapism.
I had grave fears about this movie, because in the wrong hands this character could be disastrously one-dimensional and jingoistic. (And indeed it has been done so, go here to read my good friend Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull's re-examination of the official comic-book adaptation of the Captain America movie of the early 90s.) Such fears were somewhat allayed when I was reminded that Joe Johnson, the director, had also directed one of my favorite underrated fillums of the early nineties, The Rocketeer, but I still wasn't expecting to enjoy this one quite so much.
This is a fillum which does exactly what it needs to in the larger Marvel Comics movie franchise. Unlike some of the other Marvel movies, (yes, I am looking at you Ken Brannagh,) this is plotted with magnificent economy and scripted with occasionally magnificent insouciance. There is not a moment of wasted screen-time. It is a fillum that knows what it needs to do and just does it.
So no lingering scenes set to moody music of our hero staring at his own navel and brooding about his inner demons. Steve Rogers wears his heart on his sleeve and his self-doubt, guilt and anger can be shown in a couple of lines of dialogue at the start of a scene and then we move on to telling the story and again, the fillum knows what it has to do, which is simply tell the audience who Captain America is.
One of the things I liked was that the writers, when faced with the task of taking a character called "Captain America" who is pretty much literally wrapped in the American flag, found a way to turn the concept on its head and make the character's motivations the exact opposite of shallow jingoistic nationalism, and manage to cast scorn on such sentiments as personified by Michael Brandon's avuncular yet slimy Senator Brandt.
The character's real motivations are elegantly established in the first twenty minutes of the fillum, in what I saw as one of many little Easter Eggs for comic book fans that this movie sneaks in. He's the little guy in the Charles Atlas adverts who's had bullies kicking sand in his face all his life, but in Steve's case it is literally a case of him being beaten up rather than beaten down. He doesn't dream of being bigger and tougher than the bullies, he just won't be bullied and won't stand by while others are being bullied, which is why he wants to go and fight nazis.
When his personal Charles Atlas comes along, played with incredible gentleness and warmth by Stanley Tucci, this is articulated ii the advice Tucci's Dr Erskine gives him. "Whatever happens, it doesn't matter if you become a Super Soldier, it matters that you remain a good man."
Meanwhile, in various places in Europe Hugo "Mr Giraffe-Face" Weaving is single-mindedly refusing to chew the scenery as a meglomaniac so hardcore that he finds the Nazis a bit too milquetoast to serve his ambitions. You never doubt his insanity, but what chills you about his performance is that you find yourself thinking "Thank God they had an emotially unstable, irrational Austrian man-toddler like Hitler as their absolute leader rather than an utterly focussed, Prussianly meticulous omniopath like this." There are no tantrums or Erich von Strohiem stile histrionics. He is just a very, very frightening man. (And he also had the first inter-textual gag line in the fillum. You'll have to think fast to spot it, but it does pay out really nicely in the end.)
Again though, the brakes are never put on the plot to give his character a defining scene. What this fillum does is define the characters by their involvement with the plot.
Well, apart from Colonel Phillips, but since he's played by Tommy Lee Jones, he doesn't need any character establishment. He just is.
And the battle scene direction in this is really refreshing too. Finally a modern director who doesn't think that the way to make fight scenes more exciting is to put in as many cuts as you can without having to put the film out with a health warning that some scenes may induce epileptic seizures. (I'm not picking on anyone in particular here Michael Bay.) Johnson seems to know how to position and move a camera for a sustained shot, which makes a set-piece battle-scene far more dynamic and coherent. The fact that this is a period piece set during World War II does give some license for this approach, but I have to say that I found it worked. I was waiting for Lee Marvin, Richard Jaeckel, John Cassavetes and Tele Savalas to make uncredited cameos, and the CGI in this film is so well done and so minimally used that the could have.
But the fact that they didn't appear doesn't matter, because one of the little Easter Eggs in there for comics fans is the appearance of their Marvel Comics predecessors, although their sargeant is missing for some inexplicable reason. There are lots of other nice little gifts for those who know comics, but will in no way detract from the fillum for those who aren't quite so familiar with comics.
Best of all, this fillum knows exactly when to end. Some directors, (Ang Lee, face the front when I'm speaking,) could have dragged this fillum on for another forty minutes with the character agonising over what has happened to him. All Joe Johnson needs to demonstrate all that emotional turmoil in his character is the single line: "I had a date."
As with all recent Marvel Comics movies, if you stay until the end of the credits you get a little bonus.
ETA: I saw this in normal format rather than 3-D and I strongly urge anyone else to do the same. There is nothing in this film apart from the beginning of the end-credits that would look better in 3-D and the fillum has a distinctive colour-palette, specifically, a contrast between the muted autumnals of the US bases, the wintry greys and blacks of the Hydra bases and the gaudy over-bright hues of the publicity tour scenes and watching through 3-D glasses will rob the viewer of that subtlety and be a disservice to the cinematographer.