Captain America: The movie that lives up to it's title
These days the summer movie landscape is littered with comic book superheroes; some of them good some of them we never speak of. The big superhero movie this summer is Captain America, which hit theaters this past Friday. It is the last movie that will be released in preparation for the big Joss Whedon version of "The Avengers" that is scheduled to be released next summer.
I don't know about the rest of you but I've slowly started to lose interest in comic book movies. The first few years it was great to see my favorite childhood superhero come to life. But now it just feels like Hollywood is milking the whole idea since it has no new ideas or is unwilling to venture into uncharted waters and wants to stay safely in the profitable shallow end with tried movie types. For the most part recently I've been avoiding these types of movies but "Captain America: The First Avenger" was an exception. I was really excited for the movie and even dragged a few of my friends to a midnight showing with me.
The movie follows a scrawny kid from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Rogers wants to join the military and fight in WWII but is unable to because of his multitude of ailments. He is rejected multiple times but at the world's fair he is scouted by scientist Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) to participate as a candidate for the "Super Soldier" project. Rogers is chosen for the project because of his inherently good nature, which he demonstrated by jumping onto a presumed live grenade to save the other recruits. He undergoes this procedure and gains super human abilities. Due to a Nazi saboteur the experiment is never able to be replicated. Rogers now dubbed "Captain America" eventually makes his way to Europe. It is there that he fights the forces of HYDRA, the former Nazi science research unit, led by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), better known as the red skull. That sums up the movie without giving away too much.
The movie starts off strong the narrative is coherent and compelling. Steve Rogers seems like a caricature of a real person but he still manages to feel genuine and does garner sympathies. But once he becomes Captain America the movie devolves into a mindless, soulless, action montage. There isn't even really one good action sequence. The second half of the movie just amounts to a bunch of montages where Captain America on a motorcycle acts as the foreground for explosions. The movie has no feeling, no heart. By the end I really couldn't care less what happened.
The movie just felt like a war time pro america propaganda film. I mean yes the character was created to act as a piece of propaganda but I was hoping the movie wouldn't amount to this whole "AMERICA FUCK YEAH" attitude. There was even a huge amount of effort put into changing the movie's title to "The First Avenger" for the release in other countries. But with the way the movie turned out I doubt the title change will do much to hide the American Patriotism the film extols.
Like many comic book movies, "Captain America" does not follow the source material too closely. It takes huge liberties and trivializes many of the complex back stories the comics introduced. I'm not usually a stickler for following source material if the final product can stand on it's own; I enjoyed "X-men: First Class." But Captain America on it's own merit stands very weakly. It started off strong but quickly devolved into a poorly planned action movie.
I feel like the comic book movie genre needs to graciously bow out while it still has the chance. "Captain America" is another prime example of why. Hollywood seems to have run out of ideas and now just coats weak scripts with comic book paint and sends it out to the masses. It is a profitable formula but doesn't make for good cinema. I'd say that "Captain America: The First Avenger" is a movie that you should pass on but honestly in the lukewarm movie selections of this summer it may be worth watching just for the strong sense of patriotism it evokes.
I don't know about the rest of you but I've slowly started to lose interest in comic book movies. The first few years it was great to see my favorite childhood superhero come to life. But now it just feels like Hollywood is milking the whole idea since it has no new ideas or is unwilling to venture into uncharted waters and wants to stay safely in the profitable shallow end with tried movie types. For the most part recently I've been avoiding these types of movies but "Captain America: The First Avenger" was an exception. I was really excited for the movie and even dragged a few of my friends to a midnight showing with me.
The movie follows a scrawny kid from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Rogers wants to join the military and fight in WWII but is unable to because of his multitude of ailments. He is rejected multiple times but at the world's fair he is scouted by scientist Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) to participate as a candidate for the "Super Soldier" project. Rogers is chosen for the project because of his inherently good nature, which he demonstrated by jumping onto a presumed live grenade to save the other recruits. He undergoes this procedure and gains super human abilities. Due to a Nazi saboteur the experiment is never able to be replicated. Rogers now dubbed "Captain America" eventually makes his way to Europe. It is there that he fights the forces of HYDRA, the former Nazi science research unit, led by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), better known as the red skull. That sums up the movie without giving away too much.
The movie starts off strong the narrative is coherent and compelling. Steve Rogers seems like a caricature of a real person but he still manages to feel genuine and does garner sympathies. But once he becomes Captain America the movie devolves into a mindless, soulless, action montage. There isn't even really one good action sequence. The second half of the movie just amounts to a bunch of montages where Captain America on a motorcycle acts as the foreground for explosions. The movie has no feeling, no heart. By the end I really couldn't care less what happened.
The movie just felt like a war time pro america propaganda film. I mean yes the character was created to act as a piece of propaganda but I was hoping the movie wouldn't amount to this whole "AMERICA FUCK YEAH" attitude. There was even a huge amount of effort put into changing the movie's title to "The First Avenger" for the release in other countries. But with the way the movie turned out I doubt the title change will do much to hide the American Patriotism the film extols.
Like many comic book movies, "Captain America" does not follow the source material too closely. It takes huge liberties and trivializes many of the complex back stories the comics introduced. I'm not usually a stickler for following source material if the final product can stand on it's own; I enjoyed "X-men: First Class." But Captain America on it's own merit stands very weakly. It started off strong but quickly devolved into a poorly planned action movie.
I feel like the comic book movie genre needs to graciously bow out while it still has the chance. "Captain America" is another prime example of why. Hollywood seems to have run out of ideas and now just coats weak scripts with comic book paint and sends it out to the masses. It is a profitable formula but doesn't make for good cinema. I'd say that "Captain America: The First Avenger" is a movie that you should pass on but honestly in the lukewarm movie selections of this summer it may be worth watching just for the strong sense of patriotism it evokes.
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