It’s our seventh favourite movie of 2011. Here’s Mark to explain why Captain America: The First Avenger was such a great superhero film…
Over the past few weeks, Den Of Geek writers have been voting for the films of the year. It's a democratic vote, which inevitably means that things end up in a slightly funny order that not one individual writer is likely to fully agree with. But it's still a fine list. Here's entry number seven…
7th place:
Captain America: The First Avenger
In the run-up to next summer's long-touted superhero group-hug extravaganza, The Avengers, Marvel Studios has really learnt its lessons. After the sense of disappointment left by Iron Man 2, the next two pieces of the puzzle put far less emphasis on advertising the team-up, and much more into the establishment of the protagonists, and superhero stories that were interesting in their own right.
You could argue that Thor isn't really a superhero film at all, but a fantasy-inflected fish-out-of-water comedy about Norse gods and their tragic family drama. But it's still got its eye on a young audience, who can enjoy seeing the big bloke smack things with a hammer, than many other more serious superhero movies of late.
With this in mind, you could definitely argue that Captain America: The First Avenger is not a superhero movie, but a war movie. In a year when every film seemed to wrangle in a bit of alternative history, the film is set during World War II, and focuses primarily on a pitched covert battle between the science divisions of the US Army and the Nazis. A patriotic weakling, Steve Rogers, becomes the unlikely first candidate for a super-soldier serum. Although the operation is successful, it becomes impossible to repeat, and so Steve is in fact the only super-soldier available, and is initially fobbed off on propaganda tours, where his identity as the carnivalesque Captain America is first forged.
Captain America is one of those movies with big characters who are all played by great actors. Hugo Weaving is the dastardly and disfigured Red Skull, Toby Jones is his Smithers-ish assistant, Tommy Lee Jones is a hysterically avuncular colonel, and Dominic Cooper plays Howard Stark in precisely the way you'd imagine Tony Stark's dad. So it is something of an ensemble movie, countering the distinctly absurd-sounding title.
Plus, with the way that a lot of the SHIELD-related foolery is put into the background, you can also argue that it's not even a film about Steve Rogers, whose humility is so well played by Chris Evans, that it carries the entire movie without the need for any real character arc for our hero. As Stanley Tucci's benevolent German doctor intones, his serum simply makes good men great, and so Steve is an all-around nice guy from start to finish. But if it's not about him, then who?
Well, although she has more smarts than his oblivious naïveté can usually counter, Agent Peggy Carter is positioned as a character who empathises with Steve completely. She didn't attain her valued position in the Strategic Scientific Reserve without having doors slammed in her face along the way on account of her gender. She is, for once, a love interest who isn't there to be captured or killed by the villain, to provide some beef or other between our protagonist and antagonist along the way. The radiant Hayley Atwell acts it as well as it's written, and if you chopped off the bookending scenes, meant to poise Cap for The Avengers, then hers is essentially the main character arc.
It's not reading too much into the film to say any of that, but neither does it mean ignoring the fact that it's an action movie set during World War II. Director Joe Johnston, who previously brought us Rocketeer, and worked on the visual effects of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, makes a hugely enjoyable cine-literate romp, which spans several years of the war and benefits from the continuity established in previous Marvel films, by the fact that it doesn't waste any time explaining why the Red Skull believes in Norse mythology, or why the Nazi off-shoot of Hydra comes equipped with laser guns that sound like Tony Stark's repulsors.
Like Thor, it gives us the first, best reason to get excited about The Avengers: to see characters we like in action once again, rather than see them team up. That said, it's going to be especially fun to see Steve Rogers clash with Tony Stark. One has alcoholic tendencies, the other can't get drunk because he metabolises alcohol too quickly. I sense a sitcom in the offing.
Having never read a Captain America comic, the film makes the character and the mythology hugely endearing. What could have easily been a quaint and unintentionally earnest rehash of Team America's foreign politics, it instead characterises its star-spangled man with the plan as all that Americans would like to be, as opposed to conforming to some outmoded notion of international supremacy. It is, in that respect, enjoyably old-fashioned, as opposed to being jingoistic or narrow-minded.
Proof, if proof were needed, of the film's international scope is in how the film's worldwide gross exceeded its box-office takings in the USA. But box office aside, Captain America: The First Avenger is also a rollicking wartime adventure, with a sweet and gentle heart and brawny action scenes in equal measure.
It might not be the best film of the year, but it's damn good anyway, and it's my own personal favourite of 2011. How many other films this year got better and better as they went along, right up until the end?
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