LibriumArcana.Games

I went to see the midnight showing with a friend and I'll be honest I was nervous. See Cap has had movies before and they've all... Sucked. Sucked Donkey Balls. I mean they've been bad, really bad. And well... patterns. Additionally while the core of Thor was a good movie, it was weighed down by crap it didn't need and those flaws dragged it down. So I was worried.

You knew this was coming...

None of my worries were realized, I got one hell of a movie, fully worth the cash I coughed up for it. The plot was well written and uncluttered, the dialogue rather snappy and delivered with panache (people were laughing in the theater, not rolling their eyes laughing but real laughter), Chris Evan is now officially forgiven his Fantastic Four sins, Hugo Weaving has another triumph to his (is there no role this man can't do!?!) and Tommy Lee Jones was note perfect (this being because he played the same asshole he played in the US Marshals, MiB and etc). The sets feel like 1940s America and are nicely done.









Spoilers below, exit now or be warned.





This isn't scene by scene but there's a bit I want to talk about.

We start in Brooklyn. In fact we start in a recruiting office, steve and a random guy are reading the paper waiting for their names to be called. Random dude remarks there are alot of guys dying out there (this being 1943, this would be North Africa or Italy) and it can make one think twice about enlisting, Steve's response at 5'0 and 120 pds? "Nope."

This in a single opening scene gives us the core of Steve's character. Steve isn't going to let the possible personal cost of his actions stop him from doing the right thing. He's not stupid or insane but doing right is simply worth it. This makes him a vastly different character then Tony Stark or Thor. Stark is a douche bag trying to become a human being. Thor is a spoiled boy who needs to grow up. Steve is someone who has grappled with his responsibilities and has resolved to carry them out and he didn't need no stinking toys or powers to reach the decision. This isn't a movie about a powerful man trying to become good. This is a movie about a good man becoming powerful and using that power to the utmost.

As one could guess, Steve fails to enter the army, having asthma, chronic illness, tiring easily, and more. Any one of these defects would render him 4F, all of these? Fuck man.

Steve goes to the movies and in standing up against a rowdy, disrespectful asshole, gets his ass kicked. What you should be impressed at is how he keeps getting up, against someone big enough to make 2 of him. He's saved by Sgt "Bucky" Barnes, and we learn this is a thing, and... Steve has tried to enlist 5 times, falsifying information to do so. So much for law abiding.

Barnes takes him on a double date, only to have Steve duck out to try and enlist again... They have an argument and overhearing this is a certain Jewish German scientist(the Jewish part was dropped it seems). Our doc asks Steve if he wants to go kill some Nazis and Steve gives us another reply that shows us his character.

"I don't want to kill anybody, but... I don't like bullies, no matter where they're from."

This gets Steve into the program. There we meet Agent Carter(Haylay Atwell), a British lady seconded to America's Super Soldier program and Col Phillips (this would be Tommy lee jones). We get to see just how much of a wuss physically Steve is but he still gets his moments, using his brain to get a ride for example.

A note about Agent Carter, she could have ended up like Portman's character in Thor, me wondering why the fuck is she here? But she doesn't. She doesn't need to be rescued, in fact she gets a few scenes where she shows how bad ass she is (she shoots a guy in a moving car, from over 100ft, with a damn pistol! In the head! That's fucking amazing!).

The relationship between Abraham Erskine and Steve Rogers is well done but shortly so, we see Erskine become something of a vague father figure to Steve and his murder so shortly after Steve becomes superhuman must have been a knife in the chest.

We get our real formal introduction to the villians here, the Red Skull and Zola. Hugo is perfect, the Red Skull isn't played as some giggling manic but with cold dignity and nearly inhuman in his views. Emotional outburst are rare but terrifying from him.

After Erskine is murdered and Steve becomes Superhuman, instead of deploying him... They huh... Well the Col wants to stick him in a lab. An attending Senator decides to send him on tour... With the USO show... Even Hollywood shares my opinion of politicians. Well Steve ends up at the front but the troops ain't having it.

When Steve learns that Barnes unit was the one hit hard by Hydra (who has weapons right out of a Sci-Fi movie), he tries to get clearance to go save him only to get called a chorus girl. With Agent Carter's and Howard Stark's help, he goes anyways. Jumping behind enemy lines, breaking into a Hydra base single handed and liberating... The Howling Commandos! It was Fucking Awesome to see them in this movie, Dum Dum was there, as was Gabe Jones, the british dude and the french manic (A Japanese American was added to the squad). They become Captain America's personal unit in war commanded by Sgt Bucky Barnes and Cap personally and they are kick ass.

For that matter Captain America is rather kick ass, this movie doesn't shy away from the Superhuman aspect. Cap is throwing around full grown armored men one handed, he tears through platoons and companies worth of men single handedly. He has an awesome bike. The only guy who can stop him? The Red Skull and their fight on a massive flying wing out to wipe out all human life from the Eastern Seaboard, the damn thing is like a monument to the Red Skull's nuttiness. The bombs are human guided propeller driven devices, each with the name of their city neatly written on. The Plane crashes (we get a montage of people's reactions), during the crash we get a very sad and somehow touching bit between Steve and Carter over the radio.

The last scene is Ultimate Captain America's awakening to the modern world (which frankly is better then the original one anyways). And it's very well done. I am left in the hope of a Cap sequel and the Avengers being damn kick ass.

I went back and forth on what to grade this movie but in the end... Fuck it.

Captain America First Avenger gets an -A

If you like heroes who are honestly good men, if you like retro pulp, if you like solid action, see this movie.

Nit and Tev finally got to see the movie, YAY!!!! It was abso-fuckin-lutely fantastic!!!


I'm going to touch on a few things Magi mentioned.


Steve's attempts to enlist are part of the same thing that keeps him from staying down when the movie-theatre bully was beating on him: he doesn't give up. This is the core of who Steve Rogers is, a man who will not give up. Even during the fight with Red Skull, this is repeated, as Cap says 'he can do this all day'.

Thus, when we see Roger's soldier training, he is the one at the back of the pack, struggling to keep up, but not giving up and not backing down even when the 'bully' is taunting him. Still, how he managed to get the flag off the pole just showed no grunt ever thought of that trick before.

We all saw the grenade trick in the trailer, but its the scene afterward, where Dr Erskine is having a drink with Rogers the night before that I felt was the important one. The history of Red Skull sets up how the serum ramps everything, body and mind and soul. I do not think the serum would ever have been usable mass-production, even if Erskine lived, just because of that effect on the mind.

Two little things about the Brooklyn lab made me smile. I have (somewhere) a graphic novel reprint of the Best of Captain America. In the Origin comic is a little old lady in an antique shop hiding a secret base, just as we saw in the movie. She has a machine gun, and tries to stop Erskine's killer as he runs away. I don't think he killed her in the comic, but it was a great Easter Egg. The other is the 'save the little boy' subversion, where the kid looks up and say "don't worry! I can swim!" Most other hero-films would have the kid needing rescued, so again, nice touch.

Agent Carter. Damn, honey, I wish I had your skills. She obviously spent a LOT of time at gun practice. I wish they'd gotten their dance... and I wonder how long she lived after that. She'd be in her 90s. :(

The US Bonds tour. *sigh* Well, it was a great tribute to the big 1940s musical era, and the war movies were as gung-ho as anything else produced at the time. While painfully cheesy, you had to admire the choreography. And the girls in short skirts. (Did anyone notice in the end credits one of the fighter planes had nose-art of one of the dancers?) Still, Rogers was right to think of himself as a performing monkey.
The comic books we see the kids and soldiers reading I didn't get a good glimpse of, but I'd not be surprised if they copied actual 1940s Captain America covers.

Now, while Rogers did get called a 'chorus girl' by our dear gruff Colonel, I thought I heard a hidden message there. Reverse-psychology from the Colonel? He gave Rogers all the info to get to Hydra base, all but dared Rogers to go out and try it himself. Or am I reading too much into that? It was clear the Colonel wasn't happy to see the Senator using 'his' supersoldier to sell bonds, and it was clear that Rogers was willing to go do the mission himself, hell or high water.

Bucky and the Howling Commandos were fantastic. Yes, there was a Japanese-American added ("I'm from Fresno"), but he wasn't there as a token, he was just as good a soldier as the rest of them. Even the "token Black Dude" wasn't just for show, he spoke and read German and French. The massive montage of Cap & the Howling Commandos taking out Hydra ops was simply beautiful. The teamwork was spot-on, and it was clear the Commandos were just as determined as their Captain. The various ways to kill a tank made me grin (even if one tank was a Fuckin' Bolo!!!).

However... Bucky. He wasn't just off being tortured; Zola was experimenting on him. Red Skull makes a off-hand comment to Zola that leads me to think Zola was also trying to remake the SuperSerum, just as the US was trying with Cap's blood. Bucky was improving very quickly as they ran out of the building. Almost like he was healing.
We never see a body for Bucky, and we know cold and ice put Steve in suspended animation.... (go look up "Winter Soldier")

Hydra's SuperTech was Cobra-level scary, and it was nearly all based on real Nazi prototypes and plans, and in movie all ran by BATTERIES. (ok, super batteries powered by a Tesseract, but still batteries.)
The fuckin' huge tank Nit tells me is 'just' a KingTiger, a tank that the Nazis did make a prototype for but was too huge for 1940s tech to make it actually MOVE. Doesn't mean I didn't call it a 'fuckin' Bolo' when I first saw it on-screen.
The smaller Tanks I swear are stolen from Cobra's H.I.S.S. mini-tanks. Same body shape, about the same size and duty (light, fast tank)
The prop-bombs are the scariest. It was clear they were suicide missions for the pilots, thus the toast given to them by Red Skull before Cap's arrival. It was a self-propelled, user-guided WMD.
The flying wing was just amazing. We still have problems getting ours to fly right without computer stabilization, and they aren't nearly as big inside as this one. The momentary gravity loss as they plunge was a very nice touch.

But now is the REAL trick. Red Skull touching the Tesseract, and we see a wormhole form (Bifrost, as per Thor movie). The Red Skull de-rezzing, then a beam fired up into the wormhole, but not up the actual BiFrost Bridge. I think we just saw the Red Skull find one of Loki's "hidden paths" that he bragged to Heimdal about.
As the Skull said so himself to Hitler's men: You call it Magic, I call it Science. Paraphrasing Thor, who said much the same thing in his own movie. That "Odin's Gem" was hidden in Norway, in an ancient cathedral carved with Norse Mythology, inside the image of Jormandr.... makes one think, doesn't it?

SideNote:
The DoubleDate at Stark's World Expo was great. The artificial man on display may be a lead-in to The Vision, or could be another old Hero the Red Tornado who was also a robot/android.
While it wasn't the IronMan entrance, Stark Sr. also knew how to play the crowds. The anti-grav car was sweet while it lasted ("I did say a few years..."). I would like to see Cap ask Tony "Where's the flying Car?" in the Avengers movie. After all, the Avengers do have several in the comics, to carry those who can't fly.

Avengers Trailer, after the Credits.
Well now... was that Loki I see surrounded and under heavy guard? My, do you really think that will stop him? If you see Loki, the damage is already underway.

The artificial man on display may be a lead-in to The Vision, or could be another old Hero the Red Tornado who was also a robot/android.

He's actually the first Human Torch who was an android. Who was a member of the Invadors, Cap's team during the war. See here

That also points out that (via complicated storyplot) The Vision is built from the Human Torch, so I was right on both counts LOL

Saw it again... Yep still awesome.