Captain America: The First Avenger (***)

Directed by: Joe Johnston

Starring: Chris Evans, Haley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Dominic Cooper, Neal McDonough, Derek Luke, Stanley Tucci, Samuel L. Jackson, Toby Jones, Kenneth Choi

Seen: August 7^th 2011

*** Out of ****

The richness of the universe created by Marvel animators and writers shows little indication of slowing down soon. Marvel is churning out superhero movies at an incessant rate, having averaged almost 3 per year for the last decade, currently building up to next years’ The Avengers, and soon after that Iron Man 3, Thor 2, and Ghost Rider 2 as well as the new Spiderman movies (2012 and 2014). Before the year 2000, only 6 Marvel Comics live action films were produced, two of them centred around Captain America: in 1944 (their first, released as a serial of 15 big screen episodes) and in 1990 (direct to video), so in a sense with this movie, Marvel is going back to its roots. And it’s quite the return, as this Captain America captures a blue-blooded honesty in a true-as-can-be good-guy superhero – The First Avenger; Captain America.

The movie starts with two scenes without the hero, a discovery in the arctic and a rude introduction to the villain, Nazi Officer Johann Schmidt (Weaving), bullying his way into a small town to steal the mysterious tesseract, which holds cosmic powers (and also reminds of the Casket of Ancient Winters from Thor earlier this year). The story switches to Steve Rogers (Evans) in New York, being rejected yet again in his bid to join the army. He is small and physically weak, but his determination brings him to the attention of Dr. Abraham Erskine (Tucci), who includes him in selection of recruits for a covert program run by Colonel Chester Phillips (Jones) to create American super soldiers, citing that: “A weak man knows the value of strength, knows the value of power”.

Rogers is injected with a serum developed by Dr. Erskine in a successful experiment overseen by Howard Stark (Cooper), who later becomes Iron Man’s father. In a few seconds he’s transformed from small and frail into tall and muscular, even as the experiment is destroyed and the capability of creating more Captain America’s  is laid to waste. Colonel Phillips doubts Rogers’ capacity and keeps him from battle, but the beautiful and not to be trifled with Peggy Carter (Atwell) believes in him, enough to inspire him to ignore orders and save nearly 400 American soldiers from Schmidt, or the (also serum enhanced) Red Skull, as he soon unveils himself to be more than a Nazi officer working under Hitler, but the head of HYDRA, an evil organisation to rival James Bond’s SPECTRE.

Rogers recruits a group of soldiers; among them his best friend Bucky Barnes (Stan), Dum Dum Dugan (McDonough), Gabe Jones (Luke), and Jim Morita (Choi), and they rampage through Europe finding and destroying HYDRA bases in a montage of explosions and slow motion action incredible to behold. This all leads to a final confrontation between the two sides of the superpower coin of Captain America and Red Skull, which may or may not be over a little too easily as the connection is made with the Arctic discovery at the start of the movie, and which leads to an explanation of Captain America’s connection to the Avengers.

Rooting the movie in the current day does make it feel like a highlights reel of Captain America’s origin before getting to 2012’s The Avengers where Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, Black Widow and possibly more will be united in a battle against who knows what villains, but it’s still a lot of fun and a great way to spend an afternoon. Visually the movie is fantastic, and the feel of World War II America and Europe is expertly blended with cool action, big explosions and space age technology. Captain America: The First Avenger will form part of my home DVD collection soon enough.