![]() ![]() Yes, the script is both incident-packed and pretty weightless, but might this also be a result of the film’s explicit placement within the larger franchise-building project? The film’s WWII-era plot line is book-ended by present-day sequences, and it gives nothing away to note that Rogers appears in them both, released from deep-freeze hibernation to join his fellow superheroes for the contemporary perils of The Avengers. Once he’s packed on the muscle, though, you never quite forget the little guy inside the big galoot’s body: a nifty trick that owes much to Evans’ effective underplaying.īut to what end? Roughly 24 hours after seeing Captain America, I struggle to sketch its basic plot structure, much less individuated moments of humor, pathos, or suspense. Certainly, the decision to digitally paste his head onto a scrawnier body for the scenes of Rogers pre-bulk-up results in some unwelcome trips to the uncanny valley. And Evans lends a sweet, self-effacing earnestness to the role. It looks like it was made from stuff lying around an Army base. The Captain America costume has a particularly nice tangibility to it. Director Joe Johnston dusts off some of the mise-en-scène from his earlier foray into retro-futurist tinged action, 1991’s The Rocketeer. military’s number-one weapon against crazed Nazi scientist Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving). There’s little objectionable or wrong-headed in this tale of shrimpy Brooklynite Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), whose voluntary exposure to a secret strength serum makes him the U.S. But what of the films themselves? Is our investment in the individual movies increased knowing that they are joining forces? Or are we more likely to think of the pre- Avengers pictures as little more than wallet- and time-draining filler? These issues crossed my mind a few times throughout Captain America, both because of the film’s temporal proximity to The Avengers and because there wasn’t a lot on screen that was really sucking me in. It’s been a hell of a ride, if you happen to get your jollies off multi-movie marketing blitzes and cross-character brand synergy. We’re almost there, Jeff! Next summer, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and Captain America will finally leap out of their discrete summer-blockbuster cubicles and enter a world of communal superheroics, and the three-year, five-film, multi-tentacled franchise monster otherwise known as the Avengers series will reach its apotheosis.
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