Captain America: The First Avenger

I have not said too much about this film, mainly because I kept forgetting about it.  It is crazy to think that Marvel put out two major films this summer (plus, there was the X-Men film, which is also a Marvel comic, but different production company...)  I keep getting surprised by how good the Marvel films actually turn out.  Maybe DC should just allow Marvel to make their movies as well (minus the Batman films).

The movie starts out with Steve Rogers being rejected yet again from being able to sign up for the Army.  Actually the movie starts with a modern day search team finding something in the Arctic.  Anyways, Steve finally gets into the military because a doctor wants him for a special project.  We learn that Steve has plenty of the intangibles, he is very David Eckstein-esque.  He then gets an injection and becomes taller and stronger.  He becomes a super-soldier, but the good doctor is killed, so they cannot make any other ones.  The Army uses Steve to promote buying war bonds.

Honestly, the beginning was entirely too slow.  I get that they wanted to show that Steve was a great kid, and how hard he would fight and never give up.  Why not cut that back a bit and just show the grenade scene and have someone list all his characteristics?  Or something, they could have cut it down a good fifteen minutes.

After that the action picks up and Captain America rescues some soldiers and leads his own team against Hydra.  He then saves the world by crashing a plane into the Arctic Ocean and defeating the Red Skull.  He gets rescued in the modern world and learns that he has been sleep for seventy years.

The Good
-The fight scenes were pretty cool.  He made using a shield look pretty cool and not hokey.  Also, they did not make him ridiculously strong.  Granted, he is strong, but I was afraid we would see him catching cars out of the air, or flipping over a tank.  Not that strong.

-Haley Atwell is pretty damn hot.  The character of Peggy Carter was also cool.  She is pretty tough, and I am sure they will introduce Sharon Carter at some point.  My guess is that the movie makes her the daughter of Peggy.

-Chris Evans did a great job.  He did not come off as the same character as Johnny Storm.  I have always liked him as an actor, although I realize some people do not. 

-I also loved how they set-up things for the Avengers movie, but not so much that it was irritating.  That was a minor problem in Iron Man 2, all the Thor references, which I guess put some people off.  Instead, the references were pretty plot integral.  Red Skull mentions the Cosmic Cube (he calls it the Tesseract) being one of the greatest treasures from Odin's Treasure Room.  Howard Stark was also more than just a cameo, which I thought at first when he was at the World's Expo.

-The ending was pretty much straight from The Ultimates.  Steve wakes up and they trick him into thinking it is still the 1940s and then he escapes.  I liked that touch.

The Bad
-Why did Cap jump to the conclusion that his only option was bringing the plane down?  Maybe someone can explain this to me.  If he is able to control it so that it will go into a dive, why not turn it around?  Or try to land it somewhere?  Were the bombs flown by Hydra agents?  If so, once he killed all of them, what harm would it be to turn around and try to land somewhere?  They should have went with the old fashioned nuclear rocket option instead.

-Bucky's death scene was good, but when they bring him back (and they will), it will seem pretty crazy that he somehow survived that fall.

-Hugo Weaving's accent

-Chris Evans need to bulk up more, his chest was not big enough...

Comic Book Movie Grade:  B+/A-