Brothers, sisters shoot your best
July 22, 2011
I genuinely flinched during Captain America: The First Avenger, in a moment when Cap's shield whangs! off a tank and back to camera. So the 3D cinema experience has advanced, for me, at least: instead of making me want to barf in Avatar and slightly blurring Tron Legacy, in Captain America the technology added a sense of delight to all manner of small things. Canvas tent flaps, rivets, paper flags pinned in maps, Tommy Lee Jones' nose: it's all jumping out at you. There were even dancing girls flashing their gams in a nod to the now very-old title sequence in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, and an upskirt. Classy, pleated, very Busby Berkeley, but still an upskirt.Although Joe Johnston treats the World War II period action with family-friendly, fair fightin' decorum – dude really knows his Jane's Secret Aircraft – he has an eye for the ladies. Chris Evans' Cap is the hero but Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter is the star. Like Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer and Emily Blunt in The Wolfman, she adds lustre. She is a sharp shooter and a bombshell. The men are cheery and lantern-jawed, a rainbow coalition bound by courage. After the death of a friend, Cap discovers his scientifically enhanced super body is too healthy for him to even get drunk. This could be the most Aryan version of Americana since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.
Above all, Captain America is about heft. The stereo-ified weight of props and machinery is as palpable as each component of the plot clicking into place. The narrative is as carefully balanced as a Disney film, as smooth as a legal argument. If there is a common aspect to all the recent Marvel and DC movies, it is this defensiveness: the desire to get it right always second to the fear of getting it wrong. The hero dons a deliberately bad version of his uniform early on to allow the audience to get over the titters; a somber mentor is sacrificed too soon to give matters gravity (a tweedy and kinda Prada-ish Stanley Tucci, enlarging on Shaun Toub's affecting Yinsen in Iron Man); a Greek chorus of talkative supporting characters to voice the scepticism of any actual scientists / historians / four-star generals who might be present in the theater. Each comic book movie enlarges the canon of plausible solutions to underpants-on-the-outside, and thus cinema marches forward. If Captain America is Captain America not done wrong it is at least Watchmen done right.
Above all, Captain America is about heft. The stereo-ified weight of props and machinery is as palpable as each component of the plot clicking into place. The narrative is as carefully balanced as a Disney film, as smooth as a legal argument. If there is a common aspect to all the recent Marvel and DC movies, it is this defensiveness: the desire to get it right always second to the fear of getting it wrong. The hero dons a deliberately bad version of his uniform early on to allow the audience to get over the titters; a somber mentor is sacrificed too soon to give matters gravity (a tweedy and kinda Prada-ish Stanley Tucci, enlarging on Shaun Toub's affecting Yinsen in Iron Man); a Greek chorus of talkative supporting characters to voice the scepticism of any actual scientists / historians / four-star generals who might be present in the theater. Each comic book movie enlarges the canon of plausible solutions to underpants-on-the-outside, and thus cinema marches forward. If Captain America is Captain America not done wrong it is at least Watchmen done right.
There is a Stark Snr (with more dancing girls – I really did enjoy them), and a child who appears to be from Little Orphan Annie, and hey, wasn't that alley from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy? The Nazis are not Nazis really. Says Johnston without irony, "We turned them into Hydra, the über Nazis. Real Nazis aren't funny, but you can slaughter them in all kinds of interesting ways and get away with it."
Captain America does get away with it. A bullied orphan is engineered into a killer, loses his best friend and the only woman who loved him before being snatched from his world and abandoned to a friendless future, and we are all entertained.