Regardless of its financial success and any claim of critical success, Captain America: The First Avenger remains to be a hollow reel of a superhero. Captain America easily became one of the lousiest movies one could ever watch on screen, next only to that Jude Law-Angelina Jolie flick, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the experience is an agonizing time in the movies.Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow though is a piece of crap through and through.
Captain America's story revolves around Steve Rogers (Played by Chris Evans), a young, frail and a rather sickly lad who wants to join the army to fight against the Nazis. But he was too short, too skinny, and too sickly to even pass the tests. Rogers was subsequently denied admission.
But one thing about Steve Rogers is that he is not only resolute, he was also a very kind-hearted guy who was really bent on fighting the war. When Rogers' resolve was overheard by a German Scientist, Abraham Erskine (played by Stanley Tucci), Rogers was invited to join the army. Even the overhearing scene is badly played and badly thought of).
It turned out that Abraham Erskine had other plans for Rogers. Erskine was eyeing for Rogers' heart, that is his capacity for good. Erskine declined to commit to candidates who showed tendency for bullish arrogance, although that seems to be more the attribute of America rather than Rogers' patient temperament.
After a series of training which only put premium on Rogers' physical weakness, and which made the same a subject of ridicule and hilarity, Erskine finally put Rogers on the project, which was designed to transform him into a muscular and taller version of himself, augmenting his physical qualities. The procedure did not disappoint. But even before Erskine could celebrate his success, an assassin (which was among the Army's top brass. How the fudge did he get there and how stupid these top brass can be!) shot him and snatched part of the serum. Rogers, who just emerged with superhuman capabilities, chased the assassin right from the unsecured laboratory (Why is a laboratory conducting a very important experiment for the army turned out to have been placed in a lousily guarded suburban!), across the busy streets, all down to a U-boat-like submarine. When Rogers got him, the assassin chose to swallow a cyanide.
With Erskine's death, the formula was lost forever. This too was a bad twist in the movie. Erskine was conducting an experiment that was bound to be a great human achievement, not to mention that he has been committing errors resulting to side-effects as he experimented with it, and Erskine merely committed the formula to his memory. This is crap! What a sleazy excuse to make duplication of the Rogers' procedure an impossible feat.
With Erskine gone, Rogers was made to tour America wearing a Captain America costume and selling war bonds. He could have been used by scientists to rediscover the lost formula considering the army's interest on it, but all these seemed an illogical path for the writers of Captain America. Rogers as a joke in Captain America's costume was made manifest by his visit to the soldiers in Europe where he became a butt of jokes. As to why he was there was repulsive at the least. Captain America's cartoonish presence there simply made a mockery of the soldier's effort and sacrifices and the tragic impact of the war.
But since the movie's creativity has fallen short from the very beginning, they could not think of a better way of putting him in the direct path of the war action than to fly him to the Italian front and first make a fool of himself. When he was there, Rogers heard about his friend James Barnes' company having been decimated by the forces of Red Skull (Played with comfort by Hugo Weaving). Red Skull was also Johann Schmidt, the same guy who suffered the side-effects of Erskine's initial folly with the super-soldier serum. Red Skull, who happened to be Adolf Hitler's head of the weaponry division, had also a plan and ambitions of his own to hold dominion over Europe.
When Rogers discovered that Barnes might still have been alive, and could have been part of those held captive by Red Skull, Barnes stormed Skull's prison camp and liberated the whole bunch of allied prisoners.
With such Ramboesque rescue, Captain America rose from a joke to a true hero, although still in a jocular costume of stars and stripes.
And with his new status as an American icon, Captain America rushed to more missions and won many skirmishes for the American forces. Captain America's encounters with Red Skull and his super-minions with their laser-like weapons did not help to elevate the movie from being a piece of crap. In fact, the whole combat between these two lab-rats made a repulsive and disgusting mockery of the earnest efforts of the allied soldiers fighting in World War II and all the lives sacrificed or wasted during World War II. One question one could not help asking is why should the allied governments waste more lives to stop Hitler and his warpath. Just send Captain America to Europe, drop him into Hitler's eagle nest, and more than six million lives could have been spared with Captain America's superhuman feat.
Since Red Skull was able to come up with a super-weapon designed to decimate the allied forces, which would lead to his world dominion, Red Skull must be stopped. The logic was easy. And the only way to stop Red Skull was to put Captain America right between him and the allied forces, and right between him and his super-weapon. As expected, he was able to round up Red Skull's minions, although Red Skull was vaporized by the raw power of tesserac (the power-source of his super-weapon) before Captain America could bludgeon him to death or wrought him to a pulp with his star-spangled shield.
Captain America defeating Red Skull on his own, however, has been highly doubtful since Captain America is already a diluted version of the formula which created Red Skull.
And obviously, Red Skull is more intelligent and freakishly brutal.
The whole thing, however, was not a fairy tale for America. For even if they won the war, they lost Captain America, who has to sacrifice his life to avert a possible atomic/nuclear disaster for New York, although what destructive power was that in that plane remains unknown.
For seventy years,nothing was heard of Captain America, until he woke up from a sort of a long coma, putting him right at the heart of the twentieth century. Obviously, he was rescued from his self-imposed sacrifice. As to how he survived the plane crash unscathed has not been explained. Nor elaborated why he fell into a coma for seventy years and remained as healthy as ever.
Captain America the movie whirls through a fast-faced action which reduced the movie into a montage of important combats, rather than building on equally important details. At the end of the movie, one could not help feeling to have just watched an hour of trailer rather than a full-length movie that was skirting on details and substance. The audience were treated to a roller-coaster of action without picking their brains in the process.
Captain America treats all like a brainless kid.
The promotion of virtue of genuine and great sense of goodness that Captain America innately possess, which somehow reflects the heroism and the good nature and genuine kindness of ordinary folks, and the awesome stalwart built of Chris Evans hardly saved the movie from a few rotten tomatoes it does deserve.
You want to kill time, just to kill some crappy time, with a commendable few laughs, this could be the movie you're looking for.
Unless it begins to bore you even before you could even say, WTF!
