Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

Lets see the Marvel movie countdown as it stands so far.

The Incredible Hulk (the one with The Abomination)
Iron Man and Iron Man 2
Thor
Captain America: The First Avenger

That's 5 super hero movies that have to all not suck in order to make one movie, The Avengers, starring all of them. That's no small feat when you consider how many other super hero movies have gone wrong. Daredevil, Electra, both Fantastic Fours, Spawn, The Hulk, Superman 3, 4,and (debatably) Supermans, Batman movies without either Micheal Keaton or Christian Bale, the Captain America movie where Dolf Lungren was Captain America, (debatably) Spiderman 3, the list goes on. It's the movie making equivalent of the Apollo Program.

Captain America is an old story. He first appeared in March 1941. So to a certain degree it's gonna be hard to give away spoilers. Sitting next to us in the theater was a couple who may very well have a copy of Captain America Comics #1. So I'm gonna give some bits away while pointing at references to the other movies.

Steve Rogers is a skinny, sickly dork who desperately wants to join the Army and fight in WWII, but gets rejected repeatedly. So he volunteers for a program to make him bigger, faster, stronger, with increased metabolism and healing factor. He's given the Super Soldier formula which is destroyed shortly thereafter. If you go back to "The Incredible Hulk" you'll see that Bruce Banner was continuing the effort to recreate the Super Soldier program by bombarding a similar formula with gamma rays. The resulting explosion turned him into The Hulk.

Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark/Iron Man, was heavily involved with the development of the original formula along with other military weaponry.

In Iron Man 2 the device in Tony Stark's chest that keeps him alive and powers his suit is slowly poisoning him. But he finds that, for some reason, his father encoded a safer molecule into the layout of the fairgrounds. That fair is the one where Howard Stark is showing off his hover car.

You also saw Captain America's shield used to prop up a particle accelerator that Tony Stark was building. Rumor has it that you could also see it buried in the snow in the arctic in The Incredible Hulk. I haven't seen it though.

While they never use the word, the Cosmic Cube is the powerful object that the Red Skull is after. After the credits in Thor, they're studying a circuit that Loki is showing great interest in. That was the Cosmic Cube, too.

In Thor they talked about Yggdrasil, the world tree, that connects Midgard to Asgard and all the other worlds. When Red Skull goes to steal the Cosmic Cube he finds it in a hidden compartment inside a wooden wall with Yggdrasil carved in it.

I feel that I saw more, but that's all I can remember two days later.

And that's really all you need to know of the plot. It's a good story well told. I'll definitely be getting it on DVD and I highly recommend the movie to anyone.

Don't forget to sit through the credits.

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