Review: Captain America or How I Learned to Love the Bomb Cold

As usual, I am late to the Captain America party. I’ve never even read the guy’s comic and a furious Wikipedia search before I saw the movie only enlightened me a teeny tiny bit on the long and convoluted history of the Cap.

I know he’s originally from the 1940s circa World War II and that he gets frozen in ice or something to end up in our current timeline alongside Tony Stark and the rest of the Avengers. I know he recently died (and maybe even came back as comic book heroes are wont to do) and there was some sort of drama with him being unhappy with the state of the government or mixed up in the most recent election…blah di blah.

I didn’t need to know any of that to enjoy the movie (the hallmark of a good comics-movie translation in my opinion).

When we went it was a Saturday, a full week after the movie had come out and the line for Captain America was out the door of the theater. There were hardly any seats available for us by the time we got there, and the crowd was wide and mixed. The packed-ness of the theater a full week and late-night showing later should have warned me that the movie was going to be pretty good.

I was not expecting it to be as great as it was.

The movie begins in the Arctic wastes, with what I’m going to guess is a present-day thingy since there are modern guys crawling around in a frosted-over ship. I will admit to being momentarily confused; if I didn’t know the whole “literally frozen in time” thing about the Cap, I’d think I had wandered into a showing of Transformers: Dark of the Moon by accident.

Luckily, it’s just the set-up, since we then flash back to a small store in some sort of Germanic place in what looks like WWII. You can just tell when it’s WWII, can’t you? That smoky feeling to the shots, the desperation as people run in their paperboy hats…

I was almost expecting this song and dance number...

 Anyhoo, an older man with “Going to Die” written plainly across his forehead is in his shop when Elrond barges in wearing what looks suspiciously like a uniform for the SS. What Elrond is doing being Evil so far from Rivendell is beyond me, but I’m going with it because he is a delicious bad guy. Right, Mr. Anderson?

In a great show of continuity, the glowing cube from the end of Thor puts in an appearance…many years before it was acquired by faux!Loki in the future where Thor takes place…  At least there’s a nice set-up for The Avengers going. Elrond discovers the cube hidden in an enormous carving of Yggdrasil that the old man has plainly on his wall. I mean, if you’re going to be hiding Asgardian tech in your workshop, perhaps an obvious homage to the Norse gods isn’t the smartest place to hide it? Just a thought…

They call the cube “the Tesseract,” in what I desperately hope is an homage to A Wrinkle in Time but probably isn’t. The old guy dies as we knew he was going to and Elrond holds the Tesseract aloft in all of its glowy awesome before…

We flash over to the World’s Fair circa 1942. Since there actually wasn’t a World’s Fair in New York City in 1942, we get our first not-so-subtle glimpse that even though this looks a lot like our universe we are actually in a parallel kind of place. Even though DC is the company with eight-thousand Earths, by setting up this funky thing, the director and writers very nicely establish the “neighbor universe” concept that is so important to our suspension of disbelief in comic book movies. All is not as it seems, and as we pan down the street in this could-have-been World’s Fair we meet Bucky and Steve, two men out for a night on the town, or rather Bucky is. 

Steve, all 80 pounds of him, is desperately trying to get the army to accept his application to be a soldier. He wants to fight, and he has the heart of a soldier if not the strength. It is almost impossible to ignore at this point in the film the amazing effects being put into place by the production team. Chris Evans, who we know to be this hulking figure of a man especially since he bulked up for the part, is a short, scrawny, tiny minuscule… I can’t even explain how little and small and sad they make him look. It’s obviously Chris Evans, I mean it can’t be anyone else, but it’s Chris Evans as he would have been if he was an asthmatic, malnourished nine year-old.

That's him. There in the front....the man behind him is only 5'4"...

Steve Rogers, this tiny man, walks into the recruitment office and falsifies his registration information for what seems the hundredth time. It turns out that our Mr. Rogers has been trying and failing to become a soldier in the US Army for quite a few months now, and each time he is rejected by dint of his lack of strength. This time, however, the officer who does his physical examination sees something else in the small-statured man: a fierce and overwhelming desire to help, a love of country that is miles wider than he is tall, and a humility that puts everyone else to shame.

The doctor, judging from his picture, might admittedly be a little crazy... also look! Stanley Tucci!

This examining physician however, is an escaped German, on the run from the tyranny of Elrond’s SS-like people. And like Einstein and his escape with the Bomb plans safely nestled in his head, Dr. Tucci has brought with him a serum that could very well change the outcome of this war and every war to follow.

He offers Steve the chance to join the United States Army, allowing him to finally carry out his dream. When he reaches the training facility, however, Dr. Tucci must prove to the higher ups and the beautifully clothed Peggy that this mere slip of a man is in fact the perfect test subject for their testosterone-enhancing serum.

To prove the caliber of Steve Rogers over the already present hulks of men, Dr. Tucci throws a live grenade into the center of the army training camp. There is a silence, a terrified silence, and then tiny, scrawny Steve Rogers breaks ranks and runs toward the grenade. He leaps on it and curls into the fetal position, completely covering the deadly object.

Poor baby. :(

At this point in the movie, our theater drew a collective indrawn breath mixed in with some escaping “aww’s.” Who could help it when you see little, shrimpy Steve Rogers, He Who Stands Up for Everyone Except Himself, fling himself on the grenade he thinks is going to end his life? This reaction to his attempted sacrifice shows just how much we really connect with selflessness and Goodness. The grenade, of course, is a dud.

This act of heroism in spite of his small stature proves his worth to the captain of the guard or whatever he is and the green light is given to go ahead with the super serum-ing. 

Rogers is taken to a back room, strapped into some sort of metal pod and injected with adamantium the super serum. The lights flicker, some sparks fly from the control panels, and the room rumbles. But then, with a “woosh” and a clatter, the pod bay doors open and out steps…

 …Da-yum...

Of course there is a secret not!Nazi spy who has infiltrated the testing room, and he proceeds to shoot kindly Dr. Tucci and scarper with the last bit of super soldier serum. Flexing his new muscles, Steve Rogers leaps to the rescue, following the spy out the door and down the street.

The ensuing “New Power Discovery” sequence is one of my favorites. Mostly because it shows instead of tells. The Captain’s heart and motivations are displayed better than if someone had explained how to move about now, or the limitations on his new strength. He just leaps into action because he feels compelled to – it’s the Right thing to do. 

I don’t know how he does it but Chris Evans just exults in the power that Rogers must be feeling in this moment. Like we saw in Thor, there is a deep and dark longing when your body won’t do what your heart and mind want and need for it to do. The Captain’s heart for the people was in a body that was three sizes too small (like a reverse Grinch) and he now has the physical power to go with the power of his heart.

Only...not like this at all...

The movie takes off from here, establishing Captain America as essentially a propaganda guy because he’s too important to go to the front lines. He is the first and last of the Super Soldiers because the last bottle of serum was smashed in the chase. That doesn't last, of course, and there are some awesome scenes wherein the Captain and his team (setting up a nice parallel to the Avengers by canonically establishing that Cap is a good leader) blow stuff up, ride into the sunset, and generally just cause mayhem. There is pain and sadness, but there are jokes and the pulling together of different groups. I wish the scenes with the team hadn’t been a montage, but I understand why they had to be.

Also there is a really phenomenal musical number.

But let me drop something (controversial?) here. Chris Evans, he of the cuteness and the adorable GQ magazine interview, is the best choice to play Captain America and he did an amazing job. He is hard as a rock and delectable and boyishly charming and adorable. I didn't know it was possible to keep the humility of the 90 pound weakling in the performance given by the hundred some pound strong man, but it's one of the reasons the movie really worked.

While Chris Evans as the Human Torch was funny in that kinda rapscallion way, he brought an air of wonder to his portrayal of Steve Rogers that I am not sure would have been possible by anyone else. One of the things that was really integral to the story was the fact that Steve Rogers was chosen as the recipient of the super soldier serum because he was someone that you would root for regardless of how he looked. He was one of the forgotten people, those whose hearts are twenty times larger than the shape afforded them by nature or God. It's as if the super soldier serum takes the potential for greatness found in the unabashed, loving and humble Steve Rogers and makes the outsides mirror the insides. It's like a wish fulfillment fantasy for the under-powered and the alone. 

The movie is the nice little lift that we  as a country needed: the good guys can win, there is hope for not only those who are weak and little and only trying to make their way in the world, but for those who are worthy, there is almost a sense of "it all gets better". Steve Rogers is a stand-in for every scrawny person who wished they could just be a little bigger and then they'd use their powers for good.

And what's wonderful about this is that he DOES. At no point does he falter in his goodness and representing what it is that he has been entrusted with. He doesn't take his new-found powers and wreak havoc on his erstwhile tormentors. He doesn't take his new strength and use it for his own goals. He submits to the authority he was willing to die to protect. He takes his new gift and uses it for the good of others rather than himself. If anyone deserves to have used new powers for a selfish reason at any point, it's Steve Rogers. And he doesn't. 

Like all the flack leveled against Superman for being too much of a Boy Scout, there's a lot against the golden boy persona of Captain America. A flimsy show of American supremacy? No. A Boy Scout with no real danger or turmoil to make his character someone the layman can relate to? No. But these are things I run across pretty often when folk describe the Captain.

If there is anyone deserving of angst and despairing and railing against his lot in life and what he is now thrown into, it is Steve Rogers. The movie really impresses upon you the inherent sadness of his situation. He loses everyone he cares about, he is thrust too quickly into a world he wasn’t even allowed to glimpse at the start of the movie. And yet he just takes it, looks at the adversity he finds himself in front of, assesses the situation, and then jumps in with the right thing. 

In our day of anti-heroes and fallen heroes, of villains being re-purposed and shades of grey, Steve Rogers and Captain America are the shining white light at the end of the tunnel. They stand as beacons for the rest of us. And yes, even beacons have shortcomings and even Good men have failings, but Captain America's intrinsic rightness is not one of them.