Who'll hang a noose on those goose-stepping goons?

Rating: 9/10 (28 July 2013)

I confess that despite his jingoistic origins and his embarrassing costume, I've always had a soft spot for Captain America, whom Marvel revived during the short period, ages 12 to 14 or so, when I was reading their comics. As a bookish adolescent trying doggedly to get in shape, my favourite Marvel characters were those who had to work hard to exercise their super-powers, such as Daredevil (who aside from his sensory abilities, gained his powers from workouts in his private gym), Spiderman and the X-Men's Beast (who had to stay on their toes when battling stronger enemies like Rhino or Juggernaut) or Captain America (who in addition to his "super soldier" treatments, had developed uncanny skill in using that cool frisbee-like shield as a weapon).
As a Canadian, it was not always easy to maintain my affection for the Cap in the face of his name, costume and persona. Although I was reading about his exploits during the 1960s, I don't recall him ever questioning what the heck his country was doing in Vietnam. At the time the blanket answer of "fighting communism" was used readily to justify any US act of overseas aggression—just as nowadays the answer is "fighting terrorism"— and despite his crises of conscience and identity, Captain America's first loyalty was always to American troops—often as not supporting them on the ground, right in the front lines, no matter who they were fighting. At the time, Marvel was always glad to seize upon communists as convenient super-villains, since popular American discourse depicted all communists as imbued with an insane and insatiable lust for power, making Chinese generals and Russian inventors into characters who—unlike American politicians, generals or oil magnates—could be easily shaded into supervillains.
I must say that I was not completely taken with the film on first viewing. Captain America: The First Avenger seemed a bit low-key to be a great superhero film--perhaps in its lack of a full-fledged monster villain like Dr. Octopus, the Abomination, or the Evil Mutants of the X- Men movies, but nonetheless it impressed me with how perfectly it was made. The amazing transformation of big Chris Evans into little Steve Rogers; the period sets and costumes; the wonderful design of the Raymond Loewy-styled "streamlined" 1940s hi-tech inventions, and even a classic swing-era musical number: the film's artistry was first-rate on every level. This is big-budget Hollywood filmmaking at its best In fact, on repeated viewing The First Avenger's assets appear more clearly to be those of any classic feature film.
It is wonderfully written (and better-structured than its successor, The Avengers) by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and impressively acted, balancing the younger Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell with veterans Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, Hugo Weaving and Toby Jones. Above all, it is directed by Joe Johnston, whose talents have been evident to me ever since the third Jurassic Park film made its predecessors look like plodding religious epics, so quickly it moved and so skillfully it blended drama, action and humour.
With the introduction of the super soldier formula, the tesseract cube and Red Skull running wild with his Nazi splinter group Hydra, Johnston segues us smoothly from the real war of recruiting centers, boot camps, stretchers and bombed-out London to a comic-book war fought with acrobatics, ray guns, Howard Stark and a Hydra airplane the size of a football stadium, launched from an underground hangar that is about two miles long. WWII history tells us that not much of the European war was actually fought in the Alps by guys with machine guns on zipwires, but this is the world of Marvel Comics, a world in which Johnston is perfectly at home, with the result that there is much in the film that is perfect.
The growing empathy between the frail but plucky Steve Rogers and the statuesque Agent Carter takes a new turn when Rogers emerges from the Super Soldier pod sporting acres of muscle—"gee, can I touch this?" Carter obviously thinks, sublimating these new urges in the name of professionalism, but she is the first of many, and during the musical montage of Captain America's career in show business, the eager face of a female autograph seeker, and Roger's interested response, indicates that by the time he and Carter start to cement their attraction, he may not be the sexual innocent he once was. Carter's burst of jealousy, expressed by firing a gun at Rogers and his new shield, is a romantic signifier that Howard Hawks would have been proud of: perfect. Steve's misunderstanding of the word "fondue": perfect. The final shot where, having missed his big date by over half a century, Captain America wonders if maybe the Red Skull might have been right, and they have transcended humanity (though Steve Rogers has never wanted to be anything but an ordinary man): perfect. And don't forget the big musical number, its tone and message exactly fitting the period, expertly crafted by Alan Menken and David Zippel—"Who'll hang a noose on those goose-stepping goons from Berlin?" Perfect.