A Daring Film by Marvel that is True to the Star Spangled Sentinel's Story

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2015)

Full Disclosure: Captain America is my all time favorite super hero. I'm not quite sure that I can answer why that's the case, but what I know for sure is that I grew up reading Cap on a monthly basis, and collected everything I could find that was Captain America related. Maybe it was because I'm a child of the 80's and blind patriotism was in fashion back then. Maybe it was because I'm from a small town that was home to a U.S. President, meaning that the American flag lined the streets prominently year round in my neighborhood long before 9/11. Or maybe it's just simply because Captain America is such a cool character, period. All I know is that this is my childhood favorite, so I can't help but be biased toward this film.
Another quick word about that before moving on to the film itself. What a non-comics audience needs to understand about Captain America is that historically he's been presented as not just a guy who happens to be an America-themed superhero. Any character with any mindset could dress up in a flag costume and claim to represent America. But that's not what makes Cap the man that he is.
Captain America is a great superhero because he is the man that Americans should strive to be. He's a good man through and through--always aboveboard, always venerable. His character is not representative of a "my country, right or wrong" mentality, but rather his character is something that is more pure than any politics or government. He's the paragon of nobility. And it's only because of that that the whole "Captain America" thing works. Were Steve Rogers anything less than the personification of a noble, fair minded and just individual, Captain America wouldn't be the hero that I love. But it's those admirable character traits that make him worthy of respect, so that even those of us who take issue with our country from time to time can still look up to Cap as our hero of choice. Wendell Berry has a poem in which he talks about how to live a righteous, noble life, and the poem features a line that says, "Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands." By that, I think Berry means to believe in and work for an America that embraces and lives up to its mythical ethos that is so often diluted by reality.
At any rate, my point is that Captain America is the embodiment of that precept. He lives the myth, even as he is the myth itself. His character is noble and just first, and that's what makes him a legitimately cool character. It's not a blind patriotism--it's a loyalty to working to make our country what it's meant to be. That's what makes Cap my favorite superhero.
All that said, the reason I like this movie is that Marvel portrayed that central persona of Cap very well in this movie, along with being daring enough to tell the Captain America story in a way that was very fair to his actual origin story. Comics fans know that Captain America is one of Marvel's first comic book heroes, created during World War Two during the Golden Age of comics--a good twenty years before other heroes in the Marvel stable like Spider-Man, Hulk, and the Fantastic Four would make their debut. Since the 1960's, Cap has been the man with two origin stories--the story of the weakling who signed up for a super soldier program in WWII, and the man who was left for dead floating in the ocean after an airplane battle in that war and who ended up frozen in suspended animation before being resuscitated by the likes of the Avengers in the 1960's. Thus, Cap has always been the Golden Age Sentinel of Liberty, along with a Silver Age hero that was revived to become an even more important figure in the emerging Marvel Universe than he had been twenty years before hand when Marvel (then Timely Comics) was really just coming up with a standalone character that could participate in the ongoing war effort--and capitalize off of it, at that.
All that said, "Captain America: The First Avenger" does a great job telling this intricate origin story and bringing the mythology of Captain America into the 21st Century for a new generation of fans that are just discovering Cap for the first time. The World War II origin, the battles with the Red Skull, the resuscitation decades after the fact--it all comes to life brilliantly in this film. And, importantly, it's done in a way that introduces Cap to the rest of the Marvel Universe, all while expanding on its characters and background stories.
I would, however, stop short of giving this film perfect ratings. The movie is outstanding, but it does seem to be missing something somewhere along the way. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but somehow, even though I love this movie and think that it's outstanding in its own right, I don't get the same sense of endearment from watching "The First Avenger" that I get from watching, say, the first "Iron Man". That may all boil down to Robert Downey, Jr.'s strong performance as Tony Stark vs. a strong but relatively mediocre performance from Chris Evans. Or it may be due to the fact that parts of the movie were a bit contrived and hokey (the whole singing to raise money for war bonds thing). Whatever the case, this film may not be my favorite movie from the MCU, despite Cap being my favorite character. But it's still a strong movie just the same. I give it 8/10 stars.