A Fun Movie That Makes Up For the Other Disappointments of 2011

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2011)

Captain America is a fun time. It is not without it's flaws, to be sure, but ultimately the movie is defined by a sense of cheesy patriotism and optimistic bravado that does not ask you to take it seriously, promising that if you comply you will have a fun time. I complied. I had a fun time.
It embraces it's WWII setting wholeheartedly, and that is what gives this movie most it's charm for anyone with the vaguest knowledge of history. There is a great scene where Steve is in a movie theater watching a propaganda reel advising all young men to enlist and join the army, and the camera pans out to show how emotionally inspired all the women in the theater are (there are few men, because they've all enlisted), and a later one where a pre-hero Captain America tours the country doing a stage show where he tells everyone to "Buy war bonds; each bond you buy is a bullet in the gun of a good man" (or something like that). All through the film are scattered little "I Want You" posters, some featuring Uncle Sam and some, rather creatively, featuring Captain America in his place. The end credits are made of the most famous of real propaganda posters, and, coupled with excellently trumpet-bound cheesy music, this all adds up nicely to a good half of the movie being an homage to the time period from whence the comic book character was born.
Saddly, the other half of the movie is more confused. The villains use laser weaponry, and Captain America's shield is of course composed of more solid metal than anything we have today, and Howard Stark shows off a hovercar. These technological disparities were jarring, and the movie would have been better suited to featuring only the characters using standard issue WWII weapons, as it would have heightened the charm. I make it sound worse than it is perhaps, because none of the above things are bad, but they certainly weren't as good as the propaganda-ey parts.
Also, this movie's standpoint on women is exploitive, and not very well handled exploitation at that. On the one hand we have the chorus girls dressed in skimpier outfits than anyone would have dreamed of in the forties on whose barely fishnet-clad legs the camera hovers a bit obsessively during the war bonds promotion sequence. This is degrading and unrealistic. On the other hand we have Peggy Carter, the above mentioned love interest who is nothing more than a ploy to appeal to feminists. She is always shown to be more decisive, more physically capable, and generally more masculine than the men around her despite wearing high heals. She is seemingly above having to dress according to regulations (there is a hilarious shot of her running alongside a bunch of similarly ranked soldiers where they all wear uniforms and she a leather jacket), and is in nearly every other scene without contributing to the story in even one of them. Her character is obviously included to conform to the inane message Hollywood seems so bent on cramming down our throats that women can be feminine and pretty but still do man things, and in the end the message I would like to cram down their throats is that women don't need to be good at the same things men are good at to be equal to men.
The villains too need a little work. The Red Skull, the nemesis of Captain America, is introduced well in his first scene, but as the movie went on I found myself asking 'what's so special about him? Anyone can fly a plane, why is it so scary that he happens to be doing it?' Sure he was superhuman (if only slightly so), but him being superhuman never really ends up factoring in to whether or not he can order guys around, which is all he really does. His Cosmic Cube, a weapon/battery of immense power, was never explained well enough for my fellow audience members, even if I already knew what it was from my study of comic book lore, and I can't help but feel it was unfair to them. And where are the Nazis in all of this? The film would have benefited hugely from a scene or two of Captain America helping out at D-Day and such instead of just the bizarre montage it had of him blowing up H.Y.D.R.A. equipment. In particular I would have loved to see a scene or two revealing what Hitler thought of Captain America. No such scene exists, however, and I can't help but feel like the opportunity to marry history and the comic book world was lost.
Still, I make this movie sound worse than it is. Or do I? In the end, this film had some severe issues that nearly wrecked almost every second of screen time, but somehow the cheery atmosphere won me over and triumphed over these problems. The momentum of the film and the fact the plot was almost constantly being advanced, even in the action scenes, gave it a wondrous sense of adventure, and is one of my new favourite war films and possibly superhero films to boot, and I am particularly impressed with how good it was considering how difficult to adapt a character Captain America is.
P.S. Stay after the credits: there's a rather brief and flashy trailer for the Avengers. It is disappointing in some ways, but I'm willing to cut them some slack because of the fact that Avengers is still filming.