Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Snowpiercer

 You might say that I'm being overly lenient with my definition of "films released in 2014" to include Snowpiercer. It is true that Bong Joon-Ho had finished the film in time to be released in 2013, and that a protracted struggle within the Weinstein Company kept Snowpiercer out of theatres until the following year. At the heart of the debate, it seems that Harvey "Scissorhands" Weinstein wanted to cut thirty minutes out of the film in order to make it more "palatable" for audiences. To be honest, having seen Snowpiercer, I'm not sure what parts he thought cutting out of the film would improve it in any way. It doesn't need improving, and there's no amount of editing that could turn this cerebral, at times surreal film, into a crowd pleaser. The failure of the more crowd friendly Edge of Tomorrow is a testament that sometimes, the audiences just aren't going to come in. Eventually they came to an agreement that Snowpiercer could stay at its original length, so long as it only saw limited release. The good news is that word of mouth really made a difference, and like the even more bizarre Under the Skin, Snowpiercer was being talked about, even when it was hard to see it.

 Based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer is deceptively simple in its premise: in an attempt to curtail global warming, climate scientists an experimental compound, which backfires, freezing the entire world. Humanity has been all but wiped out, save for those who managed to board a luxury train designed by Wilford Industries. It was designed to run almost perpetually, and it's the only thing left that can traverse the frozen wasteland. For 17 years, the train has been going, never stopping. The social strata that makes up the remainder of humanity correlates with the sections of the train: the very poor, destitute, who could not pay for their way aboard the Snowpiercer are in the back, and the rich live near the front, in opulence, near the reclusive Wilford, who conducts the train. The back section is tired of the inequity, and Curtis (Chris Evans) finds himself leading a push from to the front - violently, if necessary.

 Embedded into the protein bars, someone has been sending Curtis messages, and with the advice of the former conductor, Gilliam (John Hurt), he thinks that now might be the time. Their only contact from the front of the train comes through Mason (Tilda Swinton), an officious, pompous bureaucrat who loves nothing so much as to remind them of their place. If they can capture her, and get past security with the help of Namgoong (Song Kang Ho), who designed the doors but also has a debilitating addiction to the train fuel's byproduct, there's a chance to confront Wilford* and stop the train. Or better conditions. Or, it depends on who gets there first. One of the interesting things is that despite the fact that Snowpiercer is a metaphor for class struggle and revolution, it's also fairly evident that this doesn't mean everyone has the same agenda. What Curtis wants is very different from what Namgoong wants, and how Gilliam and Wilford respond are fascinating unto themselves.

 Some people, like Tanya (Octavia Spencer) or Andrew (an unrecognizable Ewen Bremner) want their children back. Every now and then Mason takes them up to the front, for reasons no one in the back know, and they never return. Others, like Edgar (Jamie Bell), who were born on the train, want a sense of justice, of agency. They've never known anything but misery, undernourishment, and subjugation. We learn later in the film what life was like in the early days, moments that give considerable weight to character moments at the beginning of the film. Before that, as Curtis and company move to the front of the train, things get weird.

 This, perhaps, is what Weinstein thought he could "help" Snowpiercer with: each section of the train is distinct from the one that came before it, often in truly unusual ways. There's no way to adequately describe the surreal classroom sequence featuring Allison Pill (The Newsroom) as a Wilford Propagandist Teacher. It's not the last time the film is willing to get truly odd, which is saying something about Snowpiercer. Because the structure of the revolution is back-to-front, we often get information (particularly symbolism, like dipping axes in fish guts) before its significance is addressed. What seems like an outré moment becomes, not long after, significant in the larger structure of the world. I still love the point where a large contingent of security guards, led by Mason and Franco the Elder (Vlad Ivanov) and Franco the Younger (Adnan Haskovic) meet our heroes in a long car to battle. It abruptly comes to a halt when the train crosses a long bridge, which marks the passage of another year. The brief celebration (on both sides) and cheers of "Happy New Year" come to an end when Namgoong's assistant / translator, Yona (Ah-Sung Ko) informs Curtis that they're about to enter a "really long tunnel," and only the guards have night vision goggles. It's these unusual touches, which often collide with the brutal, post-apocalyptic reality, that give the film its distinctiveness. Trimming them out in order to "improve" the run time would have robbed Snowpiercer of many of its best moments.

 Without spoiling too much, I'd like to return to the moral ambiguity of the film by briefly discussing the inevitable conclusion when Curtis reaches Wilford (I won't say who does or doesn't make it along the way, but Bong Joon-Ho doesn't hesitate to thin both sides of the herd). There's a customary "talk with the Devil" scene, where our hero faces temptation, but this time, you have to hand it to Wilford. The case he makes is, to be honest, a fair one: what did Curtis really expect to do when he made it to the engine? Is he really going to risk wiping out all of humanity by stopping the train? It was established earlier in the film - in a horrific way - just how long a person can last exposed to the outside world. Wilford has been responsible for some horrible, unforgivable decisions, and it's during his speech that many of the seemingly "weird" moments begin to make much more sense. We've been introduced to everything that's happening in the movie well before we realized it, and the case that Wilford makes, however ghoulish, is pragmatic. From his perspective, as the steward of all of humanity, what else can he do?

 I'm not necessarily justifying either side here - before meeting Wilford, Curtis explains exactly why he's been so hesitant to lead, and what happened in the first few years, and it's not necessarily the sort of story you tell proudly. Evan's face during the monologue is riveting, and the revelations are every bit as disturbing as the discovery of what the protein bars are made of. It's the first of many revelations that contextualize dialogue you'd largely considered to be standard "I'm not fit to lead" conversations earlier in Snowpiercer. In many ways, it's a far more complicated movie than its premise would suggest, and the fact that neither side is necessarily "right" in what they want to do and how they want to do it give more heft to the ending.

 Across the board, performances are high level. Anyone who thinks that Chris Evans can only be stoic and "goody two shoes" need only spend two hours with him as Curtis to wipe that notion away. Swinton and Pill border the closest to "cartoonish" in the film, with Mason resembling a caricature of Margaret Thatcher (by design) and the Teacher being part of what is Snowpiercer's oddest moment. Both serve a purpose in the film, as does Ivanov's largely silent Franco the Elder, who doggedly pursues the rebels up the train. Special kudos to Kang-ho Song (Thirst) and Ah-sung Ko (The Host), who are more than what they seem and whose impact on the story is significant. If there's a missed note in the film, it might be from Emma Levie as Claude, Wilford's assistant, who is underdeveloped to the point of being superfluous, even late in the film. Otherwise, most of the ensemble cast is more than capable of following the story in whatever direction it takes.

 To be frank, I'm happy that we got to see Snowpiercer in its original form. There was always a chance of it lingering on the shelf in obscurity, because of debates surrounding its "palatability" with mainstream audiences. I'm not sure that the masses would or could embrace a film as nihilistic as Snowpiercer is willing to be, but now it's out there for the world to decide. It was a great year for science fiction, and Snowpiercer is near the top as far as the Cap'n is concerned.




 *I'm deliberately leaving out who plays Wilford, because it's more fun to find out, although you're likely to see the name of the actor before you watch the movie. Just not here.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Captain America - The Winter Soldier

 Coming into 2014, I must admit that I wasn't very excited with Marvel's schedule. After the pretty good, but definitely "yup, we're going to do Dark Elves and crap like that" nerd-out that was Thor: The Dark World, it seemed like we were in for a year of Marvel spending testing how far a mainstream audience would follow them. Mostly by that I mean Guardians of the Galaxy, which I'll be getting to soon, but I wasn't particularly interested in Captain America: The Winter Soldier either. It had less to do with the premise - which was a pretty good arc in the comic - but more that I just didn't like Captain America: The First Avenger. I still don't, really: it's an assemblage of scenes without any clear narrative structure or, to be honest, stakes, designed to tell Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)'s origin story, introduce the Red Skull and the Tesseract, and then freeze Cap so he can be in The Avengers. It is not, however, a movie that I found to be worth watching again, and I tried.

 Accordingly, I had very little enthusiasm for The Winter Soldier, despite the presence of different directors (Joe and Anthony Russo instead of Joe Johnston) and a focus more on Cap's role in S.H.I.E.L.D.* over trying to sell the "shared universe." That is, to say, more like Iron Man 3, which everyone seems to hate but me, in part because I knew it was a Shane Black movie. Still, I didn't really have any reason to assume that the brothers Russo, veterans of Arrested Development and Community, were any better equipped to make a Captain America movie than the director of The Rocketeer. I also didn't know what kind of Captain America movie they were making - that it would be heavily influenced by 1970s paranoia thrillers, mixed with modern action films, but with slightly more coherent editing. Had I known that, I might have still been suspicious of the directors' background in comedy, but it would have assuaged any lingering concerns that The Winter Soldier would be anything like The First Avenger.

 In fact, The Winter Soldier isn't even anything like The Avengers, which worked Cap into the fold, but sometimes in uncomfortable, ham fisted ways. We're not talking Hawkeye levels of "why are you in this?", mind you, but if you look at the team dynamic, Steve Rogers has very little impact until late in the film, and even then it's mostly Iron Man's show. The Winter Soldier, despite the increased presence of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), is mostly Steve Rogers' show. It's less a film about him adjusting to the present than putting Captain America's "good old fashioned American values" against the modern surveillance / defense landscape. More importantly, it's not necessarily clear that either side is totally right or totally wrong. Fury finds himself the target of an assassination, Cap and Black Widow end up on the run, and the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) has to make a decision about the organization's future.

 To say much more would spoil the movie, and by proxy, the end of the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and on the off chance you're the one person reading this who hasn't been prepping for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, I'll let you be surprised. If there's any character who gets the short shrift in The Winter Soldier, it's the titular character, who is limited to a "Darth Maul" level of screen time for much of the film. When he's onscreen - and for SPOILER purposes, I won't identify the actor - The Winter Soldier's impact on the story is felt, but his overall arc feels more like the beginning to a larger story. That said, he's part of several crackerjack action sequences, handled with aplomb by the Russo brothers. Both are essentially chase sequences: one with Fury, and the other involving Cap, Black Widow, and the man who will become Falcon (Anthony Mackie). Aside from John Wick, they may be my favorite sustained action sequences in a film this year, and I was not expecting that from Marvel. Not only are they well choreographed, but the Nick Fury chase scene is as suspenseful as anything I've seen in a while.

 I noticed that The Winter Soldier has a slight shift in the way that Cap / Steve Rogers is portrayed: Chris Evans adds more nuance to the "good guy" type from The First Avenger and The Avengers. He's trying to fit into the world now, and not just in a way that generate anachronism laughs. The Winter Soldier is frequently funny without relying on "Rip Van Winkle" jokes - although his notebook of pop culture to catch up on is amusing in its own right. The film also bridges the first and second film by having a few returning characters, mostly presented in logical ways. It's a bit sad to see an elderly Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) suffering from Alzheimer's, even if we also meet her granddaughter (Emily VanCamp). Technically that might be a SPOILER, since the film doesn't necessarily address it yet, but instead lays the groundwork for her character as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in a few critical junctures of the story. The most surprising cameo has the potential to be the dumbest, as it is the equivalent of the "Bond villain explains his plan" moment in the film, but the audacity behind it makes the scene work. In fact, it's hard to think of a moment that doesn't work in the film, other than maybe the Big Dumb Climax.

 Like Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor: The Dark World, and Iron Man 3, and The Avengers, and I would argue, even The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier ends with Cap and Falcon trying to bring down three flying weapons of mass destruction before they, well, destroy everything. How you feel about this apparent strategy to end every Marvel film the same way is going to depend on your mileage for this overused finale. It's not any better or worse than the others, and its impact will be felt on the larger Marvel universe in movies we haven't gotten to yet (Ant-Man, how do you feel about the collapse of, uh, SPOILER nevermind). It does seem silly to use this as the backdrop for a moment between Captain America and The Winter Soldier, as the film does end on a series of quieter moments, but maybe the blockbuster comic book movie demands it. I mean, Days of Future Past isn't a lot different, what with its "dropping a stadium around The White House", and while I didn't see The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I sure heard about its Big Dumb Ending.

 Anyway, I was quite mistaken in thinking I wouldn't like Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It's a thriller disguised as a comic book movie, one that's clever and works hard to stay ahead of its audience for as long as possible. A background in comedies, particularly comedies like Arrested Development and Community gives the Russo brothers the skill to convey information quickly without dumbing it down. Instead, they can rely on audiences to pick up hints and foreshadow events without spelling it out again. Characters go through some serious doubt and don't come out unscathed at the end. Now the Russos are going to bring Civil War to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and this is a very good sign of things to come for Captain America. It wouldn't be the first time I was wrong about Marvel's direction in 2014, but I'm glad I resisted my misgivings and watched it. And then watched it again. And then with the commentary...





 * As a side note, it's probably worth mentioning that I had been so underwhelmed by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after the first few episodes that I stopped watching, and didn't finish the first season until after The Winter Soldier came out. The back half of the first season is considerably better than the first six or seven episodes.

Blogorium Review: The Avengers

 When I think of "Summer Blockbuster" movies, I tend to think of the 1999 remake of The Mummy. It's a big, loud, dumb, action packed movie with plenty of special effects and wafer thin characters. When I say "big," I mean the scale of just about everything: the fight scenes, the chases, even the jokes are elevated to a massive level. Rachel Weisz is introduced as he character knocks down every shelf in a library. It has a little something for everybody, including something for the horror fans: it's hard to argue that the scarabs who tunnel under your skin and eat your heart or the pre-Arnold Vosloo Imhotep are there for the kiddos or the romantics who came to see Fraser and Weisz trade barbs before falling in love. It's an entertaining, if inconsequential, film that does exactly what it sets out to do, throws in some (for then) state-of-the-art special effects, and sends audiences home happy.

 The Mummy is what I assume people mean when they say "it's not supposed to be Hamlet - it's just a movie!" Of course, I haven't seen the Transformers film*, which is where this argument comes up with every successive sequel. It's what I gather I'll be hearing from people who go to see Battleship, this year's Transformers surrogate. That's fine, I guess. Gone are the days when "summer" movies meant movies like Batman Returns or Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark were the norm, when John and Jane Q. Public would go to movies that didn't need to be as close to "lowest common denominator" studio concocted and market tested product as humanly possible. Where movies like The Dark Knight or Inception aren't a rarity. Okay, so Mission: Impossible: III and Star Trek and even Iron Man also qualify. Let's not be so myopic here, but my point is that playing it safe pays off and doing something a little risky (and Batman Returns or Alien 3's relative failure may have fed into this) was something you wouldn't need to wait a few years between.

 Which brings us to The Avengers, the culmination of Marvel Studios' four year project to make a film for Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and The Incredible Hulk (Eric Bana, no wait, Edward Norton... no, wait...) before bringing them together with Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) under the leadership of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to save the world. In The Avengers, the threat is Loki (Tom Hiddleston), introduced as "Loki! The brother of Thor!" by Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), in case you missed Thor last summer. That would, by the way, probably be a bad idea, but don't worry, Marvel isn't going to leave you in the dark at the beginning of the movie. That might make you leave.

 So I don't want anybody thinking that I didn't enjoy The Avengers. I did. I enjoyed it a LOT more than The Mummy, which is an unfair comparison but helps frame how I feel about how The Avengers functions as entertainment and the reaction to the film. I've seen it twice now, and I liked it more the second time than the first. It's a film that plays like gangbusters with an audience, so I totally understand why people are throwing around words like "amazing" while other reviewers are reacting in comparably hyperbolic ways to bring them back to Earth.

 The first time I saw The Avengers, I was caught off guard by just how "Whedon-esque" The Avengers is. I don't want to repeat too much of what I said last week, which covers what most of audiences know of Joss Whedon versus what his die hard fans have come to expect, but even I wasn't expecting The Avengers to be as "quippy" as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Serenity. Almost every character has a moment where they make a clever, scathing comment that undercuts tension or action or a speech made by someone else. Most of them have several, and I'm not just talking about Downey's perpetually snarky Tony Stark, who has a nickname for every member of the team. Even the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) gets a line in that is, apparently, often drowned out by the laughter from what happens right before he says it (the line, for anyone who didn't hear it, is "Puny god.")

 At first, I didn't know how I felt about it. Being a semi-dedicated Whedon-head**, once it happened a few times, I understood that this was going to be a film where stakes were maybe not as important as they could be. Then again, that's fine: if you've seen any of my other reviews for these films, Jon Favreau, Kenneth Branagh, and Joe Johnston also muted any serious sense of threat to their respective outings. The Avengers are "hopelessly outgunned" but not in such a way that Tony Stark doesn't continue to threaten Loki right before a Chitauri*** invasion of Manhattan. The film was enjoyable, but I had reservations about how I felt about the lack of "stakes," even when a supporting character died and another character turned "evil" early in the film. Rather than meaning much, it just made sense. That's a good way to address two characters we kind of know but who have to this point played minor roles in other films.

 See, the more I write about The Avengers, the more it seems like I didn't enjoy it. Nothing is further from the truth: I'll probably see it again, maybe even this weekend. I highly recommend it to people tired of insipid "summer entertainment" and I think it's great that parents are bringing their kids (or, more likely, vice versa) and that the whole family seems to be loving it. This is a movie that can comfortably show trailers for Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and Pixar's Brave beforehand and not one of them seems out of place. It's a movie for geeks, for families, for casual moviegoers, and people just looking to have fun at the movies. Clearly its box office receipts (which, as you know, is the only way you know a movie is any good****) support the idea of its universal appeal. It is a LOT of fun, and I really want to emphasize that.

  The more I think about it, the more appropriate it is to compare The Avengers to The Mummy AND to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. The Mummy I use as a sort of superficial concept of what "summer entertainment" means, in that it is successful in trying to reach all of the target demographics while also being vaguely enjoyable but also mostly forgettable once you're finished with it. It's why the film works so well on Saturday afternoons, when it seems to play on television. It doesn't require you to pay too much attention, but you'll have a good time and be able to get back to what you're doing without much trouble.

 Star Trek, similarly, is a more successful version of this. It's accessible both to Trekkies***** and people who know of Star Trek but haven't necessarily been following the series or films. The direction is assured, the film moves at a brisk pace, the cast is fun, and it delivers laughs and thrills in equal measure. I continue to argue that despite the fact that the Star Trek reboot is a very entertaining film, it doesn't have much - if any - of a plot. It does such a fine job of making you not notice this fact that nobody really seems to mind, and I'm cool with that.

 The Avengers is sort of like that, in that it gets by on such good will with what it does right (the levity, the excitement, the humor, the character interaction), that you don't really mind the first half dragging after Loki steals the Cosmic Cube (er, Tesseract******) until Thor shows up. We spend time catching up with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), we see Black Widow in a scene that should make fans of Buffy or Dollhouse very happy, we meet the new guy playing Bruce Banner and enjoy the fact that Marvel finally nailed the Hulk's alter ego, and as usual, Steve Rogers doesn't have much to contribute.

 I know. I was mean to Captain America in that review, but aside from one great line ("There's only one God, ma'am, and I don't think he dresses like that") he doesn't get to do much but shout orders. Well, there's the other nice moment when he finally gets a pop culture reference (at the expense of Thor) that's a good laugh during an exposition scene. Captain America doesn't play much of a role in his fight scene with Loki - Iron Man swoops in and saves the day, and I don't really understand why the whole "Thor's hammer vs. Cap's shield" manages to end a fight in the woods after the God of Thunder steals Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s jet.

 But look, I'm thinking about this too much. And I'm not saying that maybe I shouldn't, but like Star Trek, most people just don't care. And I'm okay with that, because if you're going to get behind "summer entertainment" in the way people are getting behind The Avengers, it's vastly preferable that it be something this well made. This much fun. Joss Whedon knows exactly how to put the right pieces together to make a movie that plays to as many people as possible without pandering or dumbing everything down, and now he has a massive platform with which to demonstrate it. I totally understand why people LOVE this movie, and I understand why some critics are so frustrated that people are willing to overlook so much of what isn't "perfect" that they see. Both sides have a point, even if they're reaching a little too hard to prove what the other is "missing."

 Where am I? Well, like I said, I'll be seeing it again. I enjoyed it that much and think a third time is worthwhile. I'm comfortable with the film's strengths and faults in equal measure and to be honest, the former outweigh the latter in all the ways that count. Since I can't fathom why I'd see Battleship, The Avengers is going to be my "summer entertainment," as Thor and Fast Five were last year. Things will get dark and moody with Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and (hopefully) Looper in the coming months, but I'll be happy to have some fun with Earth's Mightiest Heroes in the meantime. You should too.







* After The Island, Michael Bay and I got to a point where it made more sense for us to spend some time apart. Not being able to follow the incomprehensibly edited and shot robot action scenes in the trailers made the decision to sit out the last seven years of his output easier.
** That's what you call yourselves, right? I mean, you aren't all just Browncoats, right?
*** Interesting tidbit I missed during the credits - the Chitauri named "The Other" is played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel alumn Alexis Denisof.
*** On the off chance you have never read one of my reviews before or anything else from this blog, I would like to point out that this statement is intended sarcastically.
**** Sorry, Trekkers.
****** I must admit that I'm a little confused why The Cosmic Cube isn't called "The Cosmic Cube" in The Avengers, and is instead repeatedly referred to as "The Tesseract." At first I thought it was to avoid explaining what a "Cosmic Cube" would do, but when you introduce Thanos as the stinger for the sequel and don't say his name (the lady sitting next to me asked her boyfriend "who's he?" and he didn't know) then I think you could get away with just calling it The Cosmic Cube.

Blogorium Reviews Assemble!: Captain America - The First Avenger

Pre-Review Nerd Stuff:

 I know that it's considered bad form to start a review with a tangent, but why is that subtitle on Captain America? Were Paramount and Marvel afraid that people wouldn't go see a Captain America movie if they didn't directly tie it to The Avengers movie that was still a year away? Were they concerned that people might think that, despite no evidence to support the theory, that it was somehow a live action sequel to Team America: World Police?

 Let's take a moment to just pontificate on this, because I'm guessing most of you didn't even think twice about it. Captain America was the last of the Marvel feature-length-prequels/trailers to Marvel's The Avengers Directed by Joss Whedon in IMAX and RealD 3-D Coming to Theaters May 4th*. We already know that every Marvel movie that doesn't involve spider-men, punishers, mutants and Nicolas Cage** are moving towards The Avengers. How do we know? Well, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, and Thor have included either Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury or Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson (sometimes both!) and they keep hinting at an "Avengers Initiative" that Tony Stark isn't allowed to be in.

 Sometimes they throw in characters that have nothing substantive to add to the movie but who also happen to be members of The Avengers not named Ant Man (Hawkeye and Ant Man / The Wasp stand-in Black Widow) that are also part of S.H.I.E.L.D. However, to this point, Universal and Paramount have trusted nerds to understand that they're planning an Avengers movie without subtitles like Iron Man: The Avengers Wouldn't Have Him or Thor: The God of Thunder and Also Member of The Avengers.

 I could understand the need to bridge this with Captain America if say, Nick Fury wasn't in the film (SPOILER: He is. So are his "Howling Commandos," but sans their learder). If the film was actually just about Captain America's origin and role in World War II and didn't involve the prologue and epilogue in the present day, then yeah, I guess some rubes might say "hey, where's things I recognize? Why does that guy who isn't Robert Downey Jr. have the same last name? Why doesn't this movie explain things to me because I'm a drooling moron?" Okay, that last part was maybe a little mean, but we haven't needed our hands held to this point. The other films have done a reasonably good job of integrating elements for a later film without disrupting the experience of watching the film. Well, until Iron Man 2.

 Wait, what? Oh, the movie itself? Fine...


 Substantive Film Review Portion:

 Is there a missing "director's cut" of Captain America somewhere? Specifically a cut of Joe (The Rocketeer) Johnston's film that fills in the second half of the film, when things just happen without any connective tissue? Things were off to such a promising start...

 Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a 90 pound weakling with a heart of gold who just wants to enlist and fight Nazis in World War II. His miniscule body (accomplished with some impressive digital trickery) and sickly medical record keep him from being mowed down by machine gun fire, which is what the Army officials who keep turning him down remind him. Defeated, he goes to the World's Fair in New York with his buddy "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and a few girls, and on a whim he decides to forge his papers and enlist (again). This time, Rogers catches the eye of Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), a scientist who defected from Germany to help the Allied war effort. He's working with Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) to develop the "Super Soldier" serum, and after boot camp, Rogers is determined to be the ideal candidate. Despite the misgivings of Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), Rogers receives the serum and becomes muscular, hunky Chris Evans, er "Captain America," and is promptly sent to do USO shows to help the war effort.

 Meanwhile, Erskine's first "Super Soldier" experiment, Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), is plotting to take over the world, first for Hitler and then just for Hydra, his own private army. He has the Cosmic Cube, left on Earth by Odin (Anthony Hopkins, not appearing in this film), and with the help of Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), is creating new weapons, ones that will help him rule the world. Oh, and he doesn't have a face any more - he has a Hugo Weaving mask that he wears for a while but is actually a Red Skull. Or, THE Red Skull.

 And this whole portion of the film, dedicated to Captain America's origin story, is a whole lot of fun. It's a throwback to throwbacks of old fashioned adventure films like Joe Johnston's The Rocketeer or Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (visual effects art direction by Joe Johnston). There's a nice sense of momentum and wonder as this puny kid named Steve Rogers proves himself to have the heart to be a hero and then gets the "Super Soldier" serum and instead of getting to fight Nazis has to pitch war bonds to families and punch a fake Hitler over and over.

He never even gets to punch the real Hitler, because Captain America: The First Avenger doesn't actually feature Nazis to speak of - The Red Skull kills a few of Hitler's liaisons and then declares Hydra to be its own entity. That's okay, I guess, although it defeats the purpose of needing to have the film set in the 1940s, but I was still on board. Rogers ends up in Europe doing his goofy show to soldiers that really aren't interested - they lost a lot of good men to Hydra, including "Bucky" Barnes. Rogers decides that this "rah rah" patriotic song and dance isn't helping, so he asks Stark and Peggy to sneak him across enemy lines so he can save the captured allied soldiers.

 The first action scene, when Captain America improbably sneaks into the Hydra plant past a bunch of heavily armored soldiers and rescues Barnes, along with what will eventually be the aforementioned "Howling Commandos": "Dum Dum" Duggan (Neal McDonough), Gabe Jones (Derek Luke), Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi), James Montgomery Fallsworth (J.J. Feild), and Jacques Dernier (Bruno Ricci). The men band together to escape from Hydra, and Captain America ends up meeting Zola and The Red Skull as the plant begins exploding.

 And then Captain America: The First Avenger falls apart. There's still plenty of action and patriotism and fighting of Nazis Hydra, but none of it matters any more. All of the well designed narrative and breathless pacing designed to service Captain America's origin collapses and Johnston's film becomes a meaningless cacophony of scenes that seem to happen independently of what comes before and after them. The sense of wonder and adventure dissipates and instead we're subjected to a mish-mash of things that need to happen to service the epilogue of the film, when (SPOILER) Captain America wakes up in present day New York.

 I'm going to give you two examples of things that just happen without any explanation other than "well, it needs to happen for the movie to end the way we wrote it":

 1. Captain America goes from being a propaganda tool who went AWOL and saved some soldiers who returned fully expecting to be court-martialed to being AN ACTUAL soldier. How does this happen? Well, there's a scene where he's supposed to get a medal for bravery but he isn't there so that Stan Lee can make a joke in his standard issue cameo. He's not there because Captain America is now in London is certainly appears to be an actual Captain. Before someone goes into the comments to correct me on this, please instead consider explaining how, in the film (not the comic), receiving a medal of valour is in any way a logical substitute in the narrative for going from being s morale booster into being an actual soldier.

 2. Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter have a "will they or won't they" romance during the first half of the film, one that is loosely continued into the second half of the film, only in a lazier fashion. They sort of flirt, have conversations that indicate that they could fall in love, and then Rogers is seduced by another lady. Carter walks in on them kissing, makes a snide comment, and Rogers is embarrassed. He tries to apologize, but instead she shoots his new shield and Howard Stark makes a joke. Steve thought that Stark and Peggy were canoodling because he doesn't know what "fondue" is, so he doesn't understand why she's so mad! Oh, romantic comedy misunderstandings! Then the script drops all of the parts where he wins her back and instead pretends that because Captain America puts a picture of Peggy in his watch and that she sees it in a newsreel that they're in love. We know this because they see each other during the last Hydra showdown and kiss in a car, then have a sappy conversation as Rogers (SPOILER) crashes the Red Skull's plane into the Arctic, where he will be frozen for seventy years.

 That's important because the nonexistent third act romance is supposed to be the real tragedy of the film, because when Rogers wakes up in the future and Nick Fury stops him in the middle of Times Square, the only thing he can say is "Yeah. Yeah, I just... I had a date."

 I wish I shared the tragedy of Steve Rogers losing everything and everyone he knew, but I just didn't buy it. Just like I didn't really feel anything when (SPOILER) "Bucky" is killed during a seemingly arbitrary train sequence designed to capture Dr. Zola. We're off to the next scene so quickly that it doesn't really matter what just happened, which robs the second half of the film from having any meaning.

 Along those lines, the Red Skull and Captain America have no stakes in their rivalry: other than being the only "Super Soldier"'s and being on opposite sides of the war, there's nothing driving their specific animosity towards each other. They're enemies because the movie needs an antagonist who can fly to America so that Captain America can crash the plane, be frozen, and be rescued in present day. The Red Skull works because he's Captain America's enemy, so he's in the film. He has the Cosmic Cube because it figures into The Avengers, although for some reason they aren't calling it the Cosmic Cube in the film.

 Nothing happens organically after Rogers storms into the Hydra plant. It's somehow appropriate, because at that point the World War II setting becomes irrelevant anyway. The Red Skull has developed futuristic laser guns and laser tanks that evaporate Allied soldiers (gotta have a PG13 rating for this war movie, after all), so it ceases to be a throwback to adventure films anyway. Now it's a dumb CGI science fiction / comic / war hybrid where things like plot development don't matter. The film doesn't need a reason to get from A to B to C; it just skips forward and assumes you're too swept up in the special effects to notice.

 For a director who started in visual effects, Joe Johnston has been having a lot of trouble with effects heavy films lately. Jurassic Park III and  The Wolfman looked comically cheap when it came to digital effects, and despite the presence of actual physical stunts, Captain America starts to look like a long string of green screen sequences with people running, fighting, or driving. I'm almost positive that most of the plane interior where Captain America fights the Red Skull is an actual set, but it looks fake, and so does most of the movie after the first hour. To put it in perspective, I knew that most of Asgard was designed in a computer, but it seemed more palpable than 80% of Captain America's climax.

 Now, it is possible to watch Captain America and not think about any of this. You could just turn your brain off after an hour, try not to follow the story and just say "well, they need those 'splosions, after all" and be swept away to the end of the film. You're still going to feel underwhelmed by how quickly it ends, how little any of it registers, or the way that you don't feel anything that the writers, director, and actors wanted you to. But you might not mind. You'll think about Chris Evans and how he was a really good Captain America / Steve Rogers. You'll like Hayley Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones and be surprised that Neal McDonough wasn't playing a jerk for the first time you can remember. Toby Jones is a little bit like Ronald Lacey in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Hugo Weaving is chewing up scenery as the Red Skull. Dominic Cooper is fun as Howard Stark and you know, it was a fun adventure movie. It was a comic book, and really what did you expect?

 And if that's how you measure a movie, then the fact that half of an actual movie has been stitched together with a bunch of other scenes won't be an issue. Maybe there are a ton of deleted scenes that I need to watch or something, but they aren't in the movie I did see. The movie I did see started out with a lot of promise, and then used that good will to skip to the ending without earning it. Of course, the ending only exists to be the beginning of another movie, and not much else. At least Thor had something to do on Asgard, and Dr. Banner went back into hiding while he tried to cure himself. Tony Stark had to decide what good being Iron Man was really doing.

 Steve Rogers hangs out in S.H.I.E.L.D. until Nick Fury asks him to be an Avenger. The First Avenger, I guess.

 Subsequent Nerd Closing Component:

 So, where were we? Oh right, "The First Avenger" part. So if we're talking chronologically, wouldn't Thor be the "first" Avenger, predating Captain America by a few thousand years?

 I fully admit that I'm not an expert on Captain America or The Avengers. I was always more of a DC Comics fan, so I'm coming into these films with what little I do know about the characters. Some of them I know more about than others - I read more Spider-Man and X-Men and The Punisher than The Avengers, but I also read Secret Wars and am familiar with most of the major Marvel characters. The movies have their upsides and downsides, but Captain America has, to this point, been the one I was the most disappointed with.

 Sure, Iron Man 2's plot was too busy and Thor's story was more concerned with Asgard than the dutch-angle laden New Mexico portions, but there was a semblance of narrative in them that wasn't JUST in service of The Avengers film. Captain America doesn't feel like a movie so much as an obligatory set-up of one last character in the crossover film. It's like stretching the Hawkeye scene in Thor into a two hour movie that needs to hit certain beats in order for people to come into The Avengers knowing who everybody is. Worse still is that it tricks you into thinking there's an actual movie in the beginning and then just peters out halfway through.




 * Take that, George Lucas. May the 4th be with them!
 ** Or are those last two the same thing???