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| Image Courtesy en.wikipedia.org |
That being said, it has some
definite flaws.
Let’s start with the character of
Steve Rogers. Steve is basically a Nice
Guy™, and that’s the majority of his character development. He’s a little guy who doesn’t like bullies,
and then he turns into a big guy who doesn’t like bullies but does like
punching mustachioed bullies in the face.
He wants to be able to fight in World War II but can’t because of his
medical history, so he volunteers for an experiment to make him the perfect
soldier and enhance his inner character.
And when his inner character is enhanced, he’s basically the same guy
but requires less CGI. Steve stays about
like this—humble guy given incredible power—for the entire movie, up until the
moment that he forces the Valkyrie plane into the Arctic so it wouldn’t crash
into a populated area and cause major civilian casualties.
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| Image Courtesy www.fxguide.com |
Steve just stays the same for the
entire movie as a character. The
physical transformation isn’t matched by any internal transformation that I can
tell.
Schmidt has the same problem as
Steve: he doesn’t go through any sort of
character arc. Schmidt is the bad guy
because he thinks he’s better than everyone else and is the “better man”
of legend who will take over the world.
Consequently he is willing to do anything and everything necessary to
make his vision a reality, up to and including turning on his own people. Hugo Weaving makes for an intense and menacing
Red Skull, particularly after he removes his mask and goes full-on as the
stereotypical ‘40s villain. But he’s
just the Red Skull from beginning to end, and we’re never given any indication
that he was ever anything other than a raving lunatic.
Having said all this, I do need
to point out that this movie is actually quite accurate to the comics, and it
does a good job of embracing (and in some cases subverting) the tropes that
were common in the comics of the 1940s.
Captain America represents everything that is good about America; Red
Skull represents everything that Americans hate about the Nazis. The focus is on the bonds of brotherhood
between the soldiers and on the moral rightness of their actions—they are
saving the world! Red Skull is a larger
than life caricature of what Americans in the ‘40s thought that the boogeyman
looked like. The visuals are absolutely incredible and
look like they were pulled directly out of a comic book—something the Captain
America movies have proven to be particularly adept at doing.
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| Image Courtesy marvel-movies.wikia.com |
The best part of the movie in my
opinion is actually the supporting characters.
The Howling Commandoes are awesome, even if we don’t get a ton of
development from most of the team—I’m glad they were included in an episode of Agent
Carter. Doctor Erskine serves as a
good father figure for Steve before the procedure: he supports him and explains that what is
important for the experiment is not who he is on the outside but who he is on
the inside. Dominic Cooper as Howard
Stark is an absolute blast (it really is too bad that Agent Carter got
cancelled). Colonel Philips may be the
most dynamic character in the movie: he
goes from placing all his hope in physical strength to recognizing and
respecting the qualities that made Steve an ideal candidate for the experiment,
self-sacrifice and perseverance. He does
this first when he bows to Erskine’s desire to test it on Steve instead of
Hodge (though why Philips was so hell-bent on using the big guy in the first
place when the whole point is to take a weakling and make him super is beyond
me…). After Erskine’s death puts a halt
to the rest of the experimentation, he discounts the value of a single
super-soldier, but when Steve proves just what one man can do against Hydra, he
changes his tune and brings Steve into the S.S.R. fold.
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| Image Courtesy www.slashfilm.com |
In terms of this movie, I think
the absolutely most important character was actually Peggy, because her
relationship with Steve served as the emotional heart. I actually didn’t watch this movie when it
first came out (I watched it a couple weeks before The Avengers), but I
can’t imagine anyone sitting in a theater watching this movie and not realizing
that Peggy and Steve are star-crossed lovers (even if they did somehow sleep
through the opening scene!). They could
never be together because Steve was always going to somehow get himself frozen
in ice and wake up in present-day so he could be an Avenger. So seeing them come together only for Steve
to mess it up by kissing Lorraine, and then they yet again continue to draw
closer through Steve’s war service and Bucky’s death is very bittersweet. And then when they kiss right before he has
to catch his plane to New York and gets put on ice it is all the more tragic
because you know that is going to be their only kiss. This is really what keeps the movie
grounded: Steve cares for Peggy. This is also where the movie really subverts
the trope: instead of making Peggy the
stereotypical damsel in distress/love interest, she is a very capable agent and
in some respects even more capable than Steve himself.
The other major supporting role
in this movie is of course Bucky. This
is where the movie deviates from the source the most—comic-book Bucky is a kid
sidekick, while movie Bucky is older than Steve and even bigger and stronger
than him at the beginning. At the same
time, they really work in a good dynamic between the two: they are friends, but they are more than
friends; they are brothers. The relationship
isn’t really spelled out in this movie, but it is clear from their interactions
how good of friends they are. This
friendship is actually the “through line” for the entire Captain America
trilogy: Steve trying to find and save
Bucky. Bucky falls to his “death” in The
First Avenger. He is discovered
alive in The Winter soldier and broken free from his Hydra
programming. In Civil War, Bucky
teams up with Steve once more and is once more on the “right” side. And through all of this Steve refuses to give
up on his best friend. This was all set
up nicely in The First Avenger—and who (at least comic book readers) can
honestly say they didn’t see the Bucky twist in The Winter Soldier
coming?
Probably the best and most
emotional scene in the movie came when Steve was “drowning his sorrows” in a
bar and Peggy came to console him on Bucky’s presumed death. Both of the main relationships in the movie
were on display, and this helped to set up Steve’s self-sacrifice at the end of
the movie: “This is my choice.” I do wish they had given him a little more
reason for ditching in the Arctic than that, though. I know it had to happen, but they could have
handled it better.
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| Image Courtesy spinoff.comicbookresources.com |
The fight sequences in this movie
were all really good, particularly the last one from when Steve attacked the
compound through Red Skull’s disappearance into the heavens by means of the
Tesseract. My biggest disappointment in
the movie is probably shared by a lot of other people: 3 years of war (and hundreds of comic book
issues) getting condensed down into a single war reel. If The Avengers hadn’t been the next
movie on the schedule, it would have been really interesting to give Cap at
least 2 movies pre-freeze so that we could explore more of that comic book
history, particularly the Invaders (Allied superhumans teaming up to fight the
Nazis/Hydra). There may still be a way
to revisit that, but with Agent Carter having been cancelled, it seems
highly unlikely.
It may sound like I wasn’t a huge
fan of this movie, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I really enjoyed this movie, and I thought it
did an excellent job of working with both the 1940s comic book style and the
1940s/World War II setting. There were
places where they could have done better, but that’s something you can say
about any movie.
What did you think of Captain America:
Civil War? Did you want to see more
of Cap during World War II? Let me know
in the comments!
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