Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

Hard to tell which looks more preposterous: skinny dweeb Chris Evans or cartoonishly buff Chris Evans.

Captain America: The First Avenger
Directed by: Joe Johnston
Starring: Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones
Released by: Paramount

There’s nothing really wrong with this rather old-fashioned WWII action film. Chris Evans (who, The Enthusiast has speculated before, is swiftly cornering the market in comic-book characters), is likeable in the title role. Still, it felt glib and unsatisfying.

Pencil-necked Steve Rogers (Evans) yearns to fight for his country like his hale and handsome best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), but is so sickly he’s been knocked back at various different recruitment centres. But expat German scientist Dr Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) recognises Steve’s good heart and invites him to join a program headed by Erskine, Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and British agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). (Carter’s position of authority is highly ahistoric, considering that women in WWII were relegated to support positions in auxiliary forces.)

Here, Steve undergoes an experimental procedure in which he’s injected with a special serum and subjected to “Vita-Rays” to turn him into a supersoldier. The Benjamin Button-style CGI used to make Evans look puny is very impressive, with the effect that his ‘improved’ self looks equally fake; Evans’s head looks so tiny on that gleaming, buff torso!

Evans also gives a graceful impression of a diffident guy who can’t quite believe his luck, but it was distinctly odd the way everyone else in the film is so blasé about what is really quite an astonishing, freakish transformation.

Meanwhile, the covert Nazi R&D division Hydra, led by mad scientist Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) and his tech guy Dr Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), has created a mystic weapon using a ‘tesseract’ cube said to contain the power of the Norse gods. This basically allows them to vaporise people and reduce buildings to rubble using futuristic, glowing blue guns, and to leave Hitler behind and take over the entire world! Schmidt has been treated with an earlier version of the same serum, but it is never explained how the serum deformed his head to resemble a scary red latex skull.

"Vell, I guess zis is better zan a plastic skull full off scrunched-up plastic bags…"

But the real problem with Captain America is that it doesn’t seem to know whether to be a cheeky pastiche of wartime derring-do (much as Iron Man was a wicked ode to the exhilaration of blowing shit up) or an existential drama about a guy whose very being is fundamentally altered, and who finds himself out of step with his times (much as Thor indulged in self-consciously Shakespearean drama).

Halfway through there’s a delirious Busby Berkeley-style USO musical number, ‘The Star-Spangled Man’, but the actual action sequences are played straight in a very contemporary way. The romance between Steve and Peggy never really convinced me, either – it felt pasted in because she was the only main female character.

For a film full of evil-by-definition Nazis, Captain America also lacks that Indiana Jones brand of swashbuckling – even though the hero wears a brown leather jacket, the henchman is a creepy guy in a fedora and little round glasses, and the villain makes an in-joke about Hitler digging up “relics in the desert”. While Weaving puts on his best jackboots and panto German accent, he’s no Jew Hunter. (Although, who is?)

Most of all, the film seems to gloss puzzlingly over its central irony. At its heart, it’s a celebration of how the experience of being weak imbues a personal courage and empathy – an innate goodness – that’s missing from those who’ve been strong their entire lives. It’s a wish-fulfilment fantasy clearly meant to be attractive to comic-book nerds reading Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads between pages.

Yet its hero is a jingoistic supersoldier created by the US military-industrial complex, represented here by Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) of military contractor Stark Industries, who literally embodies the power of the state through brute physical strength. He’s quite similar, really, to the Nazis, whose obsession with ethnic purity and callisthenics was all about rendering the strength of the state in flesh. Yet the film never gives Schmidt so much as a “We’re not so different, you and I…” line.

The Avengers better be pretty awesome, because if Captain America is their first, they’ll have a lot of ground to make up.

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