Captain America: The First Avenger is the final movie in Marvel Studio’s grand plan to rock the comic book movie industry with their Avengers movies.
Marvel Studios has a long history. There was a time when entertainment companies stuck to one medium and excelled at what they did instead of the Zaibatsu style Disney Corporations we have now where they compete in every entertainment forum. Marvel Comics did one thing very well and that was write comics. However it had been proven years ago that comic book characters and stories could do well in other mediums. Flash Gordon, Batman, and Superman all had successful runs in film and television. After the success of Superman there were a few attempts at making a mark on the film industry by Marvel. We got Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America, both of which were atrociously bad made for TV movies. As Batman and Superman took off in the 90’s with movies, television, and cartoon series, Marvel took the more subtle approach and stuck with cartoons putting out the popular X-Men and Spider-man cartoon series. Taking a page from the DC playbook, using big budget studios to make your movies so you don’t have to do it yourself, Marvel contracted with Universal Studios to make big budget live action movies for them. The first result was the well received X-Men. It was a little silly, and didn’t really match the X-Men comics or cartoons visually, or follow either of those plotlines, but the fans didn’t really care. Around this same time Universal Studios was working on their new Orlando theme park, Islands of Adventure, in which one of the themed areas was based on Marvel superheroes. Using their relationship with Marvel they scooped up the rights to make Spiderman and Hulk movies as well as some lesser known bombs like The Punisher (awesome movie by the way), Daredevil, and Elektra. Somewhere along the way, Marvel recognized it was in an abusive relationship and Universal Studios had literally stolen the intellectual property rights right out from under Stan Lee’s nose. This has created a very adversarial relationship between the two companies especially over the rights to X-Men.
The X-Men contract states that Universal has full rights to all X-Men characters AND anyone in the Marvel Universe they would come into contact with. This was a big power grab by Universal but the unsuspecting Marvel innocently thought that was just part of the process of giving Universal license to put characters in their X-Men movies to appease the fans. Not so. The contract also states that the rights to all these characters does not revert back to Marvel unless Universal does not put out an X-Men movie at least every four years. All this came to light after such failures as the two Fantastic Four movies and Spiderman 3 where Universal seemingly ignored all input from Marvel.
After being abused for so many years Marvel took a big step and became a media giant by creating Marvel Studios as a screw you to Universal Studios. Some of their initial movies were the hugely popular Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk which was a sequel to the Universal Studios Hulk and was an apology to fans and proved that even with a brand name that had been smeared and beaten down, they could still make a good movie.
Universal is not likely to give up the rights to the Marvel characters they currently hold because of the theme park tie ins, and now that they are in direct competition with Marvel Studios the chances are almost nil. There is hope around the corner that Marvel could get some rights back as it seems that Universal has sold the movie rights to Spiderman to Columbia Pictures for The Amazing Spiderman. Initial research also shows this is a Marvel Studios movie so I’m predicting some heavy involvement from the actual comic writers.
Ever since the creation of Marvel Studios each movie has been carefully planned. They are all in the same universe so it is possible for the characters to interact with each other. They have also popularized the “surprise at the end of the credits idea” as most involve clues to their next film. As soon as Iron Man came out and Samuel L. Jackson came on screen as Nick Fury with the line “I’m putting together a team.” Marvel fans went ballistic with anticipation of an Avengers movie, The Avengers being a group of Marvel superheroes that work together as a team and have at different times included all of the most prominent Marvel characters. Over the last several years each subsequent Marvel movie has been getting us one step closer to that final goal. However even with their string of successes there was a burning question in the back of everyone’s mind. When do we get to see Captain America.
Like most entertainment outlets in America, when we entered WWII, Marvel also contributed to the patriotic fervor and created a character to represent America, the troops, and everything good in the world. That was Captain America, with issue one showing him punching Adolf Hitler in the face. In comic books, especially when there is a long tradition of the character, a lot is taken for granted, like his ridiculous costume. The costume I believe is why this movie with the “first” Avenger was the last Marvel film to come out before the Avengers movie comes out next year. I can imagine all the writers sitting around saying, “how can we justify this costume, it’s ridiculous!”, and as a result that was the best part of the whole movie.
Sadly this whole project was very rushed. No doubt this was due to the actors’ schedules working towards an Avengers movie, Marvel releasing Thor only a few months earlier, and having to cram all of Captain America’s origin story and involvement in WWII into one film. There were several things it did right and several things it did wrong.
As I said earlier the explanation for the costume was the most well done aspect of this film, and it had some of the best character development for a superhero movie I have ever seen. They intentionally played up self referential scenes with Rogers repeatedly using objects around him like a shield, Captain America’s trademark attribute, and even showing Captain America comics (Issue #1, the one with Hiter) being sold on the street to children. Unfortunately, while these were done very well and made the movie very entertaining, there were many things they dropped the ball on.
Captain America’s main enemies were Nazis. That was the whole reason for his creation both in the comics and in the 1940’s Marvel offices. The best thing about the Nazis is that everyone agrees they were the bad guys. If you want a villain that will offend NO ONE…go with Nazis. You can kill as many of them as you want in as creative ways as you want and everyone can get behind that. They instead decided Captain America needed a super villain because Nazis aren’t cool anymore, so they introduced the Red Skull and Hydra which were traditional enemies of Nick Fury, not Captain America. This really bothered me because no one gives a crap how many faceless henchmen Cap kills. There’s no real world hatred for them like the Nazis. There were three Nazis killed in the whole movie and the Red Skull killed them. It’s a weird complaint but a necessary one for Marvel downplaying the historical and patriotic beginnings of Captain America.
Patriotism and nationalism were why Captain America was created. However in the international market you aren’t going to make as much if your main character only supports the ideas of one country. Hence the exclusion of “the American way” from Superman’s dialog in his most recent film. Removing Nazis as the villain created a scenario where Captain America was more of a code name for a super soldier than a description of the man himself. With regard to broadening the audience of the film, there were several bit characters added such as the token woman, token black guy, token asian guy, token French guy, etc… This was a strange inclusion. The multicultural group though not named is a reference to Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos who were contemporaries of Captain America in WWII. It seems the Nazi defector and Jewish soldier didn’t make the cut for the new Howling Commandos. I have also heard rumors however, that since Nick Fury is now black, the black character in the group, once Private Gabriel Jones, is now Nick Fury’s father Jack Fury, leader of the Howling Commandos.
By far the biggest criticism I have heard about this movie is the amount of montages in it. Now Iron Man did a building montage, let’s be fair. The problem in Captain America: The First Avenger is that it is almost all montages. There’s one when they introduce the villain’s back story, there’s one at boot camp, there’s one when he becomes Captain America, there’s one when they’re blowing up Hydra factories, and they aren’t particularly very good either. The becoming Captain America montage is more a musical number than actually showing a passage of time, and all the others are either exposition or trying to show and not tell in the sloppiest fashion.
I’ve mentioned this before. Superhero movies tend to follow very narrow moral themes. This movie is no exception. Sadly it goes with the idea that bullies are mean. Yes, they made a WWII movie and the moral of the story is that the Nazis are bullies. Way to downplay genocide, fascism, and one of the worst wars in recorded history Marvel!
With all that said, I’m being critical of only a few very large mistakes. Most of the complaints I have heard have been from big comic book fans and have seemed overly critical. This is a compilation of those observations and criticisms but I don’t want to give the impression that it was not entertaining. True to form for Marvel, there were plenty of good lines that had the whole audience laughing (a completely full theater when I saw it). They did not shy away from killing nameless people on both sides of the war which impressed me especially for a PG-13 movie. Captain America would probably have been better approached in two movies but as I said before, Marvel Studios was under time pressure to complete the origin stories for all of their Avengers characters.
Marvel did a good job with what they had to work with and they did it under time pressure. I know this really pisses off the film is art crowd but let us remember that almost no film that comes out is art. Movies are an industry, a business, and I support Marvel in their business venture to get an Avengers movie out because it will not only make them fabulously wealthy, it’s what the fans have been begging for for years. That was why Marvel Studios was created, because Universal Studios gave a big middle finger the fans in every one of their Marvel movies. I’m sorry to everyone who was disappointed that Captain America: the First Avenger wasn’t the greatest movie of all time, but think of it this way…it wasn’t Green Lantern…
Movies Referenced:
2012-The Amazing Spiderman
2011-Captain America: The First Avenger
2011-Green Lantern
2011-Thor
2008-Iron Man
2008-The Incredible Hulk
2007-Spiderman 3
2005-Elektra
2004-The Punisher
2003-Daredevil
2003-Hulk
2000-X-Men
1998-Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
1994-Spider-man
1992-X-Men
1990-Captain America
1989-Batman
1978-Superman
