captain america

Captain America has never really been my thing.

It's obviously quite a jingo-istic thing - I mean, he's not Captain Humanity or Captain United Nations, is he?  He's Captain America.  And that's always made him very "truth, justice and the American way."

All of which of course works under the assumption that "the American way" is on the same level as truth and justice, and, indeed, that they're somehow synonymous: that truth and justice equal the American way.  I was never really convinced that was entirely the case and of course Cap represents those things.

Of course, being the first movie (well, excluding the other adaptation) this one tells Cap's origin story and that revolves around World War 2 and the Red Skull.  In this case it also involves HYDRA and a bit of Norse technology.  The later obviously ties it to the Thor franchise but the former is interesting.

In the comics HYDRA has always been a fascist organisation, but it never really originated in Nazi Germany.  Here it's basically the Red Skull's pet scientific organisation.  This works fine enough, especially as they ditch the silly bright costumes and properly retool them as Nazis.

In fact overall I have to say I quite enjoyed the film, despite my reservations.  It's just nuanced enough, particularly in regards the whole "representing America" thing that it works.  It actually manages to make something of a point in this regard and plays out how you might expect a Captain America to actually be used by the government.

The goodness comes through as being entirely down to him as a person, rather than any sort of jingo-istic thing.  However, there is a weird element to it in that it basically has the message that if you're a weakling you can't fight, which seems odd - anyone can be trained up.  Also, he seems smart enough, so could he not go into the engineering corps or something?

There is also a weird element that results from this aspect of the film.  Clearly they needed both a small version and a big version and it makes more sense that the guy they employ is bigger and they just use digital trickery and other effects to make him look smaller for the first part.  This works brilliantly - he really looks good.

What doesn't work is the voice.  A bigger person will generally have a deeper voice simply because of how the resonance works.  But they didn't adjust his voice at all when he's small, so you have this big deep, manly voice, coming from this little pip-squeak dude and I found it very disconcerting.

But apart from that I actually really enjoyed it.