I saw "Captain America: The First Avenger" last night, and enjoyed it. It was just a fun summer "popcorn movie," that was entertaining without taking itself too seriously, but which had the right amount of explosions and grand CGI graphics to make it a fun bit of fluff. After so many overblown blockbuster type movies, this one did what it had to do well. Hugo Weaving was great as the Red Skull -- he oozed venom, and it's another notch in his villain case, to be sure (he and Mark Strong really excel at playing villains). I wished that the Skull and Cap had crossed paths a little more -- for a 2-hour movie, it went by pretty quickly, was well-paced, although there wasn't a real sense of the Skull and Cap really properly crossing swords enough for my tastes -- they jump to a montage sequence too early, which advanced the story maybe too much. But the quality of the actors sprinkled throughout it (like Stanley Tucci playing a dissident German scientist in American employ -- didn't see that coming), and the general retro sheen to it made it entertaining. I already know my boys will love it -- B1 will love the Red Skull's apocalyptic Flying Wing. I haven't seen all of the Marvel lead-in movies for next year's "Avengers," but the audacity and scope of the effort is impressive -- I just really hope the story and writing is there to make up for it. We'll see. But as the latest link in the chain (figuratively and literally), this one was a good effort. I was amused by the appearance of the Cosmic Cube -- that's a bit of Marvel lore that only folks who read Marvel Comics might have a clue about (in fact, I've seen some reviewers wonder what that cube was). That's a nice tie-in with the Red Skull, who was in possession of a Cosmic Cube at one point. It's the kind of a comic geek detail that they didn't really have to even put in there, but I was tickled that they did. I purposely didn't see the 3-D version of it, not wanting to pay extra money for it, and being annoyed at 3-D mania, anyway.
It's kind of weird to have Cap coming to this day and age -- his "Aw, shucks" and "Gee whiz" kind of Americana persona up against late-era, decline-and-fall Amerika? Kinda ironic, and beyond the scope of what these movies can even be about, but Cap would look at today's America and think "Holy Moly, the fascists WON World War II??" The Red Skull has the last laugh, I guess!
