I think it was at the Medal of Valour ceremony and not one of the shows.
I was impressed at two elements of casting:
One, how they found a guy to play Bucky who actually looks like a Jack Kirby drawing.
Two, that they went to the expense of both exhuming and re-animating the body of Truman Capote for Zola. Well done.
OMG…I thought you were just being snarky but after going to IMDB, I see that you’re not!
I liked the movie overall, but it did feel like important pieces were missing. Like, as someone mentioned earlier, any sort of reference to training.
Also, my issue with Red Skull wasn’t his motivation. Yeah, he’s just an evil asshole. He just doesn’t come across as an EFFECTIVE evil asshole in the movie. What actual wins did he rack up, at all, ever? He killed some Norwegian monks. Sure needed a giant tank for that! Then he captures a bunch of soldiers… off camera. After that, it’s just a series of beat downs by Cap. Even the scene that’s supposed to make him more evil than the Nazis is really just him shooting some bureaucrats with no repercussions.
If you judge someone by the enemies they keep, Cap doesn’t really get a chance to shine here, sadly enough.
I think a scene that would have gone a long way toward giving Red Skull a real sense of menace is if the Nazis sent troops to destroy this upstart traitor, and Red wipes them all out. It would give him a win without derailing the plot, and would demonstrate just how dangerous this guy really is.
Another thumb up. The plot was full of holes as noted. One thing that bugged me: why was Hitler letting RS get away with all his schemes. He wasn’t the kind of guy who shared power easily. But I just turned that part of my brain off and just enjoyed the a tion and the superscience. The howling commandos were cool, though it would have been nice to see Nick Fury senior.
One other thing I thought of, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, but red skull kind of reminds me of the Norway shooter. Yes there is a half baked political ideology, but really he just wanted to kill people for the sake of killing.
Heard on the radio that Captain America’s opening weekend outgrossed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
Which is amazing if true!
As far as I can tell, HP:TDHp2 Week 1 made much more than CA:TFA Week 1. However, CA:TFA Week 1 made more than HP:TDHp2 Week 2.
In other words, HP’s record for $ is higher, but performance was beaten by CA after HP’s opening.
Saw it yesterday and here are my comments and questions (random as usual):
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Liked the movie ALOT more than I expected to. For a purely CA movie (meaning not asa tie in to the Avengers) I was very pleased. I never liked the character in the comics but I thought the movie was very well done and Chris Evans pulled it off as good as anyone could for such a one dimensional character. I was entertained throughout the movie even though there were no surprises anywhere in it.
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Evans got HUGE for this thing. Seriously. Where did those pecs come from? If there ain’t some Barry Bonds going on there my name ain’t Orville Redennbacher.
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The romance may be faithful to the comics (never read CA so I can’t be sure) but it didn’t fit in the movie. I thought the actors had chemistry but the entire romance didn’t need to be there and wasn’t very believable.
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Please explain the Tesseract to me because I clearly don’t remember it correctly from my comic days. This leads into my next question
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They started off the movie calling the cube the Tesseract from Asgard but everyone is referring to it as the Cosmic Cube (which it behaved like, I think). What am I missing here? Was it the Tesseract or the CC?
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Someone please answer #5.
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I agree, whole heartedly, with an earlier poster who noticed that, once he was super buff, he seemed to automatically be able to kick ass like a super soldier. This made no sense to me at all and really broke the narrative for me. He went from doing push-ups in boot camp to selling war bonds then all of the sudden, because he needed to, he was able to beat some hydra ass and do jump kicks and shit. Not to mention that the shield’s ability to return to his hand when thrown isn’t addressed, though there is probably no believable reason for this anyway. This all should have been addressed, at least briefly. Training montage or something.
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Though CE pulled off CA in his own movie, and he did as good as any person could have done, I don’t think this movie set CA up as the leader he needs to be for Avengers. This is exacerbated by the fact that he was frozen pretty much immediately after he started fighting the Red Skull. His leadership was never developed (though for this 1-D character it may not need to be) so I don’t see how they will sell me on people like Tony Stark, Thor, and others following his orders to the death as it was in the comics.
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In case you haven’t done it yet someone answer #5.
All in all a very good movie and I walked away satisfied with how CA was handled on the big screen, though not sold on his integration with the Avengers. Expected a 5/10 and got a solid 8/10.
I dissent.
I thought this was one of Marvel’s weaker efforts. I thought they spent waaaaay too much time on the origin story. (It dragged for me.) All the time spent on the origin made the other parts of the story seem rushed. Should have spent less time on the origin, and more time on developing Captain America as a character once he gets his powers. (Missing scenes: one-on-one interactions with the howling commandos. Perhaps an obstacle for the team to overcome that better develops the individual characters.) Red Skull was also seriously underdeveloped and therefore uninteresting.
Also, Chris Evans just doesn’t carry this role for me. He just isn’t a very good actor. Zero charisma.
Only 6/10 for me.
I can get behind everything in your post except for Evan’s portrayal. Otherwise I think most of what you say is true.
I don’t. Frankly, I think the movie he’s describing would have dragged horribly.
What was the point of even introducing the commandos? They show us all these potentially interesting characters…and then don’t do a damn thing with them.
The tesseract and cosmic cube are two names for the same thing, one technical, one colloquial. I imagine they stayed away from saying “Cosmic Cube” because it sounds a little hokey.
While I don’t recall the comics ever referring to the Cosmic Cube as a tesseract in the comics; the Red Skull and the Cosmic Cube go way back, so I have no doubt that they are one and the same.
Ah, so they are the same item. Ok. That makes sense. Thanks.
Just came back from it. I’ve always been a fan of the trope of “greatness thrust upon”, that is, someone worthy is Chosen, and given power because they’re worthy of it, rather than getting it by accident and then (possibly) developing worthiness. So I liked it.
There was at least one genuine swastika shown in the movie, in the newsreel footage at the theater. I don’t know if that’s allowed under the relevant European laws.
Another visual oddity, though: It looked like, in the big fight between Cap and Skull at the end, there were a couple of frames where they missed Hugo Weaving’s “makeup” (which I assume was digital)-- I caught a glimpse of his actual face. And the skull-head was a little jarring for me, in that it looked like the skull was bigger than the “mask” (Weaving’s actual face) that was covering it.
I’m not sure that any of this is a spoiler, but I’ll tag it anyway just in case:
[spoiler]
I think they did a great job with the acting, for the major characters. The chemistry between Steve Rogers and Agent Carter did indeed work well, and I’ll have to disagree with whomever it was who said that the romance didn’t fit into the movie: A romance with good chemistry can fit well into any movie. And of course Evans did a good job of always being the little guy. Tommy Lee Jones made a great tough-and-grizzled general. Recognizing Hugo Weaving as Hugo Weaving took me out of the story a little, but only a little: It was more like “Huh, he reminds me of Hugo Weaving”, and I was actually a little bit surprised to see that it actually was. And Howard Stark reminded me more than just a little of Tony: They did a great job of playing up the family resemblance there.
On the action and effects, I only have three complaints. First, I would have liked it to be a little more clear that the shield wasn’t just a prototype, that it was literally irreplicable, but they probably couldn’t have fit what would be effectively two super-origin-stories into the movie. Second, I wasn’t really clear on how the ray-guns worked: Whenever one hit a person, the person was disintegrated immediately, but they had wildly inconsistent effect on inorganic matter. It’s OK that Captain’s shield could block them, since it’s canonically the single most indestructible object in the universe, but sometimes ordinary metal just got a little singed by them, and sometimes it got blasted (but not disintegrated). And why does it disintegrate people so exactly, anyway? You’d expect it to leave big holes in them, or take out part of the surrounding landscape, or something. Third, I’d have liked if they had shown the effect of some of those bombs, beyond just Stark’s “write that down” moment. Sure, we know what nukes are, and can picture them as having a similar effect, but the characters in the movie didn’t. Steve should have had to learn that a single bomb could destroy a city-- Just seeing them labeled doesn’t really have the same effect.
Oh, and as for his fighting skill, I didn’t really see that as a big problem. It wasn’t really touched on in the movie, but the serum does more than make him strong: It also boosts his agility, reflexes, and mental acuity. He’s had plenty of experience with fights, just from the wrong end: The serum gives him the memory to remember what happened in all of them, and the agility to reproduce it. And the movie did a good job of showing that he’s always reflexively tried for a shield.[/spoiler]
Basically I liked it but I do feel that it was a 2 hour set up for the The Avengers.
I’ve never read a single Captain America book but I did read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay so I think, in a way, I did.
Someone up thread said that Tommy Lee Jones got a lot of great lines. I disagree. Tommy Lee Jones makes those lines great. He is like Gene Hackman or Jack Lemmon. The lines just flow naturally from him.
The skinny guy looked good but he didn’t sound right. He had a deep voice that didn’t match his body. I would have been much happier to see two actors, who look similar, cast to play the role. The small differences of their appearance would not have been a big deal to me.
I felt the movie was uneven. Great scenes followed by terrible ones. I don’t get the montage of destroying the Red Skull bases. That was all very compacted. Red Skull was, for me, underdeveloped as a character but I’d rather have that fault than having the movie really be all about the villian. I’m looking at you Tim Burton.
A much better job than the Green Lantern film. That is a comic book I did read and I was not thrilled with the movie.
Saw it last night, thought it was pretty “meh”. Lots of CGI, few recognizable actors made it seem like a B-movie.
The one guy played a husband on Desperate Housewives; it threw me because he’s like a 50 year old dude and he was in the group of 20-something soldiers.
Tommy Lee Jones was great, as was Stanley Tucci. The first half was better than the second half, due to Tucci.
3/5 overall.
ETA:
+1.
After we left the theater our fanwank explanation was that the ray guns vibrated things into pieces. Organic matter is particularly susceptible. Cap’s shield (as they explain in the movie) absorbs all vibrations.
That’s what I thought, too - their addition seemed pretty gratuitous.
I think Tommy Lee Jones is another actor like Jack Nicholson who always plays the same character, but he does it so damned good that no one cares.