This is the start of a series of picoreviews inspired by a rewatch of the entire MCU Captain America storyline, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while and finally have. A reCap, if you will. O_O
The Cap movies are my favorites anyway, start to finish (Black Panther vies for a top 3 slot depending on how recently I’ve seen it, but I never wibble on the Cap films being in my top 5), so rewatching it all hasn’t been a hardship. Except Age of Ultron, but we’ll get to that. :)
Onward with the actual review!
Picoreview: The First Avenger – I love this movie wholeheartedly. I’ve seen it at least seven times and I never don’t love it. :) AFAIC, its only flaw is that it didn’t spin us off at least one movie about the Howling Commandos punching Nazis. :) Well, that and ‘The First Avenger’ is a really weak title, to the point that I actually think it did it harm at the box office.
That aside, though, the story is honestly really solid. It’s a straight-forward origin story, and I remain delighted to this day that they stuck with the “Vita-Rays” as part of the creation process for Captain America. It’s corny, but it’s good-hearted, and at the end of the day, that’s kinda the whole point.
Chris Evans is so good as the little guy who doesn’t like bullies. He just really is, and he really sells the character both as the little guy and the big man very well. His first action scene as he chases the bad guys out of the lab involves quite a lot of tiny ‘what the hell, am I really DOING this?’ expressions, and it’s charming and spot-on.
Re-watching it after years of reading analyses of it is also wonderful, because it lets me notice the more subtle moments where Steve cops on to what’s happening REALLY FAST and displays his intelligence in ways I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed when I first watched it. The bit where he takes the pin out of the flagpole is blatant, but when he wakes up in 2011, it’s not just that he was at that baseball game that’s on the radio—it’s that the woman who first speaks to him’s clothes are all wrong to somebody who was actually there, and you can see him sussing that out as he looks her over. It’s great stuff.
And of course, it introduces MY MCU character with Hayley Atwell’s Peggy, who really does very clearly like Steve before he gets big, and who is also right from the start clearly SO MUCH MORE AGGRO than Steve is, which is reflected significantly in the eventual What-If storylines. I love that. :)
Sebastian Stan made me care about Bucky, a character I probably couldn’t have independently named prior to the movies. He’s portrayed as possibly even less actually aggro than Steve, who just cannot let a situation lie, and in the early scenes very much comes across as a man who really only gets into fights to help his idiotic but righteous tiny friend. Like Steve, he obviously doesn’t like bullies; unlike Steve, he’s big enough that nobody picks on him, but he’s clearly a really decent man.
And my GOD that decency is so incredibly powerfully portrayed as Steve leads the rescued men back into camp. Bucky’s expression is absolutely fucking devastating—angry, bitter, hurt, I don’t even know what all else—as they’re coming back in, as people start crowding Steve, and he calls out, “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” Holy shit, that expression. I’ve read (fic) that suggests Bucky’s angry/upset about finally having to share Steve, but I don’t think that’s…most, anyway…of what’s going on there. I’m not sure what is, tbh. Resentment, definitely, whether it’s over sharing Steve or over Steve becoming this big strapping hero while Bucky himself was tortured and nearly died, or… what else… but what I do know is that whatever his OBVIOUSLY INCREDIBLY CONFLICTED feelings are in that moment, he does the right thing. At obvious personal cost, he supports his friend and encourages the soldiers around them to cheer for Captain America. He makes the moment about Steve and pushes him into the role of hero and leader in a way that Steve would never have actually done himself. And that’s both amazing as an act of brotherhood and a performance, because Stan REALLY SELLS his emotional conflict in that moment. Bucky Barnes is a good man, and I’ve gotten increasingly fond of him as the Cap storyline has gone on.
I remain retroactively crushed on the film’s behalf that it didn’t get the love I thought it deserved when it came out, but I gUeSs it also didn’t have a mainstream star* pulling it along in the way Iron Man did. And it was a period piece. So a harder sell. But I think it’s hugely underrated.
*ok RDJ was technically more ‘Flawlessly Cast Known Name And Disaster Waiting To Happen’ than ‘mainstream star’ when Iron Man came out, but Chris Evans was merely flawlessly cast, he didn’t have the other …advantages?… going in.