[7.0/10] It’s hard to disaggregate *Captain America: The First Avenger* from the scores of projects (frankly, better projects) that followed in its wake. The MCU was barely off the ground in 2011, and *The Avengers* was still a big gamble and nearly a year away from its enormous debut. It’s hard to watch Cap’s first outing free from the context of seeing it as the introduction of Agent Carter, the establishment of Bucky, the first appearance of Hydra, and scores of other little details, big and small, that would come to give texture and form to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
And yet, if you evaluate it as a standalone film it’s...a pretty standard late 2000s/early 2010s superhero flick. It gains some juice from the period setting, and it has a murderer’s row of character actors to liven things up. But apart from that cinematic universe firmament, *Captain America 1* is a perfectly fine but hardly overwhelming initial outing for the character, which has more in common tonally with the X-Men movies than with the later MCU films.
The film is surprisingly episodic, which perhaps makes sense for a superhero origin story. The movie feels less like one complete story than it does a series of vignettes from Steve’s life up until the point he was frozen. There’s his time as a wannabe pipsqueak eventually chosen to become America’s first supersoldier. There’s his interlude as a war bonds mascot. There’s his secret escapade to rescue his best friend. There’s a montage of his adventures with the Howling Commandos. And there’s a final effort to take out Red Skull that leads to Steve’s big sacrifice.
These various events don’t so much feed into one another as they just so happen to occur in sequence. There’s little sense of cause and effect connecting them. Instead, the film seems content to trace the various adventures of Steve Rogers, at times pausing to move the various pieces into place for tidbits familiar to comic book fans or set up his unfreezing in the future. In that way, the film is creaky in places, seeming more a collection of checked boxes for the canonical origin story of the character and his corner of the Marvel Universe, along with a smattering of cross-movie connections.
But a few things do provide a throughline for the film, and even boost it into something occasionally quite memorable. The major throughline is Steve himself. Captain America doesn’t have much of an arc here, or if he does, it’s largely over halfway through the movie. He’s more or less the same person he was at the end of the film as he was in the beginning. Only, after the first act, he has a body to match his heart and his will.
That is, however, kind of the point. *The First Avenger* quickly establishes a few key details about Steve: that he never gives up, that he has a will to help stop bullies in any form, and that he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save others. It’s those qualities that provide what Dr. Erskine is looking for when he wants Steve to be his test subject for the super soldier serum. The serum magnifies not only strength and ability, but who a person is, a fact which makes Steve ideal for the program, regardless of whether he’s “still skinny.” He knows what it’s like to be powerless, which means he’ll treat power as a gift, something to be appreciated and used for greater good, rather than taken for granted.
It’s a little cheesy, but Stanley Tucci sells the hell out of the idea and makes a big impression in a short amount of screentime. He’s just one of the stellar character actors the movie brings aboard to help breathe some life into a semi-typical hero origin tale. Tucci’s iconoclastic earnestness comes through in Dr. Erskine. Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious as Steve’s sharp-witted and sharp-tongued commanding officer. Hugo Weaving and Toby Jones chew scenery with aplomb as the bad guys. And even bit parts for Dominic Chase as Howard Stark create something memorable.
This is all especially good, because Chris Evans is pretty flat as Rogers. He would go on to become a strength of the MCU, finding a way to convey that inner goodness of the character without being boring. But here, he’s basically a blank slate for milquetoast platitudes. Even Hayley Atwell, who’s more than proven herself as a charismatic actress, sees her light obscured given her prominent yet underwritten role, even if she still manages to shine in a few choice moments. The center of the piece isn’t strong enough to carry it yet, which means a superb cast has to pick up the rest of the slack.
The casting livens up some quick-hit stops through the various phases of Steve’s life. None of these little miniature episodes are bad exactly, but they don’t fit together and play as somewhat generic. Indifferent and/or unconvincing action sequences are dutifully sprinkled in, and the various comic book canon necessities, like the Howling Commandos, are dropped in without really being established or developed. *The First Avenger* tries to cram all of these random bits and pieces together because the inevitable time jump, and it makes the whole thing feel scattered in places.
Still, there’s something compelling about watching those three essential qualities in Steve emerge and blossom once he has the might to go along with his desire. He still never stops fighting, whether he’s going against local brutes in an alley or a power mad Nazi lieutenant. He still stands up to bullies, whether they’re shouting at a movie theater or propping up the Axis powers. And he’s still willing to make the sacrifice play, whether he’s a pipsqueak falling on a grenade or a literal posterboy taking down a dangerous enemy ship lest it reach his hometown.
The rendition of this is more solid than sparkling. But it lays the groundwork for the character and his animating impulses in a way that creates room to grow. His relationship with Peggy isn’t the deepest or the most explored, but it’s sketched just enough for us to understand their connection. His loss of Bucky isn’t fully examined, but we see enough of his reaction and understanding of his friend’s choice to appreciate his. And the character isn’t exactly the most memorable out of the gate, but the core parts of his personality and M.O. find their way onto the screen, ready to be fleshed out and challenged by later stories and events.
If the MCU had puttered out and all we got were these first few movies, *Captain America: The First Avenger* would likely have been a footnote, held dear by few beyond dedicated superhero fans. But as one of the major roots of the interconnected storytelling universe of the MCU, there’s enough for fans of later work to appreciate in the film as a shaky, but important first step.
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