journal features

movie review - Captain America: The First Avenger

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2016.10.14

We watched this for "movie night" with the kids. Captain America starts out as a scrawny young man rejected from military service. He's got plenty of heart but not a great deal of strength and stamina. He's admitted to a program to make him a super-warrior, and the result is a figure as physically heroic as he is in character. The chief scientists is then assassinated, leaving the new recruit as the only example of the program's success.

Dressed in patriotic garb, he's deployed as a propaganda tool during World War II. But active duty calls and he runs afoul of an early iteration of Hydra, the rather silly clone of Specter from the equally silly Bond movies. It's Hydra that killed the chief scientist, in their efforts to thwart the program that produced Captain America.

The story takes off from there, and sets the stage for Captain America eventually joining our time.

In the end, it's a super-hero movie and there's only so much we can expect. But we enjoyed the story for the charismatic and selfless nature of the hero and the overall story which was a bit more Dr. Who-leaning or perhaps Bond-leaning than the typical Marvel movie. Compared to Iron Man, Captain America is a compelling person, certainly out of sync with today's celebration of the billionaire sociopath.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner