The Star-Spangled Man with a Plan!

Well, I feel like an asshole. After a solid week of nothing but fervent, foaming-at-the-mouth positive reviews of Captain America all over the internet and other, harder-to-acquire media, I saw it this Saturday night.

Yeah, it was pretty good. Wait wait wait don't hit me!

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the vibe. Maybe I should read more than a couple sites for my reviews, especially when one of them is Ain't It Cool News. I might as well check Fox News to see if they think Republicans are still pretty neat. But I had expected this glorious, perfect WWII epic, and it was... for the first three-quarters. Eh, maybe two-thirds. Three-fifths? Nah, three-quarters. 75% was every bit as great as Iron Man, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk. The rest of it wasn't bad, but it was closer to Ang Lee's Hulk or maybe Green Lantern. Must... not... derail... review... with Green Lantern... review...!!! Whew. Okay. I'm over it.

Anyway, I loved most of it. I didn't quite tear up, but when li'l Steve jumps on the grenade, I got that pre-tearing-up thing going where your facial muscles start quivering and I got a little choked up. When Steve's a weakling, his determination is clear (even though Chris Evans's head floating on some skinny dude's body was kind of disconcerting). When he emerges from the experiment and has to chase that Hydra spy down, I believe him. Even when he's doing his goofy USO show, I feel like Steve really wants to contribute more to the war effort. But after he frees the Howling Commandos and blows up the first Hydra base... it's like when a show gets cancelled and they have to wrap stuff up fast. The whole montage of them striking base after base of the Red Skull's agents was over way too fast for me. I thought that was going to be, like, the bulk of the movie. Instead they cram it into what would, admittedly, make an awesome music video. Are you kidding? Slap a Kid Rock single onto that three minutes of action sequences and that's the only recruiting video the army needs for the next twenty years.

After the big rescue-mission scene, which I will reiterate was itself fun as fucking hell, everything just feels too easy. Predestined. The other fans will hopefully take my meaning here: you know Bucky's going to die. You know there's some kind of bomb aimed at the USA. You know Cap's headed for a long nap in an iceberg. So when it happens, and it happens, well, not only differently from the comic book, but also in a less logical way, you're just left scratching your head.

Let me see if I can reconstruct this from memory: in the comics, Cap, Bucky and the Commandos storm the Nazis'/Hydra's/whoever's(hereafter referred to as "the bad guys") base. The bad guys basically have the first-ever ICBM and have it trained on the US. Either Washington or New York, I dunno. The Commandos kick the bad guys' asses but then the Skull (or Baron Zemo or whoever, I forget who it was in the comics) hits the big "launch" button and it goes off while Cap and Bucky are trying to disarm it. So they get rocketed into the sky over the Arctic Circle, where they realize they can't disarm the bomb, so Bucky knocks Cap into the ocean before he manages to blow the thing up in midair, saving millions of lives. Cap freezes, wakes up decades later in our present. Done.

So why did they engineer a way more complicated scenario that manages to punk the hero, his sidekick, and the villain? Bucky plummets to his "death" (it's comics, y'know) from the side of a mountain. No heroic sacrifice, he's just hanging from the side of a train and loses his grip. The Red Skull touches the Cosmic Cube with his bare hands, which apparently is a no-no, and gets Raptured up to Space-Heaven. (I mean okay we know it's Asgard, but if you haven't seen Thor I can't see how the scene would make any sense.) So Cap doesn't get to knock his adversary out of a plane or anything cool. He doesn't get to prove he's stronger than the Skull. The Skull just fucks up so bad he gets Mega Man-teleported out of the super-bomber-plane-thing. Oh yeah, there's a super-bomber-plane-thing.

The last bit with Cap on the plane feels like they just watched the beginning of the new Star Trek and decided to steal it. It's almost the exact same scene. So I understand Cap probably couldn't possibly be trained to fly a Nazi super-bomber-plane-thing, maybe he never got the chance to fly any plane at all, but... couldn't he have jumped out once the thing was on-course to just hit an ice floe? Would the Red Skull not have put at least one parachute on the plane, for himself? PS, WHY WAS THERE A PLANE? Have we learned nothing from Dr. Strangelove? Since when is failing to land a plane cooler than RIDING A BOMB? I mean, it'd be a little undignified for him to whoop and holler and wave his helmet in the air while he did it, but just sitting there and waiting to die isn't exactly Cap's style, either. Now, it felt a little shoehorned-in seeing the Skull teleported to Asgard, and having Howard Stark pop up every 15 minutes to go "hey, I'm Iron Man's dad!" again, but I didn't really mind. Most of the name-checks to other comics icons were cool. It felt a little lame that they took the oldest property of the four (Cap, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor) and bent it around to make it fit all the other films, but even if it was intrusive, it didn't piss me off. But this part... I know they had to freeze Cap so that he could wake up in the present, but why did they take a perfectly good plot and replace it with one in which everyone involved looks worse?

Okay. Over it. The rest of the movie? Loved it. Tommy Lee Jones steals the goddamn show with every line he has. Hayley Atwell does well with what she's given, and she gets a little more to work with than your average "I'm the love interest who's almost-but-not-quite as good as the hero!" female lead. Side note: Praying earnestly that they make Gwyneth Paltrow be Rescue for Iron Man 3. Anyway. Like I said, Howard Stark feels kind of forced, but it's a fun kind of forced. Like if Stan Lee could actually act, this is the kind of role they'd give him: another comic book character to remind the audience that there are other comic book characters besides the title character. Stanley Tucci's my favorite supporting character, though. The idea that Dr. Erskine really loves and respects Steve, that he's not just a guinea pig, is communicated clearly. When Steve's in the Rebirth chamber and starts screaming, Erskine's reaction is immediately to stop, to get him out of there. It's really touching. Bucky and the rest of the Howling Commandos are fine, they just don't get enough time to really, really matter to me. Too bad, because I liked what I saw.

After Cap heroically fails to land and/or jump out of a plane, the end of the 1940s sequence is pretty abrupt, and is followed five minutes later by a no-less-abrupt ending in 2011. I'm fine with it, I guess, but I felt bad for the little kids who're left thinking, "wait, did he win or what?" especially the ones whose parents took them home before the credits were over. The Avengers teaser was very cool, but it made the last five minutes of Cap look like a pre-deleted scene from the Avengers.

To reiterate, I didn't hate the whole thing. I didn't hate any of it, actually. I loved the rescue mission, the USO show, Steve's transformation and the accompanying chase scene, the training sequences... now I'm just going in backwards order through all the scenes I liked. Sorry. It was good. Maybe even great. The ride just got a little bumpy towards the end. I'll live. Seriously, though, I can't get that USO Captain America theme song out of my head. I love it. The movie's worth seeing for that alone.

All right, that's it. Forgive a cranky old habitual fault-finder. Maybe soon I can finally watch The Rocketeer and shit all over that, too.

--T.

Nazis! I HATE those guys. Psychiatrists? I REALLY hate those guys!

Captain America #26-31
Written by Ed Brubaker
Drawn by Steve Epting

Man, the Red Skull is an asshole.
Seriously, if Fascism boiled down to giving out free ice cream and playing fetch with puppies, he’d still be a monomaniacal jerk who only hangs out with other jerks. In the issues I read, the Red Skull:
-berates his chief scientist Arnim Zola for saying a new time-travel device will soon be usable for their purposes instead of his (the Skull’s) purposes. Touchy! There’s no “I” in “world domina…” I mean, there’s no “me” in “kill Captain Ameri…” Crap. You know what I mean.
-Tells a soldier that his broadcast “had better be secure” right after the guy tells him that it is. Jeez, Dad, I told you I did it! You wanna re-secure the line to make sure I did it right, go ahead!
-Speaking of “Dad,” he lets his own daughter get the crap kicked out of her by the Winter Soldier (the sidekick formerly known as Bucky) because “I needed to see if he’d be willing to kill you… or if he’s going to be completely useless.” Someone get this man a World’s Greatest Dad coffee mug!
-Oh yeah, and he sets Captain America up to get killed. But! Not only does he have his own guy, Crossbones, shoot Cap with a rifle from across the street. No, he has this creepy bearded guy, Dr. Faustus, mess with Sharon Carter’s head so that she shoots Cap three more times, in the gut no less, after Crossbones nails him in the shoulder. (Sharon Carter= Cap’s Agent-of-SHIELD lady-friend.)

But yeah, in the aftermath of Cap’s assassination, it’s harder to just hate the Skull because he’s a former Nazi—former, because, as he says, “I’m bigger than Fascism now.” I hate him because he’s a cold, calculating jerk and a selfish poophead. And now Microsoft Word is informing me that “poophead” isn’t a real word. Whatever. It’s what he is. That, and a creepy ghost in a Russian guy’s head. No, really! Because of some crazy hoodoo having to do with the Cosmic Cube (another one of those “bend reality however you want, until a superhero kicks you in the bollocks and takes it away” devices that villains love so much), the Skull is dead, but he’s possessing the body of former Soviet general Aleksander Lukin, who’s now an obscenely rich oil magnate. And between Lukin’s private army and the Skull’s dedicated (re: ape$#!t-crazy) followers, they’ve got enough manpower (and with scientist Zola and creepy brainwasher Faustus) enough brainpower to overthrow America as an encore for killing the Captain.
And while I’m ranting about villains… while Faustus is worth a bit of scorn—he’s so creepy, not only for brainwashing countless SHIELD agents and eventually Bucky, but for having that huge, luxuriant red beard that goes down to his waist—even with a suit and a monocle on, he looks like he should be carrying around a bottle of Jack and an eightball of coke with an entourage of groupie skanks. He should be touring with Skynyrd, not the Skull! Anyway, there’s Arnim Zola, who’s ten times creepier than Faustus—for God’s sake, he’s a brain in a robot body, to start with—but then, because he’s so damn practical, he didn’t put the actual physical brain in the head region of the humanoid robot body. He put it in the torso, the better to protect it from injury. Fair enough. But then he has a TV screen on his torso that shows an image of his face that moves its mouth and makes expressions as he talks. Why would anyone bother to do that. And even that little aesthetic choice isn’t the real problem. Okay, we’ve got a guy who put his brain into a robot and then didn’t give the robot a proper head. Okay. Instead his talking-TV death-mask is mounted on his tummy. Okay. The robot is wearing a jacket.
WHY. WHY DOES A ROBOT WEAR A JACKET.
Okay, sorry, there are other things about the comic besides Steve Epting’s lack of logic vis a vis proper attire for cyborgs. There are still heroes, even though the titular character is dead. There’s the Falcon, who kicks much ass despite having the most unfortunate costume ever for espionage purposes. I can’t avoid it so I’m going to get it out of the way: Falcon is the Nightwing to Cap’s Batman. Intensely loyal. The best friend Cap could have. But he’s got his own thing. He’s not going to put on the stars and stripes (even though I’ve often thought he should, and just incorporate his wings into the outfit. I dunno. Just a thought). He signed up with Stark’s Initiative, told them “give me Harlem and leave me the hell alone,” and went back out there to find the Skull and make him pay.
Speaking of making people pay, there’s the Winter Soldier. He still absolutely blows my mind. For years—decades—since the return of Jean Grey after the Dark Phoenix saga, it’s been the rule: “Only Bucky stays dead.” And now he’s alive, and somehow Ed Brubaker got us all to swallow that fact without wanting to put his head on a pike! I’m still in awe, a bit. Condensed down to one sentence: Bucky’s body got found in the Arctic Ocean by Soviets who took him in and brainwashed him and trained him and put him in stasis and used him as an assassin and he only aged ten years through the whole Cold War and then he got out when Lukin tried to buy him and Cap used the Cosmic Cube to make him remember he was Bucky! Whew.
Since Cap’s death, the Soldier has been waiting for the right moment to kill two men: the Skull, and Tony Stark, both of whom he feels are responsible for what happened to his old mentor. He managed to take the True Shield (sorry, Steven Colbert—yours is plastic) from Black Widow, and tracked down Lukin, whom he thought would lead him to the Skull. He was a little too right, and when Sin (the Skull’s hot daughter) and Crossbones couldn’t kill him, the Skull turns him “off” with an old hypnotic suggestion code from Bucky’s Soviet days. But back to Sin—the Skull’s smoking hot daughter. She’s why I really, really hate the Skull. Not only is he just on the world’s biggest revenge kick—he only wants to crush America because Cap stopped him so many times back in the old days, and now it’s the only idea he’s got—but he turned his (totally smoking hot) daughter into a crappy villain. Okay, she’s a remorseless killing machine. And? Look, there are a lot of lonely comic book readers out there. And on their behalf, I’d like to say that, we get enough of this in the real world. Not all the hot girls in comics have to be good! We love evil hot chicks! But can’t they be interesting evil hot chicks, not just more screwed-in-the-head Daddy’s girls? Can’t we have her be a seductive Nazi interrogator? Or, I don’t know, a mistress of disguise? No. She’s got an Uzi and some knives and a corset. And as sexy as two of those things—uh, I mean, one of those things! Shut up! You can’t judge me!—might be, she’s as two-dimensional as Arnim Zola’s face. It’s depressing. But if we’re talking about depressing, Cap getting shot still wins out over evil redheads. Close, though. So close.
After issues 30 and 31, I’m definitely interested in what happens next in this series. Is someone else going to wind up dead? Will Sharon beat Faustus’s mind control? For that matter, will Bucky? Will Lukin try to resist the Skull? It’s a dark time for fans of Cap, but if you’ve been online at all, you’ve probably seen the Alex Ross drawings of the “New Cap” coming next year. We all know it’s going to be Bucky. But will he really be the Captain? Or will he be another pawn in the Skull’s poopheaded “nyah nyah look at me I’m bigger than Fascism, thhpppt” plan? I’m interested in finding out. Seriously, when I wasn’t being creeped out by the villains, I enjoyed this book. Killing Cap was a ballsy move on Brubaker’s and Marvel’s part. Will “only Cap stays dead” be the rule of the future? I kind of hope so, for integrity’s sake… but for the world’s sake, I kind of hope not, sometimes. The world’s a grimmer, grittier place without Cap to rally us ‘round the flag.

Rating: Three Vodka Collins.