The Last Movie I Saw

I kind of rag on comic-book based movies a lot here on the blog. Even when I enjoy them, it's only as a kind of guilty pleasure, with plenty of reservations. Often such criticisms involve the filmmakers taking themselves much too seriously (this was a feature of the recent Thor, for example, or further back, Daredevil), or concocting over-the-top stories built on special effects to the point where any human dimension is completely lost (the Wolverine movie). Often, they are just too silly to bear remembering, even if they do deliver an evening's worth of kicks (Fantastic Four). The new Captain America: The First Avenger pretty much avoids all these traps, and does so by approaching its story with both humor and some respect for the fans who made the character a hit in the first place, by which I mean comic readers of the 1940s. I think most of the credit for this goes to the director Joe Johnston, who has displayed a knack for this kind of material in earlier films like The Rocketeer (itself based on the period comics character created by Dave Stevens) and October Sky, which was different kind of historical drama but one that also required a deft hand to keep the story's melodramatic aspects from overwhelming its otherwise inspiring plot. I'm also impressed with the job done by Chris Evans as Captain America-- I'm told he was in other movies I've seen (including the aforementioned Fantastic Four), but I don't think I would've been able to pick him out on a lobby card based on that previous work. In this film, he too strikes a great balance between the character's bouts of self-doubt and the qualities that eventually mark him as a hero. There were a lot of touches in this film that also played to the fan-boy in me, especially the very natural introduction of the Howlin' Commandos from another classic Marvel comic book, albeit one that didn't appear until the 1960s. The USO scenes were also great, signaling perhaps a subtle nod to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. Clearly Captain America does not share the serious intent of that earlier film, but I can't help but think that a double feature of the pair would reveal as many similarities as differences in defining something of the World War II era's zeitgeist. That's way more than you can say for most of the other comic book movies that have become so ubiquitous lately.