CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Version: Paramount 2011 2D Blu-Ray

Marvel has been cranking out the films as of late, leading up to next year's Avengers. So naturally, we needed a movie featuring the big cheese himself: Captain America.

I am a DC girl, so naturally I don't know very much about the comics. Therefore this review will be written from the perspective of the average movie viewer who has no Capt. history under her belt.

To begin, a summary of the plot: it's WW2, and the Germans are beating the crap out of the US. A special division of the German army, Hydra, has come up with a new weapon that renders the US efforts in vain. The US has a secret weapon in the works, however, and that weapon is the super soldier serum. Steve Rogers, a scrawny kid that has been rejected from the Army countless times, is chosen to undergo the super soldier procedure and becomes Captain America.

Yes, that summary sucked. But I'll tell you why: you need to see the movie itself. Describing the plot is possible, but you lose out on the heart of the picture. As action filled as a comic book movie can get, this one has a lot of heart- just like the protagonist. ;) Most war movies make the US look indestructible and the enemies like fools to be slaughtered. This movie, however, does a little better. Nameless German mooks get offed left and right, but you get to see more of the struggles the main characters face while at war.

The special effects are freaking genius. Chris Evans (whom you may recognize from the Fantastic Four movies) is slimmed down in the beginning of the movie to match the character's scrawny origin, and it doesn't look fake in the slightest. On the contrary, I think the scene where he comes out of the test chamber full of muscles looks more fake (and that's actually him!). Red Skull looks pretty sweet, too, although I can't help but wonder why Elrond turned to evil. XD (The minute Weaving opens his mouth, you're going to hear Elrond, ESPECIALLY when he starts going on about the tesseract/Cosmic Cube. It gets better though, when he switches from an Elfish accent to a German one.)

As expected for a manly movie, there isn't a lot of romance. There's really only one female character, but you have to remember the setting. In WW2, the women were usually nurses or workers back in the US. Feel free to take your kids to see this one, language is never worse than cable tv fare and bloodshed is more along the "vaporized" variety than the "legs and arms shot off" kind.

I would rate this in the top 2 among the Avenger movies released so far, and probably the best out of all the Marvel super hero adaptations in terms of general accomplishment. Thor is awesome, but it lacks action. Iron Man 2 has plenty of action, but the story wavers. Captain America manages to take the best of both and combine them in a single film.

I like the first Iron Man just as much as this one, but they're sort of hard to compare. This is a WW2 movie, that is a Middle East war movie. Tony Stark is the better of the two character-wise, as his character actually develops. Steve Rogers is sort of the opposite- his character remains fairly stable throughout the film, but that's to be expected since he didn't need the growth to begin with (and it's a plot point in the film that he retains his original character after the transformation). Captain America pulls out ahead of the two movies, though, because it flows a lot better than Iron Man. There is an abrupt jump into the fighting later on, but Captain America balances it out with character interaction.

This definitely belongs in any movie fan's collection. You do not need much history to follow the story . There are a few bits here and there that make more sense if you've read the comics, but if you've at least seen Thor, you should be fine. Don't bother buying the 3D version- it was post production as usual and there are no special extras on the disc over the regular blu-ray.