Captain America: The First AvengerThis movie has a very similar problem with The Incredible Hulk. It is definitely good, and has a lot of points that allow you to think for yourself, but it's really loose in some areas and really needs a lot of extra time to give it a polish.
This movie follows the story of how Steve Rogers, a young boy longing to fight for his country, get injected with a Super Soldier serum that makes him stronger and faster. He decides to become Captain America and take down Hydra, but in the end gets frozen in ice and wakes up in the present day, where he meets Nick Fury and finds out what's going on. I know I just spoiled the ending, but the whole movie details Captain America's origin leading up to him waking up in the present. I can't really talk in detail about the movie unless I explain the ending.
First, the good stuff. The way Captain America's origin was told here is really good, and even though Steve Rogers really isn't the most interesting of characters, (yeah, 'murrica) Chris Evans still portrays him well. The movie waits until the very end to show him getting out of the ice in the present day, which was a very smart decision, as it gives the audience time to understand Rogers and the trouble he goes through to get into the army. Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull was a great choice, and the Captain America suit itself looks awesome.
However, and I know a lot of you probably saw this coming, but the ending is really, really, profusely stupid. Not the fact that Steve ends up in the ice and wakes up in present day, but rather the way they get him to the ice. Okay, so we're gonna go step-by-step here, because everything about this is dumb.
Red Skull's master plan is to launch nukes to different countries and rule the world afterwards. The nukes are made to be ejected from a silly-looking boomerang plane, where they will be piloted by Hydra soldiers and crash landed in their destinations. In order to indicate where each nuke plane is headed, Red Skull painted the names of the countries they were going to blow up on the planes in English. Are you guys still following me here? In the final fight, Captain America fights the different pilots and ejects a few of the nuke planes while the big plane is over the ocean. Because they are over the ocean, the ejected nuke planes do not explode. Then, the Captain beats up Red Skull, and then in the fight, the Tesseract which Red Skull is using as a power source falls out of the machine and Red Skull picks it up with his bare hands and disintegrates because I guess Red Skull is an idiot now. The Captain then pilots the big plane and when Peggy Carter radios to him, he says that he can't land the plane because if he does, the nuke planes will explode. Why? When were we supposed to know this? He says that he has to crash the plane into the water, because that's safer. Okay, if we're supposed to assume that landing the plane normally is dangerous, then why would he have to crash into the water? Can't he just eject the nuke planes manually and then land normally?
"But Ian, he needs to pilot the plane, or else it will crash anyways."
Really? Wasn't the plane auto-piloting during the big fight with the Red Skull? Who's writing this garbage? And then Steve wakes up, and we see Shield's amazing, well thought-out method of making just one fake room for Steve to wake in that looks like it's from his time period, only to let him escape and run out of the building into Times Square. Is there not any security in this place? Why make one fake, incredibly small room within a much bigger room for Steve to wake up in. Nick Fury greets him and says that they just wanted to ease him into the revelation that woke up decades in the future, but that's complete nonsense. If you wanted to ease him into it, why did you make him wake up in an incredibly small room where if he just looks out the fake window he tell that it is fake?! Why would you do something so stupid?!
Overall, Captain America: The First Avenger is a fun, although frustrating entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Also something something patriotism.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Let me put this in simple terms:
This movie is awesome on steroids. This movie is one of the few MCU films I can definitively say is well written, and while it may seem like a stretch, I think this is actually slightly better than The Avengers. Allow me to explain why down below.
The movie follows Cap' in present day working with Shield, and everything seems okay until Nick Fury reveals Project Insight, which involves three big helicarriers with machine guns meant to eliminate any possible threats ahead of time. The Captain is furious, saying that Shield is keeping the world safe by putting a gun to its head. Shortly after, Nick Fury is hunted down and shot presumably by the Winter Soldier, a mysterious man with a robotic arm. Armed with a flash drive and their wits, Captain America and Black Widow eventually figure out that Shield has been slowly infiltrated by Hydra from the inside, and now Cap' and Widow don't have anybody to trust. In the end, they take down Shield, destroy the helicarriers, and discover that the Winter Soldier was actually Cap's friend from the war: Bucky Barnes. DUN DUN DUNNN. As you can tell, this movie is very densely packed with information and plot threads, which all come together in the end very well. Of course, there's a bunch of information that was left out, but the plot is so thick that it's near impossible to talk in depth about it without listing everything that happened in order.
For the good stuff, there's quite a lot. Black Widow is finally given a personality here, both when she tries to get Steve Rogers a date and when she starts questioning the fact she has been working for Hydra. The Winter Soldier may not appear very much in this movie, but every time he does appear, he's awesome. All of the fight scenes are exceptionally well choreographed and shot, and while I do wish that the movie wouldn't cut away so quickly during the fights, they were still satisfying. Samuel L. Jackson is still awesome as usual as Nick Fury, and Falcon was really cool. I've been told by many that in the comics Falcon wasn't very interesting, so it's a good thing we got a better version for the movies.
Also, I know pretty much everybody expected this, but the Shield/Hydra twist was brilliant. Not just because it makes all of Shield past decisions in these movies more questionable, but also because throughout the second half of this movie, nobody knows who to trust anymore. I mean, we know Captain America, Black Widow, Nick Fury, and a few other Shield agents are the good guys, but aside from that, characters we once knew from Agents of Shield or any of the extra short films from Phase One are either definitely bad guys or in a gray area. Both Trust and Freedom are primary themes in this movie, and they're both juggled very well. With Trust, Nick Fury talks about how he doesn't really trust that many people, and that in Shield, you can only really count on yourself. Not everybody knows all the information, not even the Captain. With Freedom, a lot of the movie focuses on Freedom v.s Security, mainly with Project Insight, which if you remember, is made specifically to kill millions of potential "threats" before they even do anything bad. Captain America even says, and I quote: "This isn't freedom, this is fear."
Okay, so what don't I like about this movie? Uhh....
...I didn't get to see it in theaters? I don't know, this movie is near perfect. I guess if I could say anything, it would be that Steve Rogers still isn't really that interesting this time around. I mean, Steve was never really interesting, but that doesn't make it not awkward when he's surrounded by so many characters way more interesting than he is. But when that's really the only problem with your movie, that's a pretty good sign. This movie is awesome, without a doubt the best of all the Marvel movies so far.
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