Captain America Vs Nazi Aliens

Let me make this perfectly clear: In order to be a successful super villain you must learn to understand, accept, and even appreciate super heroes. In order to become a successful movie producer you must learn to undermine, exploit, and degrade the hero until they are a meaningless husk. Many villains get the roles of villain and movie producer mixed up, and that is where they fail. Arrogance has led to the downfall of many a villain, when that hubris should be channeled into a positive strength. Look at yourself as you prepare to face your foe in combat and ask yourself, "Would my armada of chainsaw-wielding bears and death beam that fires the souls of dragons be enough to stop me?" If the answer is the resounding laughter of hubris, then perhaps it's time to re-assess your situation. Meanwhile, by emotionally reducing characters to one trait a piece, and adding explosions and lasers where applicable, movie producers are expanding their audience thousand-fold. That's the sort of thing America has come to expect from movies, and what is expected to attract American movie-goers. I myself am not against stupid awesomeness for the sake of stupid awesomeness. I enjoy things that are hilariously bad, and the comedic juxtaposition of things that modern society has come to refer to as "awesome."

I went to the midnight opening of Captain America... the FIRST Avenger. Let it be known that I was really looking forward to this movie. My enthusiasm may have been bolstered by fantastic merchandising, including the simple yet elegant Frisbee with an elastic strap, and quite possibly my favorite action figure ever: Winter Combat Captain America.

I'm going to write up the description on the back of the box for those of you too lazy to click on the above link, and even for those who DID click on the link because it bares repeating.

"CAPTAIN AMERICA will brave the harshest blizzard in order to protect the virtues of justice and truth. With only his snowboard and rocket launcher, CAPTAIN AMERICA is ready to shred down the mountain and destroy any villain that threatens the peace and well-being of his homeland."

I went to the movie with this description in mind as the entire premise of the film. Who wouldn't want to see Cap snowboarding down "the" mountain with a rocket launcher, blowing up Nazis, and launching off a ramp into an indy cab 1080° double-cork, and punching Hitler at the bottom of the slope? You may think my expectations were unrealistic. This is after all the "Concept Series" of action figures I was basing them on, but the scene depicted on this magnificently awe-inspiring figurine would not have out of place in this movie that went in every direction it could find.And yet it would, because that scene would have been good.

I may be a little too critical. It was late, I was underslept, and bad fashion choices were made, but this movie was all over the place. It tried to be too many things, and the thing it succeeded at most was a musical. This is a movie based on a comic book about an art student from Brooklyn who gets juiced up by American steroid scientists in order to fight Nazis. HOW COULD IT GO WRONG!?

It tried really hard to get me to like it, and there were times it succeeded. Stanley Tucci was easily the most likable German steroid developer I've ever seen, and Tommy Lee Jones charmingly did his darndest to not give a single f#$* throughout the entire movie. I also appreciated the semi-campy tone it had while trying to be a 1940's movie serial. The brief cameo by the original Human Torch was probably the highlight of the entire movie for me. Everything else was predictable, hammy, and musical. It even started out predictably with modern ice spelunkers discovering Cap in ice, and the entire rest of the movie was a flashback. Iron Man started in real time and went to a flashback to explain how much of a douche Tony Stark was, Thor started out in real time and then went to a flashback to explain how much of a douche Thor was, and predictably Cap did the same thing, only substituting douchebaggory for pure super-imposed scrawny-assedness.

I am going to stop right here and get the SPOILER WARNING out of the way since I have not already mentioned that I am going to intentionally try to ruin this movie for you like it ruined me. If you have any desire to see this movie, I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of the shock and arg.

The movie was a blatant tie-in with Thor, and seemed to exist purely to set up the plot of The Avengers, which I still hold out hopes for. The Cosmic Cube in this movie is an Asgardian artifact called the Tesseract, presumably because the director happened to have a geometry book open and thought it was a cooler name for the ultimate plot device. It was being sought by Nazi scientist, Agent Smith, Elven Anarchist Drag Queen of the Decepticons, for the purpose of fulfilling a God complex. Agent Smith is the leader of Hyrda, a Nazi splinter division that specializes in being unrealistically technologically advanced. This brings me to my first question about the movie.

WHY WEREN'T THE NAZI'S ALIENS!?

This is Earth 1943. The Hydra base would have put the Death Star to shame in terms of immaculately clean evil space decor. Even the Hydra uniforms, the ones that WEREN'T robot suits, look completely out of place when put side by side with good ol' American fatigues. Their evil mountain fortress and most of its contents were all made before they acquired the ultimate plot device. With all of the ridiculousness going on in the movie, and the fact that nothing was believable, suggesting the Nazis were really shape-shifting aliens from another planet in order to explain why they were so technologically advanced would have been okay with everyone in the audience. The Nazi's in The Ultimates were assisted by aliens, and we all know how badass Ultimate Captain America was. Instead it's explained that everything was created by this guy. Sorry, hold on... THIS guy, who is clearly NOT a television, and like the Nazi aliens, COULD have been. Why? Well, why the hell not? Frankly, I was surprised that they weren't aliens, and I am dead certain that someone somewhere who had never read a comic book in their lives was leaving the theater asking themselves why the Nazis had not been aliens.

I mentioned before that Captain America: The FIRST Avenger tried really hard to be a 1940's super hero movie serial. This was achieved through hokey acting and dialog, which is strangely acceptable on it's own without being juxtaposed by the SPACE NAZI LAIR scenes. The thing that completely severed the cables supporting the suspension bridge of disbelief was the montage of the Agent Smith doing violent evil things against a fiery backdrop during the expository monologue explaining that he was the villain of the movie. They could not set up a believable world, and then once they pumped Cap full of thawed blue raspberry Otter Pops it got worse.

A Nazi spy killed the creator of the Super Soldier Serum, who apparently refused to write anything down, thus making it impossible to replicate the miracle that is Chris Evans. In the comics he tweaked one last thing right before the procedure that actually made the Serum work, but in this adaptation they just forgot to make back-ups of all the documentation and everything was lost until The Incredible Hulk needed someone to punch who was not a lake. Then, since the military was only able to produce one super soldier, they decided that rather than actually put him to work stomping Nazis as a costumed badass they would take the thousands of dollars they invested in one man's abs and turn him into a dog-and-pony show.
Then suddenly, without warning... the movie became a musical about war bonds.

Using Captain America as a poster boy to bolster support for troops during WWII is not something I have a problem with. It's the fact that that's all the military has intended to use him for. This is a guy that could lift a car, or at least wrestle one while attached to a wire harness, and rather than train him to stomp Nazis, they put him in a cloth costume in front of a punch of pin-up girls and had him punch a caricature of Adolf Hitler, which should have been as cool as it sounds, and might have been had they not drug it out for three minutes. The point is that it made no sense. Stanley Tucci was shot, and everyone just said, "Oh well! So much for creating the perfect man to fight a tyrant bent on creating the perfect race" and walked away from the perfect man they just created, leaving Cap to travel America and tell the American people to give the government more money to waste on things they won't use to stomp Nazis. Finally, after embarrassing himself and everyone who saw the movie, Cap decides to go off and stomp some Nazis against the will of the Army, and free The Howling Commandos in order to attempt to make the movie not suck by including The Howling Commandos in it.

Sargent Fury and His Howling Commandos were created by the biggest asshole in comics, Stan Lee, when his editor said that the reason his comics sold so well had nothing to do with his writing, and everything to do with the cool titles. Stan, who had been trying to get fired for years, decided to come up with a war comic during the age of hippy peace-lovers with the longest most cumbersome name he could come up with just to win a bet that he could make it sell like hotcakes no matter the odds, and thus the Howling Commandos were born. Their inclusion in the movie was a fantastic nod to hard-core losers who knew who the hell they were. There was absolutely no character development for them, and they didn't need it, because all the audience needed to know was that they were the best part of the movie. Thank goodness the director had succeeded in that endeavor where he had fallen flat everywhere else. He couldn't even keep a joke about Howard Stark's overly complicated shield designs from falling flat. He even tried to put some conflict in a relationship that was hardly there between Cap and the only female character. The only thing that made the movie entertaining was its use of source material. For that reason, I am going to continue to insist that the Nazis had been aliens.

The next quarter of the movie consisted of action montages that made Team America: World police look like Mein Kamph with puppets, including scenes of Captain America on a motorcycle for the sake of having Captain America on a motorcycle. Cyber Nazis are punished, Cap prevents the launching of several BOMBS WITH COCKPITS THAT ARE LABELED WITH THE MAILING ADDRESS OF EVERY MAJOR CITY IN AMERICA SO THE SPACE NAZIS DON'T FORGET WERE TO FLY THEM... and then Neo leaps out of the Cosmic Cube and makes Agent Smith explode because I suppose the writers couldn't figure out how to make Captain America win a fist fight, and Cap crash lands a plane in the arctic because the autopilot is engaged and the controls will only allow him to steer up or down, and I officially can no longer even pretend to care about this movie or this blog.

If it had tried to be a straight up 1940's movie serial, or if it had tried to go for broke and have robot Nazi aliens riding dinosaurs on the moon and included more of the source material that had made the movie at least tolerable, it would have been a good movie. It just needed to pick something and movie on. Instead all we were given a heap of attempted films that added up to nothing. Film producers are the real villains. I think we can all learn something from them.

- Lord Veltha