Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

Really enjoyed the first act of this, but as soon as Cap stormed the factory I found myself kind of mentally checking out a bit. The first half of the film has got a really strong emotional core to it, whilst the second half feels oddly detached and almost glacial. It sort of loses a lot of it’s sense of fun once it moves into the montage and then never lets up until the finale. It means stuff that should be a ‘big moment’ like Bucky’s death just feel oddly muted.

Whilst I liked Weaving as the Red Skull, and particularly enjoyed his Dastardly and Muttley style relationship with Zoller, I never got a sense of threat from the character. He’s supposed to be an equal to Captain America in terms of strengths, and should probably be handier in a fight due to the fact that he’s actually a soldier, and yet we never get a sense of that. His big moments are moving a coffin lid and punching a shield. I guess it’s the nature of the movie, but everything kind of seemed too easy once Cap made his decision to fight. Ever sequence we see is an overwhelming victory for allied forces with minimal casualties. I’m not wanting an Inglorious Basterds style culling of main characters, but it would have been nice to see the Allied forces vaguely inconvenienced by the Red Skull and his Nazi Super-Science.