ughhh. I know I'm going to sound like such a party pooper, and I never cared that much for Captain America anyway, but if this movie doesn't fully take its chance to be the Indiana Jones of the next generation, then I don't know what to say. Is this set in the 40s? I can't really tell if they're fully committed to that or not based on the stealth bomber and clearly futuristic looking "science" equipment. But if this was a rough-and-tumble, beat the Nazis, PG-13 Marvel version of Inglorious Basterds, WHO WOULDNT SEE THAT MOVIE!??!?!
Instead I'm afraid they're just going to do some banal 85 minute origin story and Red Scare is going to die and never be heard from again and then we're going to flash forward 80 years for the Avengers movie where it won't make sense that this Capt America is hanging out with Robert Downey Jr.
Saw it. He's only in "present day" for the last five minutes of the movie.
I liked it quite a bit. It's an old fashioned adventure movie in the model of the good Indiana Jones movies. They spend a lot of time with the origin, but it's all tied in to the Red Skull and his motivations, so it works out well. There's a lot of Avengers set-up and having seen Thor will help you catch some of the more obscure references, but you don't need to have sen the other Marvel movies to stick with this one.
In a nutshell, The Red Skull and his Nazi science squad Hydra finds this cube (related to Thor's world, I think) that creates a near unlimited energy. the Skull uses this source to power all this new technology and breaks away from Hitler and the Nazis. Meanwhile, the German scientist who created the Skull during a test of his "super soldier" serum has now joined the Allies and is set to test the serum again. Enter Steve Rogers, a 90 pound asthmatic who's rejected by the army five times as 4F because he's weak and skinny. I think you can see where this goes.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a montage of Captain America being used as a propaganda tool to sell war bonds replete with 40s war song and dancing girls.
The action scenes are well done and hearken back to less stylized movies though there's still plenty of CGI. The characters are well written though everybody is either black or white. In some ways that's refreshing.
The writing is solid. The acting is great. The ending is depressing as hell, which means that I believed the attraction/love story between Captain America and Peggy Carter. I won't give it away, but if you know anything about Captain America, you know what happens. It's really sad. In fact, even the AVnegers trailer after the credits didn't snap me out of the funk.
Rule #4 of screenwriting. If you can make Nazis your script's villains, do it.
