I made it out to see Captain America: The First Avenger last weekend. I enjoyed it. It was definitely a well-done origin movie, and while I haven’t seen Thor yet, it definitely seems like Marvel Studios has its formula down.
The most important thing that Marvel achieved with Iron Man and Captain America is to give the audience ample reason to like the title characters. If you like the character, you’ll want to follow his exploits in sequels, spinoffs, and the Avengers movie. Iron Man achieved this by letting Robert Downey, Jr. loose to make wisecracks and have a ton of fun being Robert Downey, Jr. Captain America does it by using just about every scene to establish what a good, decent, nice guy that Steve Rogers is.
At the beginning of the film, Steve Rogers is a complete physical basket case – he’s short, he’s scrawny, he’s sickly, he’s not particularly coordinated. The film demonstrates this by sticking Chris Evans’ head on a much smaller person through CGI. It looks a little odd, but you get over it, because even as a 98-pound weakling, Steve Rogers is a good guy. He’s trying to enlist in the Army in order to do his part during World War II. He gets himself beaten up by trying to hush someone heckling a newsreel. He ditches a double date to try, yet again, to enlist. He is, in short, the Hero Who Never Gives Up, and it’s easy to be on his side. Contrast that to the hatchet job that Green Lantern did in trying to introduce Hal Jordan.
Once Rogers’ character is established, the movie gets the action plot moving, and that’s competently done. Hugo Weaving does a nice job of portraying the Red Skull as a Nazi who’s decided to break away from the Reich and try to take over the world himself using advanced technology. As a result, the movie is a weird mix of a World War II era war movie and a science fiction action film. Since the filmmakers have tied this movie to the cosmology established in the other films, especially Thor, it’s easier to buy into than I expected.
I think that years from now, people are going to be writing books about the way Marvel has established a film universe. It could all come crashing down at some point, but right now they’re writing a new rulebook.