Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger is about a young man named Steve Rogers who wants to join the military during World War II.  However, he is deemed unfit for service because not only is he a small, frail man, but he also suffers from a number of physical ailments.  One day, when he is at a carnival with his best friend, Bucky, he is noticed by a German scientist, who transforms this small young man into a tall, toned, attractive army man that becomes Captain America.

He is not immediately seen as an active superhero, though.  Instead, he is pushed into show business in order to sell bonds to the American public in order to fund the war.  On a trip abroad, putting on his show, Steve learns that his friend, Bucky, has been captured along with many other men by Johann Schmidt, aka Red Skull.  Right on cue, Steve's love interest, Peggy Carter, shows up to convince Steve that he is meant for more than show business, and along with Howard Stark, Captain America moves from show business to the military when he frees the prisoners of Red Skull.

Eventually, Red Skull and Captain America end up on Red Skull's plane.  Red Skull is the one that eventually destroys himself, by mishandling the Norwegian tesseract, which until then had been powering all of Red Skull's weapons.  Steve is left alone on the plane, which is destined to New York, and rather than blowing up the city, he instead brings the plane down in a frozen wasteland, only to be discovered about seventy years later.  The end of the movie shows Steve waking up from a seventy year sleep, so we can only imagine that he was cryogenically frozen or something of the like, but it is not mentioned in the film.

Overall, I thought that the movie was just okay.  It was certainly a necessary film to precede The Avengers, which is scheduled to come out sometime next year, and while they did a good job of giving Captain America his own story, it was quite clearly a transition film.  I certainly appreciated having Howard Stark working so closely to Steve Rogers, and I thought Peggy Carter had such pretty makeup that I plan to do a tutorial on her sometime soon, but as for Steve, or Captain America, himself, I wasn't really impressed.  Of course, who could really compare after Thor?  Now, there was an attractive hunk of man.

So, to sum it all up, I thought that the story was good, but there was too much emphasis on how it connected to the other movies in the Avengers series.