Captain America (2011): derivative and superficial fluff featuring Hollywood notions of nationality

After enjoying Avengers more than I thought I would, I’ve been swept up in the recent superhero movie craze and finally got round to giving Captain America a shot.  I thought it was interesting in places but disappointing in others, enjoyable overall but not worth a re-watch too soon.

I liked the character Dr Abraham Erskine.  A great German scientist, he fled Nazi Germany and used his talent to help the Americans – as many Germans did at the time.  It’s good that Hollywood has made an effort to overtly represent the greatly under-represented Nazi-era German people who wholly disagreed with Hitler’s philosophy.  Hollywood itself is dotted with Germany-based talent who fled the constraints of the Nazi state for the free world: Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, F.W. Murnau, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich and Paul Henreid to name but a few.

Having visited Berlin recently, taking in the history, one of the most profound realisations I experienced was the sheer amount of guilt and responsibility which still weighs down on the ordinary people of Germany to this day due to the shameful and violent past inflicted on their national identity by a select group of twisted people who held power.  I think the Emmy-winning documentary Inheritance best portrays this phenomenon.  It tells the story of Monika Hertwig, by all accounts an ordinary German woman, who struggles to come to terms with the legacy of evil left by her father, Amon Goeth, one of the most infamously ruthless Nazi commandants (notably portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List).

In Captain America the villain, Red Skull, isn’t particularly threatening, despite being played by the legendary Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Lord of the Rings) and apparently surpassing the evil of modern history’s most despicable villains, the Nazis.  In spite of this and the fact he’s harnessed the infinite power of Marvel’s favourite MacGuffin, the Tesseract, he’s consistently put down by the Allied forces.  He never presents any real challenge – more an ominous air of ‘you better be frightened, this guy’s worse than Hitler’.  This works for the enduring America-as-hero-terror-as-villain myth which Hollywood (and indeed US politicians) love to propagate, but it just seems that the war is too easily won here.

Howard Stark could’ve been a much more pivotal character in this film, and should’ve been in my opinion.  I mean, come on, it’s Iron Man’s dad we’re talking about here.  The man left a hell of a legacy and this should’ve been milked to the fullest.  I think the writers missed a trick here.

The scene near the end of Captain America where the plane is going down is clearly derivative of the incredible opening sequence of the classic A Matter of Life and Death (1946). So much so, it’s almost as if the character Peggy Carter was manufactured to fit this bill.  In A Matter of Life and Death, a British bomber pilot contemplates mortality before jumping out of his flaming aircraft without a parachute.  He speaks to an American ground-control officer and there is an inexplicable but undeniable attraction between the two as if they’ve just fallen in love.  In Captain America, the nationalities are switched, but the situation is almost exactly the same.  Captain America is plummeting towards earth in an aircraft to stop it crashing into New York City, while speaking to Peggy Carter, a British military officer who’s almost an exact match to Kim Hunter’s June in A Matter of Life and Death.  The fact that Peggy is British and working for the most secretive project in the US military is never explained – the only explanation is that her character is superficial and merely exists to satisfy a crude attempt to pay homage to that famous scene and/or shamelessly replicate its emotive genius.

Going on the theme of national identities, the relationship between Peggy Carter and Captain America could be seen as analogous of Britain and America’s historic alliance throughout the modern era and the present day.  As an extenstion of this analogy, the group of POW’s rescued from Red Skull’s lair who become Captain America’s personal henchmen could be regarded as American alliances (if my memory serves me correctly, I believe this group consists of a Frenchman, Englishman, American and an American of Japanese descent).

A mixed bag of surprisingly impotent villains, interesting representations of the German national identity, derivative filmmaking and missed opportunities make Captain America ultimately not as effective as its big blockbuster brother, Avengers, but still fairly enjoyable.