I was only a kid when I saw the motion picture Captain America. My memory is hazy but there was a guy dressed in a blue suit who had a shield. That’s all I remember about 1990’s incarnation of the Cap but I doubt many people are even aware of the film’s existence. After all, it currently holds a rating of 2.9 on IMDB. Just to compare, The Phantom (you know, it had Billy Zane literally dressed as a bellend in it) has a rating of 4.9. Praise the lord for my hazy memory!
In 2000, X-Men kick started a golden age of comic book movies, and by golden age I mean a relentless barrage of the fuckers. We were given films like Elektra, Ghostrider, and The Spirit, hardly the most recognisable of heroes. Yet Captain America, one of the biggest Marvel heroes, had escaped another adaptation until this week. Why the long wait? Did they think that we didn’t need another Captain America and that the 2.9 pile of shite would fulfil us for eternity? That’s unfair, I can’t honestly judge that film with the limited memory I have, it might be a masterpiece. There were over 20 Marvel films between X-Men and Captain America: The First Avenger, did they forget about him? Or was it political? After all, it’s Captain AMERICA. You might as well call him Captain Prick outside the States.
Captain America: The First Avenger follows Thor as the second big Marvel film of the year, and manages to up the ante considerably. While Thor was a strange mix of Norse fantasy and California Man (Encino Man for the Americans), Captain America is a straight up WWII adventure romp. Directed by Joe Johnston of The Rocketeer fame, you would be forgiven for lowering your expectations, but Johnston has managed to make a film which should not only beat an IMDB score of 2.9, but also 4.9, making it officially better than The Phantom. Score!
Since Iron Man in 2008, there has been a steady string of films leading up to next year’s avengings, though what sets Captain America apart from the likes of Iron Man 2 and Thor is that for the most part, it completely forgets it’s an Avengers prequel. Set in WWII it’s free of restraints and can focus on being an actual film, Agent Coulson can’t appear every twenty minutes, and nor can a one eyed Samuel L. Jackson.
Steve Rodger’s journey to becoming Captain America is perfectly paced, and akin to the sort of heart warming overcoming the odds film Disney might make. We see Chris Evans’ puny Rodgers get beaten up and rejected from the army, and by the time he makes the transition to super-soldier it feels like the end of one of those Disney films, and in a good way. This is a man who has been bullied all his life, and he is finally able to defend himself. In this sense, Captain America is far more human than any other Avenger, and despite being a piece of American propaganda, we can relate to the guy standing up to bullies.
We’ve not just come for the sentiments though, we’ve come to see Captain America kick some Nazi ass! And he doesn’t just kick them, he kills them! I guess I’ve got so used to super heroes just slapping their enemies about a bit that seeing Cap shoot his is quite surprising. He just don’t give a fuck. It is WWII after all. This isn’t Saving Private Ryan however, Johnston directs the action in the style of a Sunday matinee adventure reminiscent of something like Indiana Jones (and even Star Wars), yet there are only so many ways you can see the Captain attacking a Nazi with a shield.
The action isn’t bad, it’s just not good as everything else, especially the acting, which for a comic book film is rather good indeed. Chris Evans has already proved he can handle action roles in Fantastic Four, Push, and The Losers and he is perfect in the role of Steve Rodgers. British actors Dominic Cooper, Toby Jones, and Hayley Atwell do an impressive job and while he’s not on screen for very long, Stanley Tucci shows why he makes everything better.
Who would have thought that the director of The Rocketeer could come up with something this good? Not me, and maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because I expected The Rocketeer. This should get us all excited for The Avengers but I still can’t see how it’s going to work. There are so many loose ends from four different films that it has to be at least five hours long just to tie them all together. It’s either going to be a horrible mess, or there’s going to be a horrible mess in every nerd’s pants. I’ll let you know next May if I come or not.
Showing posts with label The Avengers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Avengers. Show all posts
Monday, 1 August 2011
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Thor Blimey!
Who’s your favourite super hero? Batman? Superman? Spider-Man? Iron Man? Thor? Chances are you didn’t say Thor, no one really likes Thor, he’s boring, he dresses funny and talks like a dick. Marvel are running out of characters to put in their movies and subsequently they’ve had to make Thor.
Marvel like to think of themselves as mavericks when casting directors, and Kenneth Branagh initially appeared to be a strange choice, but a classical sort of hero needs a classical sort of director. Much of the film’s plot is to an extent Shakespearian and it’s here where Branagh succeeds, the lust for power that Thor and his brother Loki both share is the most gripping element of the story, and it’s a shame Thor ever sets foot on Earth.
When he does fall to Earth, he is met by Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, and Kat Dennings, and the inauguration of this gang makes for a strange pacing. The film constantly shifts between two settings, the plot is driven forward in Asgard only to be slowed down with Thor’s Earthbound coming of age. Shit is happening in Asgard and on Earth Stellan Skarsgard is helping a troubled young man like he’s still in Good Will Hunting.
There’s no doubt that Kat Dennings was cast to provide a little humour, but the comedy comes from the mere act of Thor speaking all olden days in modern America, and while this is far from high brow, I still ashamedly laughed. When Kat Denning’s INSANE dialogue about shit like a stolen ipod doesn’t make you laugh there really is no point of her being in the film at all. In fact the funniest part of the film, like all other Marvel films, is Stan Lee’s cameo.
It’s strange that between the two settings, Asgard looks the most realistic. We are sold this fantastic looking in-depth world, and then it’s juxtaposed with a tiny American desert town, which seems to have a pet shop and nothing else. When Thor’s mates turn up in their Asgardian clobber it looks ridiculous, and at this point Thor becomes very silly. To make matters worse when Thor inevitably comes of age, Natalie Portman utters the phrase “Oh…my…god” (do you get it? Because he’s a god LOLZ) in such a cheesy manner that she should give her Oscar back.
Perhaps the writers were getting bored because by the final scene, there were barely sentences between Thor and his daddy Odin, “You will make a wise king”, “you were a wise father”, “As will you be”, “yes”, “hmm”. By now I’ve become prepared to sit through ten minutes of credits to see a 30 second scene starring Samuel L. Jackson, but I’m starting to think it’s not worth it, no one else did, they all fucked off.
Without the pressure of setting up The Avengers, Thor might have been very different, what we got was a great film merged with a very silly one, and while it’s not a disappointment, it missed the opportunity to be the best Marvel film yet. There is only Captain America left to come before The Avengers graces our screens, and then it’s finally over…Apart from Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Captain America 2, and whatever the fuck they do with the Hulk.
Marvel like to think of themselves as mavericks when casting directors, and Kenneth Branagh initially appeared to be a strange choice, but a classical sort of hero needs a classical sort of director. Much of the film’s plot is to an extent Shakespearian and it’s here where Branagh succeeds, the lust for power that Thor and his brother Loki both share is the most gripping element of the story, and it’s a shame Thor ever sets foot on Earth.
When he does fall to Earth, he is met by Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, and Kat Dennings, and the inauguration of this gang makes for a strange pacing. The film constantly shifts between two settings, the plot is driven forward in Asgard only to be slowed down with Thor’s Earthbound coming of age. Shit is happening in Asgard and on Earth Stellan Skarsgard is helping a troubled young man like he’s still in Good Will Hunting.
There’s no doubt that Kat Dennings was cast to provide a little humour, but the comedy comes from the mere act of Thor speaking all olden days in modern America, and while this is far from high brow, I still ashamedly laughed. When Kat Denning’s INSANE dialogue about shit like a stolen ipod doesn’t make you laugh there really is no point of her being in the film at all. In fact the funniest part of the film, like all other Marvel films, is Stan Lee’s cameo.
It’s strange that between the two settings, Asgard looks the most realistic. We are sold this fantastic looking in-depth world, and then it’s juxtaposed with a tiny American desert town, which seems to have a pet shop and nothing else. When Thor’s mates turn up in their Asgardian clobber it looks ridiculous, and at this point Thor becomes very silly. To make matters worse when Thor inevitably comes of age, Natalie Portman utters the phrase “Oh…my…god” (do you get it? Because he’s a god LOLZ) in such a cheesy manner that she should give her Oscar back.
Perhaps the writers were getting bored because by the final scene, there were barely sentences between Thor and his daddy Odin, “You will make a wise king”, “you were a wise father”, “As will you be”, “yes”, “hmm”. By now I’ve become prepared to sit through ten minutes of credits to see a 30 second scene starring Samuel L. Jackson, but I’m starting to think it’s not worth it, no one else did, they all fucked off.
Without the pressure of setting up The Avengers, Thor might have been very different, what we got was a great film merged with a very silly one, and while it’s not a disappointment, it missed the opportunity to be the best Marvel film yet. There is only Captain America left to come before The Avengers graces our screens, and then it’s finally over…Apart from Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Captain America 2, and whatever the fuck they do with the Hulk.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
You stay classy, San Diego
FANGASM! The past weekend has seen San Diego host the 41st Comic-Con, a mecca for hundreds of thousands of geeks to all perpetually jizz in their pants for four straight days. Not living anywhere near San Diego, I have not been jizzing in my pants, and have been jealously following any news I can find on twitter and IGN.
To be honest, I don’t know what goes down in San Diego other than a platform to promote upcoming comic book films. This year the main focus has been on Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Green Lantern, Thor, Captain America, and every fanboy/girl’s wet dream, The Avengers.
Reviews of the upcoming Scott Pilgrim film all point to a win, but I suspect that anyone who has a firm grasp of reality will hate it and onlookers will point and laugh at me while I try and justify why I like it - Mary Elizabeth Winstead is hot, a good enough reason for liking anything.
I don’t know anything about Green Lantern other than what has been referenced in The Big Bang Theory, but it looks like it’s shaping up to be pretty awesome. Ryan Reynolds has the trust of every geek by reciting the oath at the con (and we know he can do action), green is my favourite colour (I‘m sure that makes or breaks a film‘s quality), and Blake Lively is pretty hot.
Also coming to a screen near you…next year, are Thor and Captain America: The American Avenging Avenger of America, or whatever they decide to call it. Like Green Lantern I don’t know much about Thor. I know he’s a Norse god, and as such he has a hammer, and he speaks all old like. Kenneth Branagh is directing, which means it will be boring, and I am as excited about Thor as I am of being raped. Natalie Portman is hot though.
I stayed until the end of the very long Iron Man 2 credits, and I all I got was Thor’s hammer in a desert. I will still see it of course, and stay until the end of the very long credits just to see Captain America frozen in carbonite or something like that.
I’m looking forward to Captain America simply because I like Chris Evans, who has bagged just about every
action role Ryan Reynolds hasn’t, and for good reason, he’s awesome. He was the best thing about the disappointing Fantastic Four movies, and was pretty good in Sunshine, Push, and The Losers. Rumour has it that he will be playing all of the X-Men, in X-Men: First Class.
This is all leading to The Avengers movie, and in a massive hurrah at Comic-Con, the entire cast came out, and even here in England we could hear the simultaneous ejaculation of thousands of geeks. We were unveiled two things that we kind of knew anyway. First up is that Mark Ruffalo will be the Hulk. Just to repeat, Mark Ruffalo. I want Edward Norton back. It’s hard to get worked up though, because it’s so difficult to make the Hulk work on screen, and he will probably have a fairly small part in The Avengers, with the big CGI Hulk likely to have more screen time.
The other “surprise” was that Joss Whedon will be writing and directing, and this has gone down a storm. I loved Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, but he has only directed one film, Serenity, so it would be premature to put so much faith into Whedon. The Avengers is the most high profile comic book film in history and they cannot mess it up. It is a very high risk project, and when you put all those heroes together it could end in disaster, remember Spider-Man 3? 3 villains and it all went wrong. It could turn out to be as much as fun as being stabbed in they eye with a pen. Still, Scarlett Johansson is hot.
I forgot about the new Tron film! I don’t care about the new Tron Film.
So that’s Comic-Con in a nutshell, essentially a extravagant piece of marketing to get you to watch Marvel films when they’re released in 2 years time. Stay tuned for the upcoming report on next month’s Rom-com-con, where we will be getting all the hype on the latest J-Lo film, due for release in 2014, where she is a successful single female lawyer, who falls in love with a pumpkin voiced by Patrick Dempsey.
***Note***
I was wrong about Green Lantern and I eventually got excited about Thor.
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