Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

In the summer of 2011, there have been four superhero movies released. These films have been Thor, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, and Captain America: The First Avenger. I like all of these films, even Green Lantern. I know a lot of people don’t, but I do. Out of these four, I think that X-Men: First Class stands as my favorite, with Captain America: The First Avenger close behind. And I consider that to be decent praise. The film, like all of the other movies mentioned, is based off of a long-running comic book series, also called Captain America. You can find issues of it in just about any comic book store ever. Now, I have read Captain America, but I do not read it regularly. So I cannot vouch for the faithfulness to the comic book beyond the basics. And from the little that I know, I would say that the movie is decently faithful. It follows young Brooklyn-risen 90-pound weakling Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), who wants nothing more than to be a part of the US army, fighting against the Nazis in WWII. After being rejected countless times, he finally achieves his dream by agreeing to be a part of a top-secret operation run by the Stark family. Steve is injected with the Super Soldier Serum, which enables him to do exactly what the name states-be a super soldier. Steve becomes the ultimate human being (to put this in simpler terms, think NZT from Limitless, only affecting physical awesomeness instead of mental awesomeness. And yes, I do know that awesomeness is not a word). Being a superhero, however, he has to have a supervillian, which we find in the form of the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), a man with science gone wrong. And so now he has a red skull. And to say the least, it looks SO COOL! I know I’m being a geeky 13-year-old when I go off like this, but it looks amazing. I cannot wait to see Red Skull on perfect-picture Blu-ray in a few months. This movie is actually really cool. It’s slick, historic, and brave. And while the movie didn’t portray what is arguably the single greatest comic book cover of all time (where Cap uppercuts Hitler. So awesome), it still was very good. And that ending, oh that ending. I knew that it was coming, but it still blew me away. And it has Samuel L. Jackson (which this movie, along with Thor, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2 all have, all being a part of this giant movie project that you may have heard of called The Avengers, coming in 2012), and when is that ever a bad thing? NOTE: If you ever go up to a fan of Conan O’Brien, especially in recent months, and go up to him/her and ask about this movie, more than likely the response you will get will be “Oh, it looks good!”. And yes, I fall into that category. CONAN RULES!
8.5/10