Captain America: The First Avenger

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Skinny Steve Rogers wants to join the US military to help fight the evil Nazi’s as he doesn’t like bullies, no matter where they live. However, his physical condition is all but great and as such he’s already been rejected multiple times. When he goes to a fair with his friend Bucky, he tries to sign up yet again and his attempts are noticed by Dr. Abraham Erskine who enlists him for the secret Project Rebirth. Rogers undergoes the experiment and his body suddenly gets enhanced to almost superhuman condition. As Erskine immediately after gets murdered by an agent of the Nazi Hydra research department lead by Schmidt aka the Red Skull, Rogers gets assigned to do promotional activities as Captain America.

However, when his tour arrives in Europe and he finds out his friend Bucky is held captive in a Hydra facility along with several other soldiers, Rogers goes on a one-man mission to free them all and prove Captain America is more than just a promotional tool…

Sound and Vision:
Captain America has some noise bursting in a couple of scenes, and a bit too much facial smoothing at times, but other than that, the image quality is great. The blacks are as inky as they can be, the level of detail is amazing, there’s incredible level of depth and great contrast. Although not perfect, Captain America has a great transfer.

The sound comes with a 7.1 DTS-HD track which increases your expectations but unfortunately they don’t quite get fulfilled. Detail and positioning is great, dialogues never get overwhelmed and the rears get plenty of action. However, the sound lacks thunder despite there being plenty of explosions and action present. You truly have to ramp up the volume of your amplifier in order to get a true Hollywood experience, something we’re really not used to with DTS tracks. A shame as this could have been better. If you don’t have a decent surround system, you’ll lose half of the soundscape.

Extras:
- Audio Commentary track
- Marvel One-Shot: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer
- Outfitting a Hero
- Howling Commandos
- Heightened Technology
- The Transformation
- Behind the Skull
- Captain America’s Origin
- The Assembly Begins
- Deleted Scenes

It looks as if there’s a ton of extras present on this release, but the featurettes (48 minutes in total) are short spotlights that are rather promotional, lack a “play all” function, and don’t offer too much in-depth information. Also the audio commentary lacks decent info (although there are a few tidbits of interesting stuff). The deleted scenes are interesting though.

Conclusion:
Captain America: The First Avenger is the latest movie leading up to The Avengers which will bring together Iron Man, Thor, The Incredible Hulk and of course Captain America himself.

After the rather superficial Thor our hopes were that Captain America would bring a deeper story, and it does. We go back to the days of World War II and see how Steve Rogers is transformed from a weak but persistent boy over an all-American hero used as a promotional asset to a true hero who stands by his comrades.

When compared to the other Avengers movies, Captain America contains the deepest story and is unlike most superhero movies actually a film that can appeal to a wider audience than the usual Marvel fans. The superhero features are limited and the movie relies less on sci-fi gadgets and special effects (although there are plenty) than on actual hero-behaviour and character. An excellent movie that stands in high contrast to the simplistic Thor.

Marvel movie adaptations aren’t always great (see again Thor) but Captain America is as good as they can come.

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