Captain America: The First Avenger Review

Joe Johnston is exactly the right director for this: he made The Rocketeer, he loves period hardware, and he shoots wartime New York in warm amber and Hydra's bases in cold industrial teal without once winking at the material. The first hour is the best origin work in the whole franchise. Skinny Steve Rogers, achieved with digital shrinking that still holds up, is a fully written character before the serum, and the grenade in the training yard tells you everything the next two hours will only confirm.

Chris Evans plays decency as an active choice rather than a default setting, which is far harder than it looks. Then the film hits its structural wall. The entire Howling Commandos campaign, the friendships, the losses, the war itself, is delivered as a montage, so Bucky's fall lands on a relationship the film never actually dramatized. Hugo Weaving is enjoyably arch but the Red Skull is a plot device with a face and a voice. The ending is genuinely sad, a man agreeing to a date he will never make, and it buys the sequels an enormous amount of credit.