Captain America: The First Avenger Belongs To A Bygone MCU
A man — and a movie — out of time.
When Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) revealed that he was worthy to wield the mythical Mjolnir — the famed weapon of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) — in Avengers: Endgame, it was the culmination of years of careful character building... not to mention a moment of unprecedented hype. Fans the world over lost their minds in theaters, and for good reason. We’d spent years on a journey with Steve, watching as he became Captain America, reconciled his status as a Man Out of Time, and rallied the Avengers against the kind of threat that would send a lesser hero to cower in a corner. We already knew he was capable of incredible feats, but summoning Thor’s hammer was the confirmation — and, in hindsight, the last Awesome™ moment we’d get with Steve.
Like so much of Endgame, however, said awesomeness has grown stale in the years since. The conclusion of Steve’s arc (and the whole of Marvel’s Infinity Saga) rings more like a series of hollow hero moments in hindsight. Most have long been ready to move on from that era, which makes Marvel’s determination to cling to it all the more demoralizing. Steve’s subsequent choice to return to the past after defeating the evil Thanos (Josh Brolin) was a polarizing one, but it was supposed to be the final word on his character. Seven years later, however, Cap is back in the fray, summoning Mjolnir for one last fight in the latest trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. It’s almost identical to the reveal we get in Endgame, but with seven years of clarity between those two moments, it doesn’t garner the same levels of hype.
Doomsday wants to frame Steve’s resurrection as a kind of “miracle,” one of many the Avengers, X-Men, and Fantastic Four will need if they’re going to defeat Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.). It could have been an exciting prospect if Marvel had done anything worthwhile with its cinematic universe, the Captain America mantle, or its latest Big Bad. But MCU fans have had a front-row seat to a near-decade of trial, error, and contingencies so safe they couldn’t possibly be real, so most can see Steve’s return as the nostalgia play it is.
With Doomsday, that hollow feeling fans felt after Endgame can be felt months before the film is set to premiere. The MCU most fell in love with is unrecognizable now, which makes something like Captain America: The First Avenger feel like the true miracle.
The success of so many fan favorites can be traced back to The First Avenger.
The First Avenger was both an origin story and a prelude to the first Avengers film, and it managed to succeed on both fronts. It’s much closer to the superhero spectacle that defined the 2010s; looking back through the lens of MCU bloat, it’s comparatively a modest affair. By keeping things simple, though — and delivering a pastiche on WWII-era adventures — director Joe Johnston effectively turned a stuffy comic book hero into a three-dimensional human.
Evans was far from the first choice to play Steve Rogers after starring in two Fantastic Four movies for Fox, but he eventually proved how perfect he was for the character. His take on Steve was soft spoken and thoughtful: when his face is superimposed onto Steve’s scrawny, pre-Super Soldier body, you believe that he’s more lover than fighter. That doesn’t make him any less worthy of greatness, however. Abraham Erskine’s (Stanley Tucci) super soldier serum is the kind that amplifies the subject’s inner self. It’s why his first test subject, the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), bears a garish, cartoon-y resemblance to a skeleton. But Steve is a good person through and through, so when he’s selected as the first volunteer of Erskine’s revamped program, he inherits a well-earned, immaculate new physique.
The First Avenger had a simpler villain and lower stakes, but that’s what makes this origin story so solid.
Whatever super-strength and speed Steve inherits, it takes him a long time to become the Captain America that anyone might recognize from the comics. His winding road from scientific guinea pig and government mascot to soldier and, eventually, superhero, is hard-won — but Johnston and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely never skimp on the moments that define the film’s heroes and villains. A compelling story and strong characters are the brick and mortar of any good film — this used to be a no-brainer for Marvel, but the stories that followed The First Avenger delivered diminishing returns on one front or the other.
The only reason a character like Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) could rise to new heights in The Winter Soldier and beyond was thanks in great part to The First Avenger’s strong foundation. So many of Marvel’s latest decisions, dubious as they are, can only be made because of the work the franchise did in its early eras. It’s hard to see anything matching the perfect simplicity of The First Avenger at this stage, least of all Doomsday, and that’s a shame. Still, there is a silver lining: as dismal as Steve’s story gets, no one can take away the power of his origin story.
