Now, I go into this not having seen X-men First Class, and it is a point of contention because of some of the reasons I think Captain America is such a good/effective movie. I’ll give a little bit about each of the other big movies and why they are so big, and then why Cap blew them away.
Hulk: The first one with Eric Bana was bad, we can all agree. The one with Edward Norton in the Avengers timeline was much better. The character deals with anger management issues and the monster inside all of us, according the its creator, Stan Lee. Although the character has been limited in some of his effectiveness in some stories, being just a rampaging monster, the character has evolved to have an intelligence, but it is still mainly anger focused. The Norton version of the movie brought this out more. The Eric Bana one focused more on his relationship with Betty and tried to make it more of a date movie than a comic book movie, and thus brought down both sides of it.
Fantastic Four: both movies were well written, had great effects, decent stories and good actors. But the FF has never been one of my favorite comics. I never connected with any of them. I’ve tried again and again and like the latest incarnation of the Future Foundation (still the FF, but the abbreviation means something different), and now that Spider-man is involved after the Human Torch died, it has a little more potential (I’ll get to that with talking about Spider-man). I like the new outfits – white with black trim, even looks good on Spidey – and I like where it’s going as a super-science comic with the human side to it with the Thing and the Richards family.
Spider-man: Stan Lee made Spidey as a metaphor for puberty and life’s problems. Here when Peter Parker is at that age when his body starts changing, the radioactive (or rather genetically altered, in the movie) spider bite really changes him. He gets all those abilities that are spider-like, yet still has to deal with school, relationships, finding work, taking care of his Aunt May. It gave a much more human side to a super hero than DC’s Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, etc. ever had. The first to Spidey movies had this and were good movies. The third one was “let’s see how much crap we can throw in this movie and keep it under 3 hours.” Didn’t work for me, or for Marvel apparently which is why they’re rebooting the franchise.
X-men: always one of my favorite books, mainly due to Chris Claremont’s writing from the 70’s through the 80’s. A bigger metaphor for puberty you will not find (even in Spider-man) as they mutants’ powers emerge at the onset of puberty, and they don’t know what to do with these powers. That setup didn’t translate well into the movies, but they were still good action/sci-fi yarns, but it’s what made that book so popular because EVERYONE GOES THROUGH PUBERTY.
Watchmen: this one is most comparable to Captain America, because it is also a period piece, and the time of the story has a big impact on what makes it effective or not. (Starting to see why I had to mention that I haven’t seen First Class yet?) Watchmen takes place in the height of the Cold War in the 80’s when the threat of nuclear annihilation was at its peak. If you lived through it, you probably remember it well. The problem is, most people, even if they lived through it, DON’T remember it that well. We were really, really close. And the scary thing is, one of the things that saved us was the Chernobyl disaster. That’s right. When the Chernobyl nuclear plant had its meltdown, the USSR couldn’t handle the clean-up. Mikhail Gorbachev HAD to ask us for help. It opened the doors to the Soviet Union for the first time and kicked Perestroika and Glasnost into gear. It didn’t remove the threat of nuclear holocaust, but it cut it back so far that anything other than where we were was a moment of relaxation and peace. The Watchmen movie tried to convey this in the three hour epic, but that was just the backdrop to the story of the characters. And since it was only the backdrop, it didn’t come across and made the movie less effective through no fault of anyone’s except time.
Captain America: now we come to why this period piece was so effective. Everyone knows about WWII and what it was like for our country. Even if we didn’t live through it (most of us didn’t), it was such a big, long part of our history, and there have been so many movies and tv series about it that most of us actually have an understanding of a lot of what it was like. In fact, movies about WWII is what’s boosted enlistment into the armed forces for the Iraq and Afghan wars we’ve been fighting. During WWII, men enlisted so they could go fight Nazis. Inglorious Basterds is a prime example of America arrogance, if you will, of fighting and winning a war, and it takes place in WWII. Steve Rogers has similar ambitions and is such a likeable, human character that you can’t help but feel for him when he gets rejected time and again when all he wants to do is HELP. It seems less like a comic book movie and more like an underdog movie with a couple of sci-fi characters (Cap and Red Skull). Since he’s still mostly human with heightened strength, he’s less comic book, and more effective. It’s the same reason a well-written Batman movie (the Christian Bale movies) are so good. He’s still a human, but at the peak of perfection. Once they started changing that, the movies got worse (Batman and Robin). But this is why I feel Captain America was a good movie. The character was more human and involved in his time period that everyone can relate to.
