More Captain America

We went to see Captain America yesterday. My dad thoroughly enjoyed it, all the more so because he said he hadn't slept well the night before, and the movie lifted his spirits. So let's hear it for Captain America! This is part where, if I weren't lazy I'd embed that clip of the soldiers cheering Cap after his rescue mission.

Audience: But you are lazy?

Oh, don't get me started.

Being my dad, the one continuity error he thought he saw was that the Hydra agent who killed Erskine was originally using a Luger, but somewhere along the line switched to a Walther. Which he said wasn't a big deal since they have the same nine round capacity, though he thought he counted 11 shots. Anyway, he really liked the movie and said that once Captain America actually crossed paths with the Red Skull, it felt like the Captain America comics he used to own. He was also very excited to see the Howling Commandos, and asked if they'd have a movie in the near future. He was glad to see Tommy Lee Jones (he's a big fan of Tommy Lee Jones), and he quite liked Hayley Atwell as Agent Carter. During the scene where she catches Steve making out with that blonde, as Steve chases after her, my dad commented 'He still doesn't know anything about women.' Less than 10 seconds later Carter made the same statement, albeit with a "bloody" tossed in there.

When we were discussing the film afterward, he mentioned being impressed with its restraint. I thought he meant the depiction of violence, but he brought up the sequence in the pub. He was surprised that when Carter told Steve that Stark had some equipment for him to try out, no one made the "and I've got some equipment for you to try out line". Obviously Steve wouldn't say that, so he must have expected either Bucky or some random drunk to pipe up. I did remind him of the idiot from the training camp, who got socked in the jaw, which he described as "modern", as opposed to the more typical knee in the groin.

Watching it again, I did wonder why Steve didn't simply use his shield to wedge the stick of the plane in place to keep it in the dive, then jump out. My dad said he hadn't seen any parachutes, but the chance of survival would still be better than staying in a plane he's going to crash. I guess Cap wanted to make sure it didn't crash, and couldn't risk his shield slipping after he'd bailed out.

I had to explain why Nick Fury was Samuel L. Jackson, which meant trying to explain the Ultimate Universe, though I don't know how much of what we saw was from Millar's version of Cap's origin. I did talk about how Millar made Cap kind of a jerk. How all the heroes were jerks, really. Which lead my dad to suggest the writer was probably a "cynical bastard". I didn't mention that was written by the same guy who wrote Civil War which I've described to him previously, though it would have cemented his opinion I imagine. We started discussing how most of the writers today are either cynical like that, or romantics, like him or myself. That was his assessment; I have a hard time picturing myself as a romantic, but I suppose in superhero comic terms, it fits me more than cynic. I don't go in for the "You have to be a damaged individual to do this stuff" line. Some heroes, sure. Not all.

One thing I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't catch until the second viewing was that the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract is the basis for the arc reactor technology that powers Iron Man's armor. It was the scene where Howard Stark's messing with the item Steve brought back from that first Hydra base. I noticed the little circular power source glowed the same as the power source in the center of Iron Man's armor. Then it all sort of came together in my head. I felt very slow.