Lego Advent Calendar Haiku Day 9

Angelic heralds 
Sing Hark! to Captain Rogers
STAP*'s blasters silent

*Single Trooper Aerial Platform--as seen in The Phantom Menace

 

An 11-Year Endgame

The first Marvel comic I remember reading is What If? #1, which asked the question "What if Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four?" Now, I must have read Marvel comics before that one, because I understood who all the characters were and I knew What If? was an unusual comic because, of course, Spider-Man never joined the Fantastic Four. 

I read that comic in Shane Berthauden's room in Leaf Rapids, and it really captured my imagination. The initial counter-factual (in the context of the mainline Marvel universe) setup had an incredible cool factor, but things turn dark when the Invisible Girl, feeling overshadowed by Spider-Man, leaves the group. Things get worse after that, but by comic's end, we are reassured that these events happen in a parallel universe to the familiar Marvel world we know. Even so, the impact of that comic remains powerful, because those events did happen (somewhere), and the triumphs of and tragedies of those characters remains somehow real. They grow and change in a way denied the prime Marvel universe, because in those comics, the status quo generally reigns supreme, with major changes in characters' lives happening only once every few decades (though the pace is slowly accelerating). 

Avengers: Endgame reminds me of the What If? stories because in this movie, all the chickens come home to roost; consequences are real, lasting, and permanent. Even though this movie uses a do-over as its major plot, Endgame somehow shows that there really are no do-overs. It's impossible to explain this seeming contradiction without spoilers, unfortunately. But the filmmakers manage it beautifully.

At one point in the film, a mother tells her son, who feels as though he has utterly failed as a person, that he should stop trying to be who he's supposed to be, and instead be who he is. Only today, after thinking about the film a little more, did I realize that conversation turns out to be the arc for the major characters in not only this film, but for all the Marvel films in which they've previously appeared. Whether or not you appreciate superhero movies, that is an accomplishment in film that I believe is unprecedented in cinema: character and story arcs spread out over 22 films and 11 years. That the Marvel movies, particularly the overstuffed Avengers films, are coherent at all is something of a miracle. That they're actually entertaining and have something to say about the world is astounding. 

This movie speaks best, of course, to the audiences who have invested in the entire journey. I would argue, in fact, that those not so invested may be bewildered by Endgame, and its companion piece, Infinity War. And that's okay. Not all art is digestible in a moment, or an hour, or two, or a week. Some takes time to percolate, to evolve, to age at the same rate as we mortals. 

Every moment in this movie is earned thanks to the rich backstory told over the last 11 years. Some of these moments moved me to silent tears; others caused elation and that "gee whiz!" sense of wonder that gave me such thrills as a kid. 

What a long, strange, amazing journey it's been. Endgame is a fitting end indeed. 

Tedfufu's Captain America

Compiled by YouTube user Tedfufu, this collection of animated moments from the 1960s Captain America cartoon has me metaphorically rolling on the floor with laughter. The combination of choppy, surreal animation and crazed dialogue is a real sight to behold. Enjoy! 

The Shield of Liberty: The Winter Soldier

By far the best of the modern Marvel movies to date, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a sharp, well-plotted political action thriller that neatly poses a question every citizen must answer: how much freedom are we willing to surrender in the name of security?

As the film opens, we discover that time-tossed World War II super-soldier Steve Rogers - AKA Captain America (Chris Evans) - is dividing his time between performing anti-terrorist operations for shadowy supra-government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and trying to catch up on the sixty or so years of popular culture he missed while in suspended animation. (There's a cute moment where we see a brief close-up of Steve's notebook, which includes a checklist of music, movies and television shows he should watch to bring himself into the 21st century.)

While a patriot, Steve is clearly uncomfortable with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s methods, which consist chiefly of universal surveillance and overwhelming firepower. His concerns mount when his boss, Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) informs him that a new generation of helicarriers (basically flying weapons platforms) will soon be deployed, and that these weapons are capable of wiping out every bad guy on earth in one fell swoop. In the real world, drone strikes kill indiscriminately at a distance without due process of law; the film takes this unhappy reality one step further, suggesting a holocaust by remote control.

Steve's misgivings - and, as it turns out, those of his boss - turn out to be well-founded, and soon Captain America and his allies the Falcon and the Black Widow are on the run, fugitives from their own employer. What follows is a well-paced cat-and-mouse chase full of surprising revelations and chilling betrayals, with not only millions of lives at stake, but the personal freedoms of everyone on Earth.

While this film, like the other Marvel movies, features generous helping of super-hero action, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is far more grounded in real-life problems than its cinematic siblings. While previous films in the series dealt with mad scientists and alien invasions, The Winter Soldier presents us with villains cast in the mold of today's greatest threats to democracy - the very people we elected to serve us, who instead kowtow to the 1 percent and sacrifice the liberty of the masses to serve a few corporate masters.

That may sound a little cynical, but the past year's revelations of increasingly intrusive corporate and government surveillance of our lives makes this, along with climate change, one of the chief existential threats to civilization. Tellingly, the only politicians in The Winter Soldier turn out to be exactly as deserving of the distrust polls show we have for our elected officials.

Many storytellers fail to deliver on the initial promise of an intriguing premise, but in this case the film plays out exactly as it should, taking some impressive chances to deal with the logical fallout of its plot - fallout that can't help but have an impact on future Marvel movies (and especially the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television program).

In the end, Captain America and his friends save the day - for the moment. But it's a victory that demands its audience start thinking more seriously about what patriotism and freedom really mean. These are not American problems; it's a struggle that touches each and every one of us. The Winter Soldier is just a movie, but like the best popular culture, it raises an important issue and even serves as a call to action: don't let the powers that be cow you into a state of constant fear. Open your eyes and look for the real enemies. 

Bald Birthday

Sean's friends like to make fun of him by insinuating that Harvey's is his favourite restaurant. For Sean's birthday we played along with the joke by shooting this photo and claiming on Facebook this would be Sean's birthday supper before heading in to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. 

White Man in Peril

There's no reason at all for Captain America to refer to the race of the guy losing his hat, and yet he does. In fact, it seems to add greater urgency to his desire to intervene.

Rick Jones' epiphany doesn't help. "If you speak English, we must be getting near civilization!" It's fascinating how subtext so very often says so much more than text...

An A for Avengers

In the beginning - and only the beginning - super-heroes inhabited their own worlds. Batman struck terror into the criminals of Gotham, Superman brought robber barons to justice in Metropolis, Wonder Woman fought Nazis. But it was only months before Sheldon Mayer and Gardner Fox decided that their four-colour heroes should meet, and thus, with the publication of All-Star Comics #3 and the Justice Society of America, the concept of a shared superhero universe was born.

Decades later, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby decided that the next wave of super-heroes, Marvel's Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and so on, should also explicitly inhabit a New York teeming with super-heroes. For decades, shared universes of larger-than-life characters have been the norm in comic books.

But a trope taken for granted on paper has proven difficult to translate to film. The Superman movies of the 70s and 80s made no mention of Batman or Green Lantern; the Batman films have referred to Superman only in passing.

That all changed when Marvel Studios began the most ambitious comic book film project ever: introduce a handful of Marvel super-heroes to the big screen one movie at a time (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger), weave over-arching narrative threads and supporting characters through each film, then bring all the heroes together in one spectacular team-up.

That team-up, of course, is Joss Whedon's The Avengers, the story of a small group of people with remarkable gifts and equally potent hang-ups who are recruited to save the world. It's a super-hero story in which the paper-thin plot serves merely as an excuse to play these characters off one another, and frankly that's fine with me.

Even though each of the titular Avengers - Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye and Thor - have already been introduced to movie-going audiences via the preceding films mentioned above, Whedon spends a little time to re-establish each character, mainly to ensure that when they're brought together the various personalities clash in believable and amusing ways. Norse demigod Thor is torn between respect, frustration and amusement for the "little people" he sees as children in need of protection. Captain America, frozen in time since World War II, struggles to adapt to modern mores. Bruce Banner - the Hulk - reigns in his berzerker rage with dark, quiet humour. Tony Stark, the billionaire genius under the Iron Man armour, tosses sarcastic barbs at his comrades to mask his own hopes and fears. And Black Widow's lethal professionalism is tempered with a tiny hint of realistic - not sexist, not pandering - vulnerability. (She alone seems to understand the full danger of recruiting the Hulk.)

While the film is generally serious in tone, its greatest asset is the warmth and humour generated by putting all of these characters (and their fine actors) together in the same milieu. Each of them is given multiple moments to shine, and at the screening I attended these moments were greeted with great enthusiasm by the audience.

Oh, there's a threat, of course; Norse god Loki recruits an alien armada to eke out revenge for his treatment in Thor, but the existential threat hardly matters to the audience; what's fun is seeing how these messed-up characters learn to work together. The last third of the film is a glorious mess, a hyper-kinetic action set-piece that puts each hero through his or her paces and sets the stage for more adventures to come.

The show-stealers this time around are Black Widow and the Hulk, for reasons I can't reveal without spoiling the fun. And as with other Marvel films, be sure to stay all the way through the end credits for not one, but two additional scenes.

The Avengers may not be as complex as Christopher Nolan's recent Batman films, but its greatness is of a different kind. This is comic-book fun of the first order: unselfconscious, brazen, hyperbolic, and most of all, just plain fun.

Captain Seanmerica

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

[SPOILER WARNING: If you haven't seen Captain America yet, beware: this review contains plot spoilers.]

When Richard Donner prepared to direct Superman (1978), he took great pains to avoid camp, knowing that would destroy any hope of producing a good film that stayed true to what made the character great. One word guided his approach: verisimilitude.

Captain America director Joe Johnston seems to have taken the same approach with this latest comic book adaptation, a World War II period piece with a modern-day framing story. Like all comic adaptations, the story is necessarily chock-a-block with elements of the fantastic; super-science, implausible action, grotesque villains. But Johnston uses clever art direction and scripting touches to give these elements a thin veneer of plausibility, allowing the audience to believe that yes, perhaps a good-hearted 90 pound weakling could be transformed into a super-soldier capable of leaping high walls and lifting motorcycles over his head. The super-science, for example, is always clad in World War II vintage cast iron and giant rivets. Readouts and maps are always vintage analog. Period costumes and music, acting choices and Johnston's direction all serve the film's patina of realism; we could almost believe that if history had been different, if technology had only progressed a little faster, the events of the film could have happened.

Chris Evans, above all, allows us to believe in the film. His portrayal of Steve Rogers/Captain America presents us with a hero who is determined, vulnerable and perhaps a little sad, yet filled with a genuine desire to serve his country. Evans' Rogers embodies all the positive aspects of patriotism, the love of country that manifests itself as a desire to serve others and sacrifice for the common good.

"Do you want to kill Nazis?" asks good-hearted German expatriate German scientist Professor Erskine, as part of a test to see if Rogers is the man he needs for his experimental super-soldier project. Rogers, at this point still a brave but physically hopeless weakling, shrugs:

"I don't want to kill anyone," he says. "I just don't like bullies."

Rogers' compassion, his lack of blood-lust and desire to simply do the right thing, convinces Erskine that Rogers is worthy. And so Rogers undergoes the heroic transformation from everyman to superman that forms the necessary dramatic nexus of virtually all superhero films. The magic of science morphs Evans from a scrawny runt to a mesomorphic fantasy figure, an ironically Aryan Übermensch. It's an irony that Johnston chooses to ignore, though, perhaps for good reason; too much self-awareness would destroy the verisimilitude he's worked so hard to establish. Evans and Johnston play it straight, even during the comic interlude that serves to establish the iconic costume: before being allowed to participate directly in the war, Rogers is forced into a propaganda role, acting as a sort of USO entertainer, movie star and comic book hero, clever touches gleaned from the character's real-world media presence.

The film's pacing and believability do suffer somewhat after the generally excellent opening act. Captain America's adventures on the battlefield are presented in a frenetic montage of over-the-top action; Cap tosses his shield at a sniper, Cap gets into a James-Bondian motorcycle chase, Cap tosses grenades into tanks, etc. While this approach economically establishes Captain America as a force to be reckoned with, we lose some of the emotional connection we had with the character; it's hard to care about Cap's exploits when they're presented without any context. I far prefer Richard Donner's approach in Superman, in which the titular hero has only three our four heroic exploits on his big debut night, but each is given the appropriate weight and pacing to establish his heroism. In other words, we have enough breathing space to care about what's happening, to have some investment in the outcome.

The film regains some of its momentum in the final act, as Captain America squares off with his nemesis, the Red Skull (the always-affable Hugo Weaving) in a gigantic flying wing full of kamikaze buzz-bombs with the names of American cities painted ominously upon them. Like most Marvel movies, the story climaxes with a super-powered fight scene, and on this point I do wish the writers could come up with something new. Not all conflicts need to be resolved with fisticuffs; Captain America should be clever enough to outwit his foes. At least it would be a change.

Still, the climax ends with some genuine poignancy, dovetailing as it must into the film's modern-day prelude. A final radio conversation between Rogers and the object of his affections is quite moving, especially when the audience knows that their romance is ultimately doomed by time and tragic circumstance. Dramatic irony is rare in superhero films, and much appreciated here.

The present-day coda provides a well-crafted if somewhat utilitarian setup for the next film in this sequence of Marvel adventures, next spring's The Avengers. Stay for the post-credits teaser!

Final verdict: not as good as Thor or X-Men: First Class, but still enjoyable summer entertainment.

7.2 star-spangled vibranium shields out of 10.

Super-Hero by Night

Last night I dreamed that Sylvia and I had teamed up with Captain America to fight a super-villain by moonlight on an old abandoned farm. The villain was a humanoid blob of glowing yellow light that shot firebolts; I don't think I had any super-powers, I was more of a Rick Jones-style sidekick.

Captain America was having a tough time against this guy, barely able to deflect the firebolts with his shield. I flailed my arms around uselessly. Sylvia, however, used her telekinesis to grab hold of a hay bale and slam it down on top of the villain, leaving him trapped cartoonishly inside the centre of the bale with only his head visible.

I whooped in triumph and shouted, "Hey, Captain America, she really BALED us out! Get it? Because she used a hay bale..."

The last image of the dream was Captain America's annoyed glare, gazing straight at me.