Captain America: The First Avenger, and some tangentially related thoughts

[edenfalling]

Susan and I decided to see Captain America: The First Avenger rather than Crazy, Stupid, Love -- our joint movie-watching tradition, does, after all, lean much more toward action movies than toward romantic comedies. And overall, we liked it.

I had to keep looking away from the screen during the USO bond advertisement show portion of the story -- it was like the writer and director had their fingers right on my sympathetic embarrassment squick button and were mashing it with gleeful abandon -- and Susan and I both agreed that the helmet-with-eyeholes was dumb (a regular helmet, even if it were painted blue with the A symbol, would have been immeasurably better), and the gratuitous use of slow-motion for random three second intervals during action scenes did not look cool in the slightest; it just made the moves in question look fake, fake, fake... and also tacky. Aside from those quibbles, though, the story was a lot better than it strictly needed to be and you could tell the actors were having fun. It genuinely felt like a WWII movie, albeit a WWII movie crossbred with a sci-fi action flick.

(Question: Why do futuristic weapons always glow blue these days? How about something that glows yellow, or, I don't know, white. Or maybe one where they decided that glowing weapons are stupidly obvious and covered all the power source elements, like sane people might do? But clearly that would not be visually cool enough... *grumble*)

I really should rent Thor when it comes available on Netflix, and maybe the Edward Norton version of the Hulk, just so I know what the movie-verse take on those characters is before The Avengers comes out next year. Because I will be going to see that movie, no matter how stupid it is. (Just like I will be going to see the new Spider-Man movie, though I think it was deeply unnecessary to reboot that franchise this soon.) A small corner of my soul is in hock to Marvel, okay? The first comics I ever read were X-Men and Spider-Man issues that Cat pushed on me, and the first non-PBS television I ever watched was the 1990s X-Men cartoon (which Cat also pushed on me, come to think of it). I think I imprinted a bit.

...

At least these days I get reasonably entertaining action movies out of that bargain?

Comments

[autumnia]

I can't speak to the films you've seen/going to see since I'm not really a fan of Comic Action Hero movies (though, I would consider making an exception for Thor) but maybe the blue glowing weapons is just a really big trend.

After all, even Rhindon glowed blue in Edmund's hands (as did those silly seven swords on the Table) in the VDT film. :-)

[edenfalling]

Well, Power Glows is a trope that's been around for ages (and has never made much sense -- a constant discharge of light is a waste of energy!), but a specifically blue glow is probably more recent. I think it struck me because of ads I'd seen for Cowboys & Aliens, watching Tron: Legacy around New Year's, and now in Captain America there were glowing blue energy guns and things. Too much blue light!

Glowing swords are just silly, unless they're lightsabers. Where is the light meant to come from? Radioactive decay? :-)

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

re: blue, maybe it's the teal and orange (http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html) thing at work again?

[edenfalling]

*follows link* Possibly so!

I also think there is some general color-coding going on, where things that glow red or orange are evil while things that glow blue or white are good... and since Hydra's superweapons are powered from a stolen bit of "good" (or at least neutral) alien technology, the blue glow is a way of signalling the power source.

I still think it is just dumb to have weapons that glow in the dark. No matter how cool they look, they are desperately impractical.

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

1) I agree with your thoughts about Captain America, though the bond-drive scenes were, in a way, a nice homage to the original comics and their purpose.... I'm hoping in Avengers we get at least one scene where Steve tries to find out what happened to his girl and to all of his team.....

2) Ah! I read the Aventures of Tintin first, but X-men and Spiderman were next as a kid too. (reprints of the 1960s comics. The original class is still my favorite team of X-men.) And I loved that X-men cartoon too. I liked that they made Wolverine older since I found/continue to find X-men love triangles boring and I always liked the part of Wolverine that tends to gruffly mentor kids....

[edenfalling]

1) Oh, the bond drive scenes were an excellent idea, and very well choreographed! They were just torture to sit through, because I felt so awful for poor Steve having to embarrass himself like that over and over and over.

2) Wolverine was older than the others...??? Oh, you mean the X-Men Evolution cartoon, from the 2000s! (Which I hear is pretty good, yes.) I was talking about the old Fox cartoon from the early 1990s, in which almost everyone is an adult, and they used Chris Claremont's 1980s run on the comics as one of their main sources for plots. (I think Wolverine mentored Jubilee a bit, though. He is indeed an awesome mentor, in a gruff, "I'm not actually doing this" way. *grin*)

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

Lol. Yes, I was referring to the X-men Evolution ones... I've seen and liked the other cartoon though too. Woleverine sort of has a habit of taking people under his wing without really realizing it. The way you describe it (gruff "I'm not actually doing this)" is perfect) Kitty (Shadowcat), and Jubilee as well as more recently others. Even in the movie he takes Rogue under his wing.