Captain America

Once again, as tends to be the case with superhero movies, Captain America was pretty much what I expected it to be. I didn’t know much about this character going in, and so I was intrigued at the set up of the weakling who wants to help his country and do the right thing but is unable to enlist until a brilliant scientist gives him a chance to become part of an experiment to create a new super soldier. After Steve Rogers is transformed from a ninety-eight pound weakling into a super buff fighter capable of helping the Allies destroy the Nazis, the movie takes a turn I wasn’t expecting with a really delightful song and dance routine. But, of course, we must get back to the action when Captain America goes out alone to save his old buddy from the bad guys with the evil plan to take over the world.

The plot from there isn’t too important to recap. The bottom line is that the movie does a good job of being what it is. My one major critique is the same critique I have of a lot of action movies in recent years, and that’s simply that it’s too long. By the final half hour or so, I was ready to be done. I don’t know if I have a short attention span or what, but I generally think ninety minutes is a good length for an action movie, comedy, horror, mystery, whatever. Anything other than a serious character-driven drama should probably be less than two hours. And any single action sequence should probably be no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Now, I wasn’t timing the big climactic action sequence in Captain America, but it sure felt like it went on for a half an hour or so, and I wanted it be done about halfway through.

It’s strange: I don’t have any specific problems with the action sequences. There weren’t any moments that stand out as being gratuitous, but on a whole, it was just too much. I think the tendency in recent years is to always try to make the newest movie bigger than what has come before, but bigger doesn’t mean better. I’d rather have smaller, with more specifically chosen moments that really work instead of throwing every possible event at the screen, hoping that something will be amazing. I have a feeling of déjà vu as I write this. Did I write this same thing about Thor or X-Men? It seems likely.

So here’s my general advice to directors making the next big blockbuster action movie: go for a lean ninety minutes. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience with too much action. Plus, if a movie is ninety minutes instead of over one hundred and twenty, the theaters might be able to squeeze in an extra showing each day, which means the movie could rake in even more money.

Thor

It was a very Norse weekend for me. On Saturday I went to see a broadcast of Die Walküre as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series. Then on Sunday I went to Thor. I won’t write too much about Die Walküre because even though I saw it at a movie theater, it wasn’t really a movie, and this blog is devoted to movies. I’ll let it suffice to write that I enjoyed it, I left with “Flight of the Valkyries” stuck in my head, and that it (along with Thor) inspired me to want to learn more about Norse mythology.

I know a little bit about Norse mythology, but just the generic stuff—that Thor is the god of thunder, Odin is the big chief god, Valhalla is where heroes go when they die, and so on. My interest in Wagner’s Ring Cycle in recent years has given me a bit more knowledge, but I’m not sure what is classic Norse mythology and what Wagner changed around for his own purposes. But I’m not particularly familiar with the Marvel comics character Thor. My brother, Nate, is a Marvel fan, and he told me that Thor is to Marvel comics what Superman is to DC, in that he is otherworldly with super strength and can basically fly and so forth. So I went to see Thor without many particular expectations beyond just hoping to see a fun comic book movie. I did have fun at the movie, but somehow, despite what I thought were my lack of expectations, it wasn’t what I expected.

I have seen a lot of comic book superhero movies over the years, and I generally enjoy them. I suppose that, without giving it too much conscious thought, I have come to expect certain traits from the first movie in a superhero series. I’ll meet the hero, find out what type of powers he has, where he came from, how he became a hero, etc. Sometimes it starts off with the hero as a child and leads up to the point where he becomes a hero (as in the original Superman movie), or it might present the character before getting powers (as in Spider-Man), or maybe just start with the hero already doing his work (as in the first Tim Burton Batman). But at some point, there will be a double identity and conflict between the desire to be a normal person and a heroic super human. But Thor is different. It begins much like Superman. We’re in a different world, there’s the backstory of a father and son. Instead of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, we have Anthony Hopkins as Odin, but still, I can see where this is going. But then the movie doesn’t go there. One of the big differences is simply that Thor has no secret identity. When he arrives on Earth, he’s just Thor. And the fun isn’t in him dressing up like a hero, it’s in him dressing down like a regular guy and trying to figure out how to relate to his new surroundings.

Another big difference is in the major conflict. Again, I expect from past superhero movies that there will be one major villain, a Lex Luthor or Green Goblin or Joker. But the villain in Thor emerges much more slowly and subtly than in many other superhero stories. The villain in this movie is probably the most fully fleshed out, complexly motivated character of the lot. This contrasts quite a bit with our hero; even though there is an arc to Thor’s story, during which he achieves some growth as a character, it’s clear from early on what that growth will be, so we aren’t surprised when it happens. But it’s not clear from the beginning what exactly the villain’s arc will be or even whether the character we suspect will be the villain will eventually emerge to be the clear villain.

There are obligatory scenes of fighting that feel comparable to other comic book movies, and there are some deliberate tie-ins with other Marvel movies and setting up next year’s Avengers movie; but despite all of this, it still didn’t exactly feel like a superhero movie to me. I suppose that if I hadn’t known it was based on a comic book, I might have just thought it was an intriguing original idea to take a mythic god and put him into our modern world, and I don’t know if I ever would have thought of the term superhero at all. And that’s kind of refreshing.

There have been a few movies recently that have taken the superhero genre and played with it. Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Super (which I haven’t seen yet but want to) all toy with the premise of real people deciding to become superheroes. But here’s sort of the opposite approach. Thor is a super human, literally a god. But for most of the movie, he isn’t dressed in a cape and flying around catching bad guys. He’s just a fish out of water, walking around, trying to get his bearings. In a weird way, maybe more than Superman, Thor reminded me of Crocodile Dundee.