The World War II setting offers Captain America a chance to be a real war hero, in a time when war heroes were celebrated, and to fight a clearly defined, evil enemy that everyone recognizes as a threat. Today it would have seemed tacky to send Captain America to Iraq or Afghanistan. The 1940's wartime era plays into that patriotic symbol theme that is vital for Captain America to work. It would have been easy for the filmmakers to have a short World War II intro and then bring Cap into the modern world like the 1990 Albert Pyun version but we probably would have ended up with a similar mess. Johnston and his writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have found the balance to bring Cap to life and one of the prime reasons this works so well was the decision to take the character back to his origins and set it in the World War II era. Did director Joe Johnston ("Jumanji" & "The Rocketeer") manage to bring Captain Steve Rogers to the big screen successfully? The answer is simple, yes he absolutely did. So this brings us to "Captain America: The First Avenger", the latest in the current series of Marvel films that lead into next year's "The Avengers". Captain America however is rooted in the real world and it would be really easy to make this a nauseatingly patriotic Michael Bay movie. True "Thor" is about an Asgardian thunder god but at it's core it is essentially a fantasy film and we have done that before, so I had a lot of trust that it would work. Steve Rogers AKA Captain America is essentially a flag waving, patriotic boy scout and that works in printed form but could end up being a cheesy corn dog on screen. Of all the Marvel comic adaptations, I most worried about Captain America because this is a hard comic to adapt.
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