Captain America SPOILERS!

[Ahriman238]

On which note I think Howard Stark was done well- you get a sense that he's enough like Tony Stark to be his father, but at the same time he's very much his own character with that (fully appropriate) Howard Hughes vibe.

Yeah, Howard Stark was aces, and I'm looking forward to Steve's reaction to Tony in the Avengers movie. More evidence for the Marvelverse already being somewhat more technically advanced, the '43 expo showed antigrav. Granted it only worked for a minute, but still. I also loved that he found the Cube, but was wise enough to order them to keep on looking.

Steve's confusion over the definition of 'fondue.' cracked me up.

[Havok]

I assumed they were manned bombs. Hydra agents are clearly willing to die for the cause and each one had a city painted on it. I think that was done for period effect and to let the audience know automatically what they were looking at instead of having to work in an info dump to explain them.

Fondu was indeed classic.

And I touched on the advanced Marvel-verse Earth in my post. It goes far beyond just the anti-grav car, which obviously, NEVER worked right.

[Dass.Kapital]

Say the film today and give it +1 and thumbs up of approval.
Spoiler

I thought the small plane(s) that fell out of the flying wing bomber was/were more a 'Parasite fighter' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin for extra sort of defense for the parent ship, as opposed to something akin to a manned V-1...?

[Simon_Jester]

Do we see any evidence that the parasite craft have weapons?

If so, they might be air-deployed fighters. If not, the city names painted on them make it more likely that they are some sort of missile.

[Dass.Kapital]

I think a rented or bought copy of the movie will have to be used to slow the images down and go looking for muzzle ports.

Though, I also seem to remember the bombs having silver cables being plugged into them and I don't remember any such on the mini-planes. Also, did the mini-planes even have writing on their noses?

Also, I remember some one previously asking about the mix of props and jet engines. I remember a distinct scene/image of the power distribution from the cosmic cube into the planes engines, with the prop engines being driven via power drawn from the cube and the jets not being on said screen.

So, could the propellers be for main flight and cruising and the jet engines being used to power the 'mundane' things on the plane such as generating electrical and hydraulic power?

A final thing. When the Skull is escaping in the Triebflugel (The vertical take off escape plane), does any one remember if it's rotor tips were glowing blue...or red..? I seem to remember blue. Indicating that the stored power of the cube was some how being used to operate the pulse jet motors. Perhaps the bombers rotors used the same idea?

Just some more musings and thoughts.

[Ellindsey]

A final thing. When the Skull is escaping in the Triebflugel (The vertical take off escape plane), does any one remember if it's rotor tips were glowing blue...or red..? I seem to remember blue. Indicating that the stored power of the cube was some how being used to operate the pulse jet motors. Perhaps the bombers rotors used the same idea?

I'm pretty sure they were glowing blue. The impression I got was that Hydra was using the energy from the cube to power everything, including the aircraft.

The props on the bomber did appear to be the exact same as that on the Triebflugel - a three-bladed prop powered by engines in the tips of the propellers.

[Simon_Jester]

A final thing. When the Skull is escaping in the Triebflugel (The vertical take off escape plane), does any one remember if it's rotor tips were glowing blue...or red..? I seem to remember blue. Indicating that the stored power of the cube was some how being used to operate the pulse jet motors. Perhaps the bombers rotors used the same idea?

I'm pretty sure they were glowing blue. The impression I got was that Hydra was using the energy from the cube to power everything, including the aircraft.

The plane may have been 'Cube-powered,' but removing the Cube from the plane didn't stop the engines. What does that say?

[Crossroads Inc.]

It says the energy storage devices are pretty damned impressive.

Ok that said I myself half expected the plane to suddenly 'power down' and begin to fall when the cube was yanked. We shall have to assume that it had a siezable power reserve. We know you can store 'Cube Energy' in a stable matrix that seems to keep its power for days on end. For all we know Cube Energy, by being 'magic' may never ware out like energy in a normal battery.

Thats said, other then an excuse to put the Cap on Ice, there should have been no reaso to ditch the way he did. Despite what he said, the plane did nto seem to be moving fast enough to be reaching NY in a matter of moments. If Cube Energy stores well, he should have had ample time to make a controlled crash landing instead of the ose dive he did.

[Mr Bean]

Why do we assume the plane was cube powered? Why is it not assumed that that was just a cube storage device in the cockpit? Remember the Red Skull was bailing out of his VERY last base bringing the cube with him least it fall into those nasty allies hands. It would make it sense he would keep it close. The whole point of the device seemed to be contain the cube not to draw power off of it. Remember what happened when it hit the deck? It almost instantly melted it and fell through.

[Havok]

I'd say you are partially correct. The device looked to be not just for storage, but as a way to transfer energy to whatever plugged into it. Perhaps that is why Cap had to crash the plane in the ice, to contain what he thought would be the explosion caused by the CC energy stored in the wing.

[Dass.Kapital]

The plane may have been 'Cube-powered,' but removing the Cube from the plane didn't stop the engines. What does that say?

*Bows* Well...if the jet engines were a separate system, then when the cube got yanked the plane was still able to be 'control' crashed. Is what it might say. As the jet engines wouldn't be effected by the loss of said cube.

Again, with the images of that screen showing red lines from the cube's storage/containment back to the props I do not remember seeing the jet engines included as part of that system. Also, the jet engines were running before the Skull put the cube into the system...I think....

Also, I think the reason Cap decided to put the plane down where ever he could, such as in the middle of no where, was because there were still a whole shed load of large, black, sinister looking things in the bays behind him.

It's shown that Cap doesn't have a huge education. Plus, there really is no way of knowing how inert/explosive the pay load of the bomber was.

It could be that Cap thought the out come of him putting the plane into the snow would have been a huge bang. Instead, he thumps his head on the control console (I don't remember Cap strapping himself in) and goes into deep freeze for decades, not realizing that neither the plane, nor himself, has been vaporized by unleashed cube energy.

Also, since the cube seems to be some part of the Norse God Rainbow bridge, who's guessing that instead of 'vaporizing' people, the energy is simply just 'shunting' the target off to a random time, place and space?

[Simon_Jester]

Since Cube energy also blows the shit out of inanimate objects, I suspect it disintegrates, or can disintegrate, human beings as well. Though the effect is kind of ambiguous.

But yeah, Cap's decision to crash the plane is very consistent with his heroic but not-especially-thinky persona. He may have been hoping vaguely for a 'controlled' crash, bringing the plane skidding to a halt over the icepack in a roughly survivable way, but I doubt he had any real confidence of that.

[Bright]

But Steve is at least somewhat "thinky." This much was established in the scene with the flag pole during training.

[Simon_Jester]

But Steve is at least somewhat "thinky." This much was established in the scene with the flag pole during training.

Strictly true. I mean, he's not stupid, he's got problem-solving skills.

But he's not a trickster-hero: he overcomes difficult situations by guts and honor more often than by his wits. And he's willing to take big leaps into the unknown, even to the extent of writing off his own life, if he sees something he thinks is important enough to justify it- no sense of caution or risk-aversion to the man at all, or if there is, his courage totally overrides it.

So there isn't necessarily a really complicated logical reason why Cap crashes the plane. He doesn't know exactly what's keeping the plane up, or what's powering it, or what it's armed with, except that it has very powerful weapons and was originally meant to devastate the entire East Coast. He knows it's headed straight for New York at speed, and believes that he won't be able to prevent it from doing so.

Under those circumstances, if he thinks there's even a small chance of the plane crashing in New York on autopilot with its powerful bombs loaded, he'll write off his own life to stop it from happening. It's really that simple.

[Flagg]

I just got backed and liked it overall. I could have done without the not-nazzies and the GI Joe battles where everyone just runs at eachother shooting lazer beams, but it was pretty damned good.

[Jim Raynor]

Just saw it and I thought this was a great movie. A lot better than Thor, and about as good as First Class. I agree with everyone who says that this is probably the best Marvel Studios film since the first Iron Man.

The entire cast was terrific, from Chris Evans as Cap all the way down to minor supporting characters. You know they were really aiming to make a quality movie. It was refreshing to see such an "old school" type of hero done well. I was really pulling for Steve even before he became a super soldier. Peggy Carter was a lot better than most superhero movie love interests. She had personality, an implied history of putting up with sexism, and she could kick butt right alongside the hero. Howard Stark had a much bigger role than the cameo that I had predicted. He too was done very well, and you can see how a guy like Tony could be his son.

Also, despite its war setting this movie had a surprising amount of humor in it. I frequently found myself laughing with the rest of the audience in the theater. Fun and adventurous, the perfect tone for a movie like this.

The Marvel Universe connections were great, and this movie was so closely connected to Thor. I just wish that they gave Cap some more time after he woke up in the present. I hope his story about acclimating himself to a new, vastly different America doesn't get sidelined too much in next year's Avengers.

9/10. Highly recommend seeing this if you haven't already.

[Ted C]

Why do we assume the plane was cube powered? Why is it not assumed that that was just a cube storage device in the cockpit? Remember the Red Skull was bailing out of his VERY last base bringing the cube with him least it fall into those nasty allies hands. It would make it sense he would keep it close. The whole point of the device seemed to be contain the cube not to draw power off of it. Remember what happened when it hit the deck? It almost instantly melted it and fell through.

The device he plugged it into on the plane looked exactly like the mechanism used to draw power from it for weapons earlier in the movie. It stands to reason that getting a plane that big off the ground would require an enormous amount of energy, possibly more than it was reasonable to store in the batteries they were making, at least for a trans-Atlantic flight.

[Mr Bean]

The device he plugged it into on the plane looked exactly like the mechanism used to draw power from it for weapons earlier in the movie. It stands to reason that getting a plane that big off the ground would require an enormous amount of energy, possibly more than it was reasonable to store in the batteries they were making, at least for a trans-Atlantic flight.

As noted there was no power loss when the cube was removed, and the plane was already in motion before the cube was installed both things that don't seem to jibe with the fact that the plane required the Cosmic cube itself to fly.

And I'll toss out two more things I'm recalling, in the escaping scene there were other planes besides the one the Red Skull escaped on I recall, which makes little sense if each plane requires the Cube to power it.

Second, the Ratte tank Cap smashed in the destroying the bases montage were powered by Cube energy and moving that much armor and guns is a far sight harder then propelling the super ship. The power generation requirements are harder for moving something that size and arming it with a disintegration ray on a tank scale compared to just getting a flying wing in the air.

[LadyTevar]

Nit and Tev finally got out of the house to see the movie. It gets the Tahalshia Double Seal of Approval!

A few thoughts:

Steve's attempts to enlist are part of the same thing that keeps him from staying down when the movie-theatre bully was beating on him: he doesn't give up. This is the core of who Steve Rogers is, a man who will not give up. Even during the fight with Red Skull, this is repeated, as Cap says 'he can do this all day'.

Thus, when we see Roger's soldier training, he is the one at the back of the pack, struggling to keep up, but not giving up and not backing down even when the 'bully' is taunting him. Still, how he managed to get the flag off the pole just showed no grunt ever thought of that trick before.

We all saw the grenade trick in the trailer, but its the scene afterward, where Dr Erskine is having a drink with Rogers the night before that I felt was the important one. The history of Red Skull sets up how the serum ramps everything, body and mind and soul. I do not think the serum would ever have been usable mass-production, even if Erskine lived, just because of that effect on the mind.

Two little things about the Brooklyn lab made me smile. I have (somewhere) a graphic novel reprint of the Best of Captain America. In the Origin comic is a little old lady in an antique shop hiding a secret base, just as we saw in the movie. She has a machine gun, and tries to stop Erskine's killer as he runs away. I don't think he killed her in the comic, but it was a great Easter Egg. The other is the 'save the little boy' subversion, where the kid looks up and say "don't worry! I can swim!" Most other hero-films would have the kid needing rescued, so again, nice touch.

Agent Carter. Damn, honey, I wish I had your skills. She obviously spent a LOT of time at gun practice. I wish they'd gotten their dance... and I wonder how long she lived after that. She'd be in her 90s.

The US Bonds tour. *sigh* Well, it was a great tribute to the big 1940s musical era, and the war movies were as gung-ho as anything else produced at the time. While painfully cheesy, you had to admire the choreography. And the girls in short skirts. (Did anyone notice in the end credits one of the fighter planes had nose-art of one of the dancers?) Still, Rogers was right to think of himself as a performing monkey.
The comic books we see the kids and soldiers reading I didn't get a good glimpse of, but I'd not be surprised if they copied actual 1940s Captain America covers.

Now, while Rogers did get called a 'chorus girl' by our dear gruff Colonel, I thought I heard a hidden message there. Reverse-psychology from the Colonel? He gave Rogers all the info to get to Hydra base, all but dared Rogers to go out and try it himself. Or am I reading too much into that? It was clear the Colonel wasn't happy to see the Senator using 'his' supersoldier to sell bonds, and it was clear that Rogers was willing to go do the mission himself, hell or high water.

Bucky and the Howling Commandos were fantastic. Yes, there was a Japanese-American added ("I'm from Fresno"), but he wasn't there as a token, he was just as good a soldier as the rest of them. Even the "token Black Dude" wasn't just for show, he spoke and read German and French. The massive montage of Cap & the Howling Commandos taking out Hydra ops was simply beautiful. The teamwork was spot-on, and it was clear the Commandos were just as determined as their Captain. The various ways to kill a tank made me grin (even if one tank was a Fuckin' Bolo!!!).

However... Bucky. He wasn't just off being tortured; Zola was experimenting on him. Red Skull makes a off-hand comment to Zola that leads me to think Zola was also trying to remake the SuperSerum, just as the US was trying with Cap's blood. Bucky was improving very quickly as they ran out of the building. Almost like he was healing.
We never see a body for Bucky, and we know cold and ice put Steve in suspended animation.... (go look up "Winter Soldier")

Hydra's SuperTech was Cobra-level scary, and it was nearly all based on real Nazi prototypes and plans, and in movie all ran by BATTERIES. (ok, super batteries powered by a Tesseract, but still batteries.)
The fuckin' huge tank Nit tells me is 'just' a KingTiger, a tank that the Nazis did make a prototype for but was too huge for 1940s tech to make it actually MOVE. Doesn't mean I didn't call it a 'fuckin' Bolo' when I first saw it on-screen.
The smaller Tanks I swear are stolen from Cobra's H.I.S.S. mini-tanks. Same body shape, about the same size and duty (light, fast tank)
The prop-bombs are the scariest. It was clear they were suicide missions for the pilots, thus the toast given to them by Red Skull before Cap's arrival. It was a self-propelled, user-guided WMD.
The flying wing was just amazing. We still have problems getting ours to fly right without computer stabilization, and they aren't nearly as big inside as this one. The momentary gravity loss as they plunge was a very nice touch.

But now is the REAL trick. Red Skull touching the Tesseract, and we see a wormhole form (Bifrost, as per Thor movie). The Red Skull de-rezzing, then a beam fired up into the wormhole, but not up the actual BiFrost Bridge. I think we just saw the Red Skull find one of Loki's "hidden paths" that he bragged to Heimdal about.
As the Skull said so himself to Hitler's men: You call it Magic, I call it Science. Paraphrasing Thor, who said much the same thing in his own movie. That "Odin's Gem" was hidden in Norway, in an ancient cathedral carved with Norse Mythology, inside the image of Jormandr.... makes one think, doesn't it?

SideNote:
The DoubleDate at Stark's World Expo was great. The artificial man on display may be a lead-in to The Vision, or could be another old Hero the Red Tornado who was also a robot/android.
While it wasn't the IronMan entrance, Stark Sr. also knew how to play the crowds. The anti-grav car was sweet while it lasted ("I did say a few years..."). I would like to see Cap ask Tony "Where's the flying Car?" in the Avengers movie. After all, the Avengers do have several in the comics, to carry those who can't fly.

[RecklessPrudence]

In regards to the flagpole scene, I half-expected Steve to have kept going, spurning the rest he so desperately needed and the possible shortcut so that he could get a head start on keeping up with all the muscleheads who were faster than him. Especially since we don't see him once the drill sergeant starts going on about the flag and how if you get it you get a ride back to base.

It was only once the camera showed him, when they were getting ready to resume running, that I realised he was going to do something clever. I had gotten focused on his 'never give up' sheer stubbornness, rather than his not-booksmart-but-able-to-think-on-his-feet-ness (is there a word for that? In DnD it'd be 'middling-INT-high-WIS', but there's got to be a term for it that I'm just not thinking of - hell, it's what my grandpa and uncle are, so I should know it, but I've gone blank), and it was good to be reminded of that aspect of him.

[Simon_Jester]

The fuckin' huge tank Nit tells me is 'just' a KingTiger, a tank that the Nazis did make a prototype for but was too huge for 1940s tech to make it actually MOVE. Doesn't mean I didn't call it a 'fuckin' Bolo' when I first saw it on-screen.

If you mean the one I think you mean, it's actually bigger than some of the early Bolo-story Bolos. And no, Nitram's wrong, it's not "just" a King Tiger, those only weighed about seventy tons and weren't all that much stunningly large- a lot of that weight was solid slabs of metal. About ten feet high, twenty feet long, and twelve feet wide. King Tiger could actually move, just not very fast- they were used in the late war period and gave Allied armor commanders some interesting times- they showed up in the Battle of the Bulge for example. Seventy tons was dangerous enough as it was, stacked up against thirty-ton medium tanks like the Sherman and T-34.

The real behemoths from this movie are based off what people around here are calling "Maus" and "Ratte," "Mouse" and "Rat" being ironic nicknames the Germans gave to the beasts. Those never made it out of prototyping, and were way bigger. Maus tipped the scales at 200 tons, and they did get the prototype to move... slowly. Ratte weighed 1000 tons, or would have; they never built one and were planning to use U-boat engines to power the beast.

While it wasn't the IronMan entrance, Stark Sr. also knew how to play the crowds. The anti-grav car was sweet while it lasted ("I did say a few years..."). I would like to see Cap ask Tony "Where's the flying Car?" in the Avengers movie...

HELL YES!

[neoolong]

SideNote:
The DoubleDate at Stark's World Expo was great. The artificial man on display may be a lead-in to The Vision, or could be another old Hero the Red Tornado who was also a robot/android.
While it wasn't the IronMan entrance, Stark Sr. also knew how to play the crowds. The anti-grav car was sweet while it lasted ("I did say a few years..."). I would like to see Cap ask Tony "Where's the flying Car?" in the Avengers movie. After all, the Avengers do have several in the comics, to carry those who can't fly.

That was the original Human Torch, Jim Hammond. He was an android created by Phineas Horton, whose name you see above the tank he was in.

Red Tornado is DC by the way.

[Zaune]

Not much to add to the chorus, besides the fact that the GI Joe school of infantry tactics annoyed me as well (come on, Hollywood, I found a Vietnam-era US Army field manual in Waterstones for fifteen quid once. Researching this stuff is not hard!), but did anybody else notice that the tracked vehicles parked near that armoured car that gets stolen in the prison break look like a post-war West German APC whose name escapes me? If I'm right, that has to be the cleverest Easter Egg in film for years.

[Mayabird]

Bucky and the Howling Commandos were fantastic. Yes, there was a Japanese-American added ("I'm from Fresno"), but he wasn't there as a token, he was just as good a soldier as the rest of them. Even the "token Black Dude" wasn't just for show, he spoke and read German and French. The massive montage of Cap & the Howling Commandos taking out Hydra ops was simply beautiful. The teamwork was spot-on, and it was clear the Commandos were just as determined as their Captain. The various ways to kill a tank made me grin (even if one tank was a Fuckin' Bolo!!!).

This brings up something I was wondering - the Marvelverse apparently has been more technologically advanced than ours for a while (and scientifically, since they could casually throw around terms like 'genetic code' in the 40s), but what about socially? Was their U.S. Army desegregated already? The random black guy mixed in both propaganda films and the troops wouldn't have flown at all in our time period. The Japanese-American troops were segregated as well in ours.

And now, a complaint no one else has made here.

A complaint no one else has ever made anywhere, I'd bet.

A complaint I doubt anyone else will ever make.

And this is really minor.

Those scenes where they're in the camp in Europe, and there are incidental background sounds from the woods around, I clearly heard a chickadee call. Chickadees do not live in Europe. Their cousins the tits do, but they sound different.

Yes, I am THAT big of a nitpicker.

[Havok]

another old Hero the Red Tornado who was also a robot/android.

Red Tornado is DC by the way.

HA HA!!! FUCKING NOOB!!