How to use this Page

Captain America: The First Avenger, released concurrently, went back in time to place its difficult-to-like protagonist in his proper context

???

The writer’s revisionist view of history makes X-Men First Class look like a documentary. Idiotic “serious” analysis of comic book movies like this are what provide endless material for The Big Bang Theory.

Erik’s mother doesn’t have to be a mutant. Perhaps mutantism is a recessive gene and both mother and father had it? I don’t need to have red hair to have red haired children!

Also, Raven is far from a hideous monster…every red blooded man on earth would bed her as is.

Also, this is kinda long winded and overthought.

“X-Men: First Class” was a well made, entertaining movie, but it had anachronisms that detracted from it being a convincing “period piece.” The long hair, sideburns and mini-skirts didn’t become fashionable until a few years later. Crewcuts still ruled in ’62.

But I guess long hair and short skirts are things that say “The Sixties” to people who didn’t live through the decade, or simply don’t know much about it.

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t gripe about a comic book movie, when “Django Unchained” has characters in 1858 using dynamite (which wasn’t invented until after the Civil War) and tossing off modern phrases like “What’s not to like?”

???

Captain America wasn’t a movie for a long long time because the idea of a superhero superpatriot felt repellent to a mass moviegoing audience. The only way to make Captain America work in a 21st-century movie was to place him in his historical context first.

Captain America was a movie serial in the 1940s and a regular film in the early 1990s. And as for your take on the character…have you ever actually read a comic with Captain America in it?

Alcott’s biases are showing in his comments about CA. Also his ignorance.

“Captain America was a movie serial in the 1940s”

Which only supports Alcott’s comment that Captain America only works in his historical context.

“and a regular film in the early 1990s.”

Bringing up that intended-for-theatrical-release-but-went-direct-to-video joke of a movie doesn’t do your argument any favors.

“Which only supports Alcott’s comment that Captain America only works in his historical context.”

In no way does a mention of the 40′s CA serial support alcott’s ridiculous comment. Audiences weren’t clamoring for Iron Man before that came out. By your and alcott’s reasoning that would be because audiences found a super technological hero repellant.

This was a thoughtful essay – nicely done. I appreciated the insights about the film’s references to other films -

Yeah, I agree. This was really insightful criticism. It synthesized and contextualized a lot of things I noticed, but wasn’t consciously aware of. Definitely saw it as a romance. How could you not? And I picked that up in the Ultimate X-Men series too.

Darwin is a fairly new character. His first appearance was in Ed Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis from the mid-00s, and is a period story set at the same time as Giant Size X-Men, where Wolverine, Colossus, Storm, Banshee and Nightcrawler join the team. I’m font of him and was bummed that he bit it.

…have you ever actually read a comic with Captain America in it?

Sure! He’s a perfectly appealing character. But he is, and must be, a man out of time before he can speak to a mass movie-going audience. The idea of a movie studio, post-Vietnam, presenting a feature based on a patriotic superhero would have been commercial suicide, as evidenced by the 1990s fiasco. Marvel’s stroke of genius was to take their true-blue boy-scout superhero and place him in his proper context.