I, like many, saw the new Captain America movie last friday. I knew I wanted to blog about it from the moment I saw it, but it’s taken me a few days to collect my thoughts and get to the blogolator.
I think the most important thing about this movie to me was seeing it with my six year old, who we call “Tater” on the webbertubes. Tater was so completely bought in to the movie experience that his enthusiasm completely amped up my own enjoyment.
I had previously taken Tater to Thor, and he liked it okay, but the pure joy emanating from him while he watched Cap was unlike anything I had ever seen short of when Chewbacca was on that one episode of the Muppet Show.
This movie is so perfect! The action is exciting, the good guy is remarkably good and the bad guy is unapologetically evil. Dr. Erskine tells Steve Rogers to never stop being the little guy from Brooklyn, it’s the fact that Captain America carries through on that promise that really defines the idea of a hero. I think not since Christopher Reeve as Superman have we seen the idea of a hero being so… heroic. So noble! So…. so… well, so good. Cap is virtuous. He is better than all of us because he tries to be better than all of us.
Watching with Tater was so much fun for so many reasons. Tater would get excited whenever Howard Stark was on screen because, “That’s Iron Man’s dad!” Or when we saw the Tree from the Thor movie concealing the Cosmic Cube, at the mention of Odin, Tater squeals with delight. But, perhaps for me, my favorite moment of watching Tater was when Bucky came on screen and Tater asked me, “When does he become the Winter Soldier?”
For Tater, these Marvel films are One Big Movie. It isn’t the Iron Man movies, and the Hulk movies, etc. For Tater, it is simply the Avengers. How cool is that?
Today, Tater asked me once again if there ever really was a Captain America. Once again, I had to tell him there wasn’t. But, the line has blurred more than ever now.