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The film opens with an extended present-day discovery of the title character. He’s in suspended animation in a crashed aircraft in an arctic wasteland. The scene draws its inspiration from the resurrection of the character in the Marvel Comics’ superhero renaissance in the mid-1960s. Much of the film owes its inspiration to Marvel Comics ideas that came out of the ‘60s, but at its heart, the film is firmly rooted in Joe Simon’s original comic book of the ‘40s.

After an extensive series of scenes that help tie this film into the matrix of the rest of Marvel’s Avengers family of movies, we get introduced to Steve Rogers in the form of Chris Evans. Whereas the original comic book introduces Rogers roughly seven panels before he’s turned into Captain America, the film spends a good hour getting him there. The comic book wasn’t all that interested in who Steve Rogers was as a person, but the film centers a good portion of the drama on it.

Captain America wasn’t alone in getting relatively little of the spotlight behind the mask. In general, heroes of pop fiction in the ‘30s and ‘40s didn’t get the kind of comprehensive background that our modern heroes do. Whether the hero in question was in a comic book, a movie serial or a radio drama, action heroes back then never really had much of their backgrounds delivered to the audience. The move to more character-driven hero fiction in the past half-century or so is partially due to maturation of hero fiction as a genre, but I like to think that there’s a healthy skepticism in there as well. It may have something to do with a healthy mistrust of authority.

Back in the early-to-mid 20th century, people were more willing to take their heroes on faith. Now we’re less trusting. We’ve been burned before with the whole hero thing and we want to see a resume. Whereas once we were willing to take on faith that our hero was a fine, upstanding man representing all of the more noble ideals of a nation, now he needs a thorough background check.

Various authors had tried their hands at fleshing-out the background of the character over the years. Roger Stern did a good job in the pages of the comic book for the character’s 40th anniversary in 1981. Fabian Nicieza did an equally admirable job for a mini-series celebrating the character’s 50th ten years later.

With a history now going back 70 years, Captain America’s screenwriters could’ve drawn inspiration from a lot of different sources. The film’s interpretation of the character paints him as a kid from Brooklyn who wants to serve his country. He has tried to enlist quite a few times under various aliases - rejected every time due to physical frailty. He refuses to give up. And Evans does a good job of keeping this kind of altruism grounded in the kind of earthbound emotion that we can accept. So the new incarnation of the hero passes the initial job interview from a cynical audience. Fine, but that’s only the first part of the journey.

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