Man Out of Time: Revisiting Albert Pyun’s ‘Captain America’
I was not a terribly discerning fan when it came to comic book movies as a kid. I couldn’t afford to be, because we had so few. And I watched so many low-budget horror, sci-fi, and action films from an early age that the cheapest movies looked normal to me. I never batted an eye. I grew up as a (mostly) Marvel kid during a time when pretty much the only superhero movies had been based on DC properties. Batman dominated the 1990s, and the Superman films were already modern staples. Those two guys were it for superhero titles at the video store, with no Marvel characters to be found, with one major exception: Captain America. It blew my young mind to discover this one in the video store and it quickly became a rental staple of my early childhood.
Even when I got a little older, I watched so many Full Moon films that the budget of Captain America never stood out much to me. That makes sense, too. After all, this movie’s director, Albert Pyun, directed two Full Moon flicks, Dollman and Arcade. Both are great early efforts from Charles Band’s direct-to-video studio. Dollman in particular is a gem. Not only that, but those Full Moon films often shot in Italy, where Band had a castle they would often use as the single filming location for their features. The whole third act of Captain America looks like it could easily have been shot at that castle.
I didn’t become remotely discerning about 1990’s Captain America until the big budget comic book boom of the 2000s, and at that point I dismissed it for too many years because I saw what could be done with these properties when they were handed over to major studios that treated them like real releases. Nearly every Marvel film of the 2000s felt like an event. Even when I was renting Captain America in the mid-‘90s, most people didn’t even know that it existed. It’s a shame I ignored it at that point, because I think Captain America is fascinating.
It did not have an easy time getting made, by any stretch. When I watch it now, I don’t think about what it could have looked like if it was a studio blockbuster on the size of Batman or Superman. I do think about what it could have been if the director’s vision had been left intact, instead of being chopped down to feel more like a traditional, family-friendly superhero film. And I think about the end result, the movie we’re left with, which is still of much more merit than it is typically given credit for.
Captain America adheres pretty close to the character’s comic book roots, especially considering the drastic liberties taken by the two TV movies of the 1970s. The film follows Steve Rogers (played by Matt Salinger, son of Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger) as he volunteers for a military experiment in World War II which transforms him into the super-soldier Captain America, who winds up freezing in the ice for fifty years and unthaws just in time to stop his nemesis the Red Skull from basically becoming the President of the United States.
At the same time, there are definitely some liberties taken. Instead of a German, the Red Skull is now Italian, which is a change that definitely makes sense given the film’s resources, but the accent is jarring nonetheless. While Red Skull is depicted in his classic, gruesome appearance for his fight with Cap in WWII, he looks very different for the rest of the film, having undergone heavy reconstructive surgery during the intervening decades.
The Captain America costume is incredibly faithful, perhaps even too much at times, as the wings on the mask tend to flop, and the foam ears molded onto the costume instead of simply being holes cut out for the actor’s real ears, are borderline nightmarish. But when the suit works, it works, and it’s great to see something so faithful to the source material, even if it is used sparingly. I think if the movie does struggle in tone with wanting to be a superhero film and wanting to be a true “man out of time” movie, and even if so much of the latter was cut out and the end result is not by any means what Pyun wanted, I do think a lot of that intent comes through, and there is a solid if uneven balance between the two.
I would even be as bold as to say that the “man out of time” element of Captain America is something that this movie does better than the MCU. There, Cap’s decades-long frozen slumber is usually treated as an aside, with only a few truly emotional moments to deal with it, like Rogers’ scene with the aging Peggy Carter in The Winter Soldier. But here, that is by and large the focus of the entire film. After his bravery and his unwavering dedication to his principles, this is the most fascinating element of the character. He is a man completely displaced in time.
Even when the MCU had an entire first film devoted to the WWII era and this one has only a few scenes, those few scenes set this sense of displacement and abandonment up so well. Steve Rogers leaves his own going away party, with a limp so prominent he can barely walk let alone run, to chase down his girlfriend, Bernie, before going away, who didn’t come to his big sendoff because she can’t bear saying goodbye. There’s that part of anyone sending their loved one off to war that knows they might never return, and for Bernie, avoiding it almost makes it less real.
On the other side, we have the harsh reality of Steve’s mother, who remarks about her husband, who died in either this or the previous war. Either way, he didn’t make it home, and she blatantly tells Steve not to meet that same fate, and because we know what movie we’re watching, we know that he will. Even if there are people he can reunite with in fifty years when he’s unfrozen, his mother goes to her grave believing him dead, having lost her son as well as her husband.
When Captain America is sent out on his first mission, he asks a seemingly harmless, ordinary question about when he can expect some more troops in his battalion. After all, Steve was meant to be the first volunteer for the super soldier program, not the only. That’s when the general carefully explains to him that the doctor’s research died with her, that no one but her knew it all so that it would never fall into the wrong hands, and tells him, “I’m afraid you’re the only one of you there’s ever gonna be.” Cap takes it quietly, in stride, and goes off on his mission, but he does it with the concrete knowledge that he is and will always be utterly alone. Albert Pyun was a filmmaker who never shied away from the characters or stakes no matter the scale of the film he was making and I guarantee he wanted us to feel these things. Those scenes are in the movie for a reason.
When Captain America is unfrozen, yes, there’s still a villain and a plot for world domination and small-scale superhero set pieces, but that sense of displacement is the backbone of the movie, and it never loses that focus. He’s not just a man forced to acclimate to a world he doesn’t recognize, not even just a man forced to reconcile with the fact that the woman he was about to marry has now lived an entire lifetime without him, he is also a literal relic of a bygone era. He is a walking symbol of wartime propaganda in a time of manufactured peace. There is no place for him in the world anymore.
Even simply in terms of a superhero movie narrative, Captain America’s struggle to educate himself about the world around him is so good. My single favorite sequence in the film boasts a genuine sense of scale, and dread, and heartbreak, all at once. It might be one of the better scenes indicative of any kind of Illuminati or shadow conspiracies of any movie. Steve sits down with a stack of video tapes to watch through the decades of history that he missed, and he sees the civil strife, and the assassinations, and he sees all of these connecting threads no one else would ever possibly see, and he realizes that there is one person to blame for all of it. That then brings him to the realization that every major landmark horror that happened in the years since he was frozen happened because he failed to stop the Red Skull.
This sequence is cut intermittently and exceptionally well between Steve witnessing the horrors of the past while losing his remaining connections in the present, as Bernie, her husband, and special guest star Ned Beatty are interrogated and shot by the Red Skull’s deadly assassin daughter. (as a comic fan, I must say it’s great to get at least a loose interpretation of Sin in this movie) This leaves Bernie’s daughter Sharon to become Steve’s only connection to the world, which only makes it reasonable after everything that he would try to ditch her to keep her out of harm’s way.
Even the Red Skull is a tragic figure in this film. In complete contrast to Steve volunteering for the program, the Red Skull was a genius, gifted child stolen from his home, his entire family murdered before his eyes, and was indoctrinated into this program and molded into a vessel of hate and, on top of everything else, while Steve Rogers became the pinnacle of human performance, Red Skull was hideously deformed by the procedure. It says so much that this villain who barely displays an ounce of humanity throughout the entire film is undone in a single moment by reminding him of his own trauma and not only the childhood but the entire lifetime lost to this ghoulish hate monger he had absolutely no say in becoming. That is such a fascinating approach to one of the least sympathetic villains in comic book history. There’s no attempt to excuse this fascist’s actions especially because they are beyond extreme in this version, but his indoctrination serves as a dark reflection of Steve’s own origin and how different groups might envision the very concept of human perfection. There is at the very least an understanding of the life the Red Skull lost in becoming the thing he became.
While Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty bring star power and are great in their roles as the President of the United States who was saved by Captain America as a boy and his journalist best friend, they — Beatty especially — really exist to level this out as a family friendly superhero film. Beatty is somehow equal parts Lois Lane and Otis, a reporter trying to uncover the truth behind the Red Skull who also happens to be a bit of an oaf. The small-scale action is great at times and pretty rough in others. The WWII scene is classic serial stuff, and Cap being chased down through the wilderness is an exciting spectacle on the budget. The Italian bicycle chase? Not so much.
But like so many Marvel movies of its era, Captain America was a film made against all odds, overcoming so many obstacles that it’s a miracle it was even released at all. (Let Fantastic Four serve as a reminder that not all early Marvel movies were) The director wanted to make a genuinely contemplative film about a man struggling to find his place in a world that has completely left him behind, while others wanted a standard action/adventure film, dumbed down for the kids. Knowing that, it’s a miracle how much of that original vision comes through, and how heartfelt and earnest it truly feels at the end of the day.
The costumes, some of the action beats and effects, even performances, you know, some things are great in places and rough in others. That’s fairly standard for a film of this size, but is undoubtedly jarring for anyone who might come to this having never known anything outside of the massive superhero blockbusters. I still love so much of the heart that comes through in this adaptation and am so jealous of those who have been lucky enough to see the director’s cut. Above all, I hope that eventually gets the release it deserves, as the late filmmaker and the film itself truly deserve it.
