It’s the best effect in the picture - mostly because it doesn’t look like an effect. Rogers begins life not as a typical jock but a 98-pound weakling, and, for the movie, the beefy Chris Evans has his head grafted via computer onto a punier actor’s frame. The musclebound Captain America with his mighty shield, né Steve Rogers, actually was the first avenger, conceived in 1940 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to do battle with Hitler - earning the publisher threats from a then-large American pro-German faction. The story? It’s all right, nothing special. The score by Alan Silvestri is a marvelous pastiche with a life of its own, and there’s a terrific song-and-dance montage in which the newly christened Captain America is trotted out alongside leggy chorines to raise the warring nation’s patriotic spirits: It’s both satirical and exhilarating. Heinrichs mixes up architecture styles - Expressionist, futurist, Deco - into frames that might have leaped from the collective unconscious of forties moviegoers. The production design by the great Rick Heinrichs is bold and unfussy, the palette monochromatic with splashes of comic-book greens and reds, and the compositions evocative of World War II newsreels and propaganda (Allied and Axis) without ever slipping into camp. The director, Joe Johnston, did special effects for Raiders of the Lost Ark and made such graphically strong fantasies as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, and Jurassic Park III, and he obviously learned from Steven Spielberg to make every composition read and never to waste a shot. Until the computer-generated effects bog it down and mess up its rhythms, Captain America: The First Avenger, has a measured, classical pace and a lot of good, old-fashioned craftsmanship.
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