Just collected a few of my thoughts on how each of the main players in the potential movie should portray their parts. Feel free to let me know if you think these are totally off base, exactly right on, or somewhere in between. My hope is that, like John Favreau, the powers-that-be with this movie will plum the depths of fan knowledge and try to make the characters resonate with the only people that really matter: US!
CHARACTER STUDY FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: The character needs to have the proverbial “voice that could command a god.” He has to have assuredness and presence. He has to stand tall and strong, even when he doesn’t feel it inside. He must be buttressed up in times of despair by the courage of his convictions, knowing that in spite of everything, his heart is pure and true.
Though he became Captain America at a young age, just barely a man of 20, he has seen enough violence and horror to last a lifetime. For him, a tool of war, confrontation is always the last resort, and must only be used when nothing less than freedom and liberty themselves are at stake.
Captain America is a symbol. Steve Rogers is a man. The actor must not forget this. It can be likened to playing any of the great men of the Bible, Moses or Jesus. They are larger than life symbols, on the plane of nothing less than the Divine, and yet, they were real men, with emotions, uncertainties, and fears. When Rogers puts on that mask, he understands that the mask must hide these, conceal them beneath a diamond-hard will and certainty. His shield is not only the one he carries on his arm, but the mask and the uniform itself. It allows him to protect the frail weakling he still is inside, somewhere.
He is what every kid everywhere wants to be – transformed from an entity with no agency at all into the very essence of agency, of action, of maturity. He has his demons, ones that he hides deep, deep down inside, images and memories that are etched into his very being. He has seen concentration camps and their walking skeletons. He has seen the face of evil itself, and has seen into its darkest heart without flinching.
He has seen his best friend, his partner, his brother in arms, seemingly killed, while he managed to survive. Below the armor that he wears, the psychological and ideological armor, he bears the scars of a survivor’s guilt. But despite those scars, and how deep they run, the actor must remember that Cap still says “yes” when asked to lead the Avengers, who weren’t even born when he was fighting fascism.
He realizes that he is a symbol, bigger than just Steve Rogers. He is the embodiment of hope, and must have the fortitude to carry out his duty and mission: to protect all that this country holds dear, all that this country SHOULD be, CAN be. For, he himself is a shield, our shield, the shield borne by the Eagle on our Great Seal. He is our protector and our emblem, beyond corruption or compromise. He bears the cross of his ideals, ideals that may very well have been the secret ingredient in the one successful trial of the Super Soldier Serum.
To look into his pale blue eyes is to look into a cloudless sky on the last day of summer. His face, though it is supposed to be young, is weathered, with just-barely-there stubble. His jaw must always be set, but he must not be afraid of compassion. His dimpled chin must always be held high. Above all, the actor who portrays the Captain must BELIEVE. He must BECOME Captain America AND Steve Rogers.
Hope and sadness must mix in equal parts in his eyes, with a hefty dose of determination and ingenuity borne of countless battles in the trenches and the muck. Rogers’ one guiding principle in battle is to use as much physical force as is necessary, but not to kill. He will break limbs, he will neutralize his opposition, but he cannot bear to take a life. His victories, like himself, are symbolic. The battles he fights are larger than just killing foot soldiers. The wetworks and the blood fall to Bucky. Cap must remain an inviolate symbol, for even when faced with such extremists as the Punisher, in comic book continuity, he refuses to mete out lethal punishment and sink to the level of his foes.
JAMES BUCHANAN “BUCKY” BARNES must be a very layered character. He is not just some kid mascot, not some Robin to this Batman. Behind the domino mask hides a killer, a trained operative who KNOWS that sometimes, someone’s hands have to get dirty, and they might as well be his.
Cap is his guiding light, the one thing in the world that gives this desolate soul hope. To be a brother in arms of this great symbol gives this orphan’s life purpose, direction. Cap is at the same time a teacher, a brother, a father, and a mentor to Bucky. The bond between the two cannot be understated. It is Bucky’s apparent death that casts a pall over Cap more than anything when he is revived. For Cap, it is not so much the years, as Indiana Jones once said, but the mileage. Bucky’s “death” is the bulk of that mileage. He internalizes it, uses it as a reminder to be ever vigilant, and that he too is human. This should be more played out in the Avengers film, when Cap is revived.
Ideally, the second to last scene in the Captain film proper should be Rogers sinking into the deep, looking up through the water at the explosion that supposedly claims the life of his friend. As he closes his eyes, there is a sense of surrender, of complete despair, and of unfinished business of a life cut short.
Bucky must have shadow, intrigue, something that might make some younger viewers uneasy as he goes about the tasks deemed too dirty for a symbol like Cap – and a man of Rogers’ idealism – to have to perform. Bucky is Cap’s battlefield confidante, as Cap is his. They share in the abject horrors of war, of the purest kind of evil. The conversations between the two at their nightly encampments, lit by a low fire, or perhaps in the pitch dark, are haunting and cathartic, but somehow, the two understand that a joke here or there helps, even in the midst of the horror. The two share a similar ironic sense of humor, keeping one another in line, and keeping their feet on the ground.
To Bucky, Cap is always the “old man,” even though he is hardly five years older. Bucky is always ironically “kid” because of his baby face, a face that hides demons far beyond its years, but demons that the light of Captain America keeps in check. Remember, Bucky grows up, so to speak, to take over as Captain America, so he must have the necessary faith in Steve’s ideals to let those ideals make up for his own sins. His eyes must shine with a youthful enthusiasm, a lust for the fight. But it must not be bloodlust, for he is still young. It is instead a simple joy, perhaps the only joy of childhood he has left, in the fact that he is on the front lines, defending his country, taking part in such a great adventure with his hero by his side. But despite the fact that Cap is indeed Bucky’s hero, he knows him so well that he cannot possibly fall into hero worship. He knows all too well that the red gloves he and Cap wear hide countless layers of blood.
JOHANN SCHMIDT/RED SKULL: this portrayal is just as important as that of the Captain himself, for such an iconic hero must have a counter, a force equal to and opposite to his own. Johann Schmidt is the type of man who, as a child, pulled the wings off of flies. The first Captain America movie tried to explain the Red Skull’s origins by means of a traumatic childhood abduction. No such attempt should be made here. Such transformations are better left for villains who more closely walk the line between good and evil, such as Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent.
Skull is an agent of pure evil, not chaos, mind you. Captain America is the great idealist, and in a way, so is Skull. The horrifying part is that his ideals are more than just opposite Rogers’. They’re off the map. The man idolized Hitler. That should be enough. What kind of man would do that? What kind of evil must he aspire to? He must be absolutely rotten to the core, a horrifying edifice of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. He is the face of death, of violence and carnage. Just as his visage is a twisted view of what lies beneath man’s flesh, so must his heart be a terrifyingly twisted vision of what kind of darkness lurks when one plumbs the greatest depths of the duskiest human soul.
His greatest aspirations are so unspeakable that even Hitler became afraid of him. He wants not only to watch the world burn, but he wants to be the one to light the fuse. World domination is but one part of his designs. For him, Cap represents the one thing he cannot burn, crush, or devour: hope. His greatest fear is the hope that Cap brings. The one thing that would bring him greater joy than bringing the world to its knees before him is to torture, maim, taunt, humiliate, and dishearten Steve Rogers for all of eternity.
Even with Cap’s battle-hardened courage and fortitude, he still gets chills when thinking about Skull’s greatest aspirations. His eyes must not be the wild, animalistic eyes of Heath Ledger’s Joker, but eyes of cold, calculating evil, an evil that bides its time and lies in wait. It is the scariest kind of evil, one that is not afraid to wait, and to even play dead, to lie in the bottom and even let its enemies nibble at it, only to pounce when the time is right.
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