Captain America: The First Avenger/Headscratchers

• Not really a big deal but this Troper noticed that Cap sent Hydra mooks flying some impressive distances and I could have sworn a couple guys got sent twenty feet through the air. I know Cap is supposed to be the perfect human specimen but this seems a little more along the scale of low level super strength.
  • The movies emulate the Ultimate Comics universe in a lot of ways (tying origins together by showing people trying to recreate the SSS, Samuel L. Jackson), and in the Ultimate Universe Cap is way stronger.
  • Exactly what constitutes low-level super strength is debatable. I can knock someone back a couple of feet with a hard punch, and I'm far from even the halfway point to the perfectfshi human physique.
  • The good captain is shown holding up a bulky war motorcycle (Let's say, 250 kilograms) with three women on it (3 x 60 kg) during a propaganda show, with one hand. He didn't seem strained at all; this troper wouldn't put it beyond Cap to bench press a ton.
    • That's presuming that was real--it is propaganda after all, and if anything they'd want to exaggerate Cap's strength in those films. They might've lightened the bike, or put it on wires or some sort of trickery in-universe.
      • They can't lighten the women, however. That bike, mock-up or not, still has to be sturdy enough to not collapse under the weight of three people sitting on it, which means that even if they took the engine and transmission and etc. out and replaced them with hollow mock-ups, they've still left in the metal frame and other supporting parts. So, at an estimate of 125 kilograms (50% weight) for the bike and 180kg for the people, Cap is still holding slightly over 300 kilograms at arm's length over his head, for an extended period of time, and without showing any visible strain. This is notably beyond what even the World's Strongest Man competitors can do -- while they have lifted similar weights, its only been very briefly and only with a titanic muscle-straining effort.
      • Also, "Winter Soldier" shows Cap doing things like 500+ high dives into the ocean without a parachute and not feeling it (and from that high up, hitting water is about the same as hitting concrete), or physically overcoming the combined strength of three massive weightlifters and an electromagnet with only one arm and zero leverage, both of which are blatantly superhuman feats. So really, MCU Cap is superhuman, not peak human, they've made that plain.
      • In the comics, Captain America has knocked guys several feet in the air and once carried a motorcycle on his back, similar to the propaganda shows. Remember, he's supposed to be the peak of human physical perfection. Since no one has realistically gotten to that point, it gives writer the chance to be a little more dramatic with his strength level.
  • Its not truly superhuman. Check out some of those "Strongest Man" competitions on ESPN; you'll see real life musclemen dragging busses and other feats of eye-boggling strength. Of course, those guys are generally titanic meatslabs of pure muscle, but what cap does is theoretically possible.
    • In the third Captain America movie, Steve bicep curls a helicopter in the process of taking off. At this point we have left the realm of the even remotely humanly possible. MCU Cap is superhuman, no ifs ands or buts.
      • This is also the movie where Cap does things like kick a van so hard that it skids across the sidewalk to crash into a guy and send them flying through the air.
• Why change the lineup of the Howling Commandos. I can understand dropping a few of the memebers and adding Cap and Bucky, but why have a Percy Pinkerton-expy when you can have the genuine article?
  • Well if it had the real Nick Fury :/
    • Union Jack isn't really much like Percy Pinkerton at all.
      • I don't know if you can call Falsworth in the film a Pinky expy. He doesn't have an umbrella, glasses or a pom on top of his beret. He looks like a British commando/paratrooper would at the time. Hell, he's pretty similar to Archie Hicox.
    • I do agree, though. In my opinion it should be Cap, Bucky (as second in command, subbing for Dugan who should have been kept for the role of the present day deputy director of SHIELD), Rebel, Dino, Izzy, Pinky and Eric. Maybe even Juniper as a red shirt.
    • The explanation they offered was that they wanted an international feel for the movie and have set up the movie Howling commandos to be a multinational team. But aside from adding a French soldier, it's not really all that more international. 5 of the 7 are American.
    • While the film was set far from the Eastern front, adding a token Russian or otherwise Eastern-European person would be probably appropriate. Otherwise, the America Saves the Day effect might be a reason the film was met with a lukewarm response in these countries considering their contribution to the war effort.
      • Even during WWII, there was a general consensus at least amongst the intel community that the Soviets and their allies were *not* our friends. They allied with Hitler in 1939 to devour Eastern Europe, so why should they be trusted with god-knows-what technology? As for the Poles or Czechoslovaks, that's a more valid point, but I'd largely guess it comes down to "Not enough people"
• Before going into the SSI programme, Steve repeatedly tries to enlist in the Army. He's turned down "4F", for medical reasons. In fact, he has pretty much everything on the chart, starting with asthma. However, these seem to be informed attributes - we never actually see him, for example, have an asthma attack. You'd think if these problems were serious enough to keep him out of the armed forces, they would be near-constant problems for him.
  • They disqualified him for military service. That doesn't mean they're going to constantly cripple him in every day life.
  • To illustrate further, during periods of the draft, civilian men were turned away if they had what's known as "hammer toes". This is when your toes curl up. It doesn't hinder a person's day-to-day life in any way but it can affect balance a bit which means... no army.

• How does the Transformation from skinny little Steve Rogers to hunk Captain America is made? The effect I mean. How does movie magic does that? Seriously, it's driving me crazy.
  • According to Evans in interviews, they used a combination of shots with him in baggy clothes with a skewed perspective (think how they mostly did the hobbits in Lord of the Rings) and Evan's head pasted on a smaller body of another actor.
  • That was what they planned. From the IMDB, they "ultimately scrapped the idea since director Joe Johnston claimed that Evans moved in a unique way and that no body double could replicate his movements. Ultimately, the filmmakers utilized digital technology to "shrink" Evans down, essentially erasing portions of his physique, until they came up with what the filmmakers called "Skinny Steve". Over 250 shots were filmed like this, and because the shrinking process left empty space in the background, many of the scenes had to filmed in front of a green screen so that they could superimpose the backgrounds back into the scene."

• Did anyone else find it ridiculous that, when Steve casually enquires about the effectiveness of his shield, Agent Carter's response is to SHOOT AT HIM with a .45 in the middle of a crowded lab? What if he didn't raise the shield in time? What if a ricochet killed someone? Discharging a handgun for no practical reason whatsoever, in a crowded room... she would have been either dishonourably discharged, or ventilated by a twitchy MP.
  • She could have been firing blanks, just to see how well he used the shield instinctively. Then later, off-screen, they tested real bullets against it.
    • Those definitely weren't blanks. The bullets are shown falling to the floor after hitting the shield.
    • As we saw earlier, Agent Carter is an insanely good markswoman, has nerves sufficient to take the time to aim while a car is barreling down at her without even attempting to dodge, and is firing at a peak human (read: Superhuman by all real life standards) who used a prop shield to invade a Hydra base, who is currently using a shield made of a super-science shield that instantly stops all vibrations (hence why the bullet casings just dropped to the ground instead of ricocheting). And she just listened to the best weapons designer in America explain this to Steve, assuming that he didn't already know it from her work with the SSR. She's not going to miss and he's definitely going to block.
  • Simple answer: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned

• A relatively minor nitpick, but when Steve undergoes the procedure they just have him take his shirt off prior to the transformation. When the capsule opens up, he's a foot taller and twice the size he was before but the pants he's wearing still fit perfectly - and they weren't that baggy to begin with. What, did the Vita-Rays make his pants grow along with him?
  • Marvel universe pants do not obey your pithy laws of 'physics'. All this proves was that the people who make Hulk's pants were in business during WWII.
    • While it was somehow still fitting near the waist, it's obviously became too short for Steve new legs.

• The weaponized lasers of the tesseract have some strange properties. They can apparently disintegrate organic matter and clothing, but they can't disintegrate anything mechanical (eg. tanks).
  • Maybe it only affects cells, which is certainly something that organic matter has that mechanical ones don't.
  • The lasers were clearly shown causing explosions and blowing up walls, IIRC, so it isn't an organic-only thing. Though perhaps there are multiple types of tesseract lasers, and one type only works on organics.
    • Or the beams can only instantly disintegrate matter of below a certain density/structural integrity. Soft targets like living things vaporize, while hard targets have a part explode violently.

• While Hugo Weaving looks undeniable Badass as Red Skull, why does he have a HYDRA logo on his belt?
  • According to the latest trailer, it's because he's the head of HYDRA, which is specifically referred to as the "Nazi deep science division".
    • He also turns Starscream against Hitler partway through the film, and HYDRA goes renegade with him; it makes sense therefore that he'd wear his own symbol, and not Hitler's.

• Two from the final battle on the Valkyrie: 1. Why were the HYDRA agents trying to launch the bombs for New York and Chicago when they hadn't even crossed the Atlantic yet? 2. Why does a 'kamikaze' bomb have an ejection seat?
  • From the looks of the radar map, the Valkyrie was actually flying over the nortern ice cap to reach the United States. As for how fast it got to its destination, chalk it up to a combination of Traveling At the Speed of Plot and tesseract-powered engines.
    • Still, it was weird how they talked about "If they cross the Atlantic, we're toast" when the plane never heads over the Atlantic in the first place. (Unless the Northern ice cap counts as the Atlantic, I guess.)
    • It's symbolic: this shore of the Atlantic = us, that shore = them. Even if the villain chooses a different route to get to "our" shore.
  • As for the ejection seats, the Nazis actually did install ejection seats in "suicide planes". Even though Germans were perfectly willing to ram their planes into enemy targets, they weren't as fanatical as the Japanese about pointlessly wasting pilots so they would always eject if given the chance. However, whether these ejection seats actually worked was an entirely different matter...
  • Nobody ever said they were kamikaze bombs. They might very well have just been meant to drop bombs. Which given the power source need not be all that large to function as city-busters.
  • Why do the flying bombs have ejector seats but Valkyrie itself doesnt?
    • Even today, most bomber and transport aircraft do not have ejection seats, and presumably Red Skull probably didn't feel like stocking up on parachutes or Cap didn't want to risk the plane going wildly off course if he tried to bail out.
    • Large planes don't have ejection seats; escaping crew bail by jumping out doors with parachutes. Ejectors are only useful if your craft's pilot doesn't have room in the first place to grab a chute and jump out a door. That's why you see ejection seats in fighters but never in large transports.

• When Cap is rescuing the prisoners, Red Skull hits the self-destruct. Once the timers hit zero, the facility manages to self-destruct continuously for a solid five minutes. It would make sense if they were just bombs that went off and afterwards there was a big continuous fire, but it seems that the facility is actually exploding, repeatedly, during that whole scene with Cap and Red Skull on the bridge. (And for some reason, it's only the space under them that keeps exploding. )
  • We saw several different times hit zero at slightly different times, and before that we saw Red Skull manually activating multiple timers. Presumably each one activated a different bomb. And the bombs are all at ground level.
    • That doesn't really explain it. We saw Red Skull activate something like 3 buttons (maybe it was 4 or whatever), and then there are 3 timers counting to zero, and then 3 explosions matching the timers. But then, five minutes later, new explosions keep exploding for some reason. The only explanation that comes to mind is that Red Skull actually hit like 200 more buttons beyond those 3 that we saw. Or maybe the original three caused long chain-reactions somehow. (Or, ya know, Rule of Cool.)
      • Actually, it makes perfect sense. He starts activated the self destruct bomb, then has to stop to briefly explain to Zola why he's blowing up the base, and then goes back to turning on timers. The pause between the first three explosions and the rest is when he was arguing with Zola.
    • In wider shots, you can see that the total number of switches is closer to something between 8 to 12.
  • As noted, the Skull activated several separate timers, which presumably set off explosives in critical areas. I don't think they were expected to bring the whole facility down themselves, although they presumably destroyed the most secret items in the base when they went off. The fires they started then spread to munitions stockpiles, which proceeded to cook off, causing numerous secondary explosions (which might well have been planned).

• In the train scene, Cap and Bucky bust into some random train cars and fight some guys, and then Bucky dies. Then we cut to the black guy busting through the roof of another and apprehending Zola. Why didn't they just bust into Zola's car in the first place, and ignore all the other guys?
  • Probably they didn't know which car Zola was in. The black guy just got lucky.
  • They probably also didn't want to have any Tesseract Cannons blasting at them after they bagged Zola.

• Near the end, Cap attacks Red Skull's fortress alone and gets captured. Then when he's about to be executed, his teammates burst through a window and rescue him. Why the heck did Cap attack the fortress alone in the first place? He didn't seem to have any plan besides "punch people", and he didn't seem to accomplish anything important. So why wouldn't he just stick with his team and burst through the window along with them? The way he did it, there was a serious chance Red Skull would just shoot him before backup arrived.
  • Most likely he had one of Stark's transponders (like the one that got damaged during his earlier POW rescue mission) on him, to tell the Howling Commandos where Red Skull's command room is. And knew that Skull wouldn't be able to resist taking the time to gloat before killing him.
  • It's also a classic diversion. Captain starts attacking the main gate and all the mooks rush up there to fight him, leaving no one to notice the commando team getting ready to smash in through the back.
  • You see Steve take down the Hydra soldiers guarding him right before the Commandos burst in. He had the situation under control the whole time.

• On the plane at the end, we see a bunch of bombs. (They're all labeled with their target cities for some reason.) Then later we're flying around outside on some sort of minor aircraft. Are these the bombs? Or are they just fighter-craft that can launch from the main plane? And if they are the bombs, what happens to them? Do they land somewhere once they're off-camera? Do they explode? Did we just blow up a town in Greenland or something?
  • The planes are the things labeled with the city names, but IIRC it's not explicitly stated how they'll destroy the cities. It could be that they simply contain bombs (with the Cosmic Cube as a power source, they wouldn't necessarily need to be very large to take out a city) that are dropped and then the planes return to Skull's giant plane.
  • So the mini-planes that went offscreen just crashed somewhere, and the bombs they were carrying didn't explode? I guess that makes sense.
    • Not too surprising, most design of bombs need to be initiated in a specific way to correctly explode. Heck, nukes are such delicate piece of technology that a strong impact is actually a rather good way of disarming it. Maybe tesseract bombs have the same handicap.
  • They were man-guided bombs. The first devices for guided missiles were essentially kamikaze bombs that a pilot directed to their target. Obviously, they eventually improved the design so a trained pilot didn't need to die to get the bomb where it was going, but for the timeframe, that was how guided bombs worked.
  • Real Life WWII Italians devised a similar guided projectile just it was an attack boat, not a missile. The pilot had to steer it towards the target (usually a large warship), set the rudder, block the throttle lever down and jump. An life raft inflated automatically and held the pilot on it until his comrades came to rescue him. A team of 3 boats disabled HMS York.

• At the climax, Cap damages the Tesseract-device and Red Skull removes the tesseract. Then it either kills him or warps him to another galaxy or whatever. Why? He's handled the tesseract before without any negative effects.
  • I think maybe that was the first time he touched it with his bare skin? Or maybe it was an effect of the damage.
    • Correct, nobody ever touched it directly until that moment. First it was in the storage box, then it was placed into the device to draw power from it.
    • So, new question: Was Red Skull aware that touching the cube would have this effect? If so, why did he touch it? And if not, is it just a fortunate (for him) coincidence that he never touched it previously?
    • He had no idea. But he DID NOT COME ALL THIS WAY FOR SAFETY! Plus he was in the middle of a massive Villainous Breakdown.
  • The Red Skull is alive and well in Asgard now, right? From what I saw, the act of the cosmic cube being exposed and being handled by a mortal caused Heimdall to notice it, which resulted in the person "worthy" enough to claim it immediately being pulled across the Bifrost into Asgard.
    • No, it's only hinted at that he may have been transported to one of the other Nine Realms any one of which (except Earth) he could have ended up on. And nothing states it was Bifrost, it could have been the Cube's own powers transporting the Skull. Besides Asgard probably wouldn't be the most welcoming place for the Skull.
    • Yeah, basically they did the comic book equivalent of benching him. If he comes back, it's because he got sucked into another realm. If he doesn't, it's because he died.

• At the climax, Cap is flying the Hydra ship, and he decides to crash it into the arctic rather than bomb all the cities. Um...why the frick can't he just stop the bombing? He obviously has control of the plane, isn't there a button somewhere for "Don't Bomb Anybody"?
  • Yeah, maybe they should've just had it so the controls were damaged somehow so the plane was crashing whether he liked it or not. (Of course, that would sort of detract from his Heroic Sacrifice.)
    • Cap isn't a trained pilot. He probably has no idea how to land a plane, and the Hydra plane was, as he pointed out, flying very fast. It wasn't that it was going to bomb New York if it continued its current course, it was that it was going to crash into New York. With nobody on board with the necessary skills to land the thing safely, it was going to crash somewhere. Cap made sure it crashed somewhere with no people around.
  • Even a trained pilot wouldn't have been able to work those controls. HYDRA's technology was way, way ahead of the curve and the plane's controls were not only one of a kind, but probably also labeled in German on top of that. Cap is smart, but he's not that smart. The only part he was able to control is thee descent of the plane through the only controls easily recognizable. There wasn't much else he could do.
    • I don't know. Couldn't Cap at least try to get some flying advice over the radio? (Unless it's really only like 2 minutes till he hits New York.) And it seems to me that if you can figure out how to make the plane descend, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how to make the plane fly in circles for awhile while you weigh your options. No need to rush into a Heroic Sacrifice if you can stall disaster and then maybe they'll get somebody on the radio who can figure out what to do. Heck, you think Cap could at least report his current position so they can find him after he crashes. (Though I guess he didn't expect to survive so why would he bother...)
      • I'm not sure why he wouldn't expect to survive, he took ridiculous abuse already and survived it. If he hadn't frozen solid upon impact he probably would have been OK. Doomed by Canon, I guess.
    • He still needed body armor and a shield to make sure he survived knives and bullets. Crashing a supersonic jet is much more traumatic of an experience. It's something of a minor miracle that the plane didn't just disintegrate from the impact itself.
    • Actual non-super powered humans can survive water crashes, given luck, good piloting, and calm seas. Cap is many times tougher than that but he gives up immediately. It just seemed defeatist to me.
    • The problem with trying to safely land the plan is that it was damaged. Several of the engines were out and the main power supply was missing. Not to mention the thing the Cosmic Cube was in spouting blue mist right behind him. And we clearly see Cap messing with control sticks that aren't entirely functional. That plane was going down hard no matter where it landed and Cap was going for a place that would cause the least amount of damage to other people. And I don't think he was being defeatist, either. He was making plans for a date with Peggy, after all. He may not have expected to survive, but I'm pretty sure he was hoping to.
    • Maybe I'm not remembering this correctly, but I think Peggy actually does suggest at one point that they get Howard over the line and have him try to figure out what kind of controls Red Skull's specially-made tesseract ship is flying with, and talk Steve through it. Since Howard doesn't actually turn up, I'm guessing that they couldn't get him into the communications room on time. Which would also add to his possible incentives for constantly searching for Steve at the end of the movie, if he partly blames himself for not getting there fast enough.
    • She does indeed, and I think it's Cap that says there isn't enough time for that.
  • This very issue is the main point of parody in the HISHE vid. They also ask why Cap didn't put the plane on a downward course and then attempt to escape, perhaps by flying away on one of those fighter craft or by looking for a parachute somewhere. (Come to think of it, if the fighter craft have ejection seats then isn't it at least plausible that the big plane has some kind of ejection/escape mechanism? Couldn't Cap at least try to find it, or some other option to save himself?)
    • When Cap is at the controls, he can see the radar with his position. You can also see him trying to get control of the plane and he doesn't fully understand the controls, which by that point the plane had been damaged. I'm not a pilot myself, but I do believe it is easier to make a plane descend than to guide it into any other movement, be it changing direction or gaining altitude. Cap is, quite frankly, NOT taking any chances. He doesn't know how much control he really has over the plane or how long it will last. I also think that he might not have been thinking with perfect clarity. To this Troper, it seemed that the assault on the Hydra Base at the end was, on Steve's end, a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for Bucky's death.

• Why did it take 70 years to find the plane in the arctic? I mean, yeah, the arctic is big. But 70 years?
  • This troper is going to take a page from the Transformers book of thought and say that the ship was probably very hot when it hit the ice, melted through, and was buried.
    • It was shown starting to fall through the ice right before the flash-forward ending. Presumably since they didn't know exactly where to look, Cap was covered by re-frozen ice before Stark's crew got to the right place, and it took 70 more years before it melted again to the point that the plane was visible.
      • Even then, they couldn't exactly recover the remains of the Valkyrie out of the ice in one piece, seeing how, as one of the researchers put it, they'd need "one hell of a crane" to pull it out.
  • The Arctic scientists in the prologue even point out that it's difficult to find stuff in the polar ice caps because the ice is always constantly shifting.
  • I figured it was something like global warming melting enough of the ice to make part of it visible. In fact, I'm very surprised they didn't say so in the movie--it would've been a perfect reason for why they found him now.
  • They were explaining it in the movie. The didn't track the plane, Howard Stark tracked the energy signature of the cube, which of course let them to a wrong position, since it fell out earlier. They probably searched every inch of sea floor around it, but eventually gave up.

• How is it that Cap crashes into the arctic, and then somehow freezes in just such a way that they can revive him 70 years later?
  • Super Serum?
    • But the super-serum was never designed to prepare Cap for cryogenics or hibernation or whatever.
      • Super-Duper Serum? There's no solid explanation, really. I think they should have arranged the plot so Cap was put into cryogenics on purpose. Like, maybe there's a flaw in the serum, so it's burning him up somehow and he's gonna die, so they freeze him until they can find a fix, and then they manage to fix him 70 years later and thaw him out.
      • The serum altered Cap's biology in lots of ways, and nobody actually knew the full effects. That's all there is to it.
  • Comic book logic. That's the way it happened in the comics, that's the way it happens in the movie.
  • Pretty much the comics had established that a side-effect of the serum was an anti-freeze effect. Yeah, a rationalization, but not too unusual given the format.
  • It's explicitly stated that one of the benefits the serum grants Cap is an accelerated healing factor, similar to Wolverine's but not nearly as potent. It was probably the only thing that was keeping him alive after his body shut down from the cold.
  • I figured it had something to do with that busted up containment unit for the Cosmic Cube that was belching blue vapor. Does anyone really know how the Cosmic Cube works? I seem to recall at least one continuity claiming it could grant wishes (probably with a hefty price tag). Cap wanted to survive, so he did.
    • The cosmic cube is pretty much omnipotence in a box and does whatever it is the writers want it to. It can grant wishes (with or without a price tag) if the user wants it to or you can use it as a battery or you could use it the same way Thanos uses the infinity gauntlet. Depends on how much you know about the cube. My guess is that Red Skull didn't know how the cube actually works (Whoever is holding it can do anything they want) so the cube just defaulted on his deepest desire to ascend to godhood. The easiest way to do that? Shoot him to Asgard and call it a day. He already thought he was a god so why not just send him to the realm of the gods.

• So the SSR is operating a secret base in Brooklyn which is accessed through the back of an antiques shop. How do the dozens of MPs manage to come and go from work without anyone noticing, not to mention the senators, super-scientists, and other notaries constantly streaming in and out of a nondescript storefront? It's no wonder HYDRA knew where to send their assassin if this is how the Allies were running their covert operations.
  • The "senators, super-scientists, and other notaries" weren't "constantly streaming in and out". The senator and notaries were explicitly only there that one time because the experiment they'd spent so much money on was happening right then. As for the MP's? They can get changed out of uniform on the way out, you know. And who says that's the only entrance?
  • For that matter, who says the scientists and the MPs go home? Maybe the base has dormitories for the scientists and barracks for the guards so they can sleep on-site.

• More of a mistake than anything else, but one of the MPs doesn't fight the HYDRA spy after the transformation scene, he runs into a room and shuts the door. WTF security MP guy? You had one job to do!
  • That bugged me somewhat as well, but he might not have realized the guy was a HYDRA spy. IIRC, the guy didn't actually see the spy shoot anybody. He came out of a side door and ran past, probably to see what all the commotion in the lab was about. Perhaps he assumed the spy was just some guy also in a hurry.

• How come everybody in Nazi Germany speaks ENGLISH even when there's no reason to? I mean I know English is a common second language to most Germans, but why is it necessary in every single scene where it's nobody but Germans speaking to other Germans? I'm tempted to add a Gratuitous English entry to the YMMV page regarding this...
  • Translation Convention, of course. They're actually speaking German, but the director didn't want to use that many subtitles.
    • So I figured, though I still find it baffling that hardly any German is heard at all in a movie set in WWII Europe. At least they could've had Red Skull exclaiming in his native tongue for a split second or something when fighting Cap.
    • Actually there was a throwaway line in a comic once about how The Skull learned English specifically to be able to gloat over his fallen foes and have them understand him.
    • So this would be the explanation for why the bombs at the end of the movie were labeled in English? That's something that bothered me...
      • What is "New York" in German, anyway? Is it actually different?
        • New York City in German is... New York City. Boston and Chicago (the other two labeled bombs) are also known by their familiar names in German.
  • Moreover, the actors are all native English speakers and most of them probably have none or very little ability to speak German. Your choices are German-accented English, or painfully mangled German lines that would be hilarious to any German-speaker.

• The shield. Not the iconic one he gets for actual combat, the one he used while he was selling war bonds. When Red Skull punches it, it gets dented, so it's pretty clearly made of metal. The American propaganda film at the beginning shows little kids scavenging scrap metal for the war effort, but they make a stage prop out of metal instead of wood.
  • They probably made an exception for Cap due to his status as a propaganda symbol at the time, plus he was being backed by a US Senator.
  • I'm not an expert on this or anything, but I'm preeeeeeeety sure metal wasn't so rare it was going exclusively into the war industry. The kids gathering scrap metal was more a propagandist "look, even little Timmy is helping the war effort! Why aren't you?!" message and as a jab against pre-serum'd Steve.
    • Actually, metal was really rare during World War Two. For instance, the Oscar statuettes were made of plaster, because not even Hollywood could get their hands on enough metal (and/or they wanted to seem patriotic by prioritizing that metal towards the war effort). These plaster Oscars were exchanged for metal Oscars once the war was over. So it is pretty weird that Cap had a prop shield made out of metal, though I guess it helps that he had the backing of a senator.
• Here's a thought- the shield already existed as a prop for some other theatrical purpose. Metal was rare and lots of it went to the war effort, but I doubt every single prop in the country was sent over. Easily could have been commandeered from some hollywood studio or more likely a stage acting troupe (where the clang of a metal prop sword on a metal prop shield would have had more impact than in films where they could substitute a wooden one)

• When did Cap become a trained pilot and paratrooper? He couldn't have got his jump wings pre-serum, and the government wouldn't have allowed it after.
  • We don't see Cap have any flying skill at all until the end of the movie... which is post-Hydra-smashing-montage, and that montage covers circa one year of time. Which is plenty of offscreen opportunity for Cap's buddy Howard Stark, "the best civilian pilot", to give Steve some bootleg instruction. As for being a paratrooper on his first "real" mission, pre-montage, in real life the British Special Operations Executive stopped running their civilian agents through jump school before dropping them into Occupied Europe... because they were losing more agents in training accidents than they lost by simply giving them a very little bit of basic instruction, strapping a chute on their butt, and kicking them out the door. After all, unlike the Airborne, the guy only has to reach the ground successfully once. Peggy was very likely following the same logic as far as dropping Cap on his first mission. (Add in that unlike all of them, Cap is superhumanly coordinated, and hey.)
• How old are Howard and Tony Stark? If they're a similar age to their actors, Howard didn't father Tony until he was almost 60, and it seems like Tony Stark is supposed to be younger than his actor's 46.
  • More or less. A healthy male could father a child in his sixties, and beyond even. Its only a matter of finding a young healthy woman to be his wife, which the charismatic, intelligent and absurdly wealthy Howard Stark could've done.
    • This sort-of tracks with the second Iron Man movie, we only see Tony interacting with his father when Tony was a pre-teen so it's entirely possible that Howard died before or shortly after Tony reached his 20s (not unreasonable if his father was 60 years older than him). On the other hand in those scenes Howard looks more like someone in his late forties than someone in his sixties or seventies.
      • He aged really well
      • The Iron Man movies only amp up the confusion, actually: the first scene says that Tony's parents died when he was eighteen, and in IM 2, Tony offhandedly mentions his dad's been dead "almost twenty years", making Tony in his late thirties. Yet, the Howard Stark in the video in IM 2 (when Tony looks about seven or eight) is not in his seventies. There's a few decades spontaneously missing from this continuity...
    • This whole thing hinges on whether the actors are the same age as the characters--which they probably are not. If we assume that Howard is in his mid-20s during World War II, that would track a lot better with what we see on screen, so that's probably what the case was.

• Maybe I missed something, but is the man in the poster really Chris Evans? He looks different. Also, he has brown hair instead of blond.
  • He had brown hair in Fantastic Four as well, it's just longer here. Unlike Johnny Storm and Steve Rogers, who both have blonde hair in the comics, Chris is brunette.
  • It's weird they didn't dye his hair before taking the photo for the poster.

• Cap's mlitary awards. The first time we've seen him, he's blown off an awards ceremony, and is seen wearing the the Purple Heart ribbon with one OLC. How exactly did he get wounded on two separate occasions? And about a year later, his ribbons are the same, which seems unlikely, as would have at least gained the one for whatever medal Senator Brand was going to award him.
  • Perhaps because he honestly doesn't care about the awards he wins, so he's not concerned with presenting them properly.
    • Well, that would be insulting to other soldiers who do wear their ribbons, and he DOES display some awards, but not all of them?
  • Maybe it wasn't an official military award, but rather one of the propaganda awards (like a key to the city) that people sometimes get when don't exactly qualify for any specific existing award, but they certainly qualify for something, or the person who intends to present the award isn't authorized to present the official award (for example, the senator wouldn't have been authorized to present the Medal of Honor).

• How much does the public know about the origins and identity of Captain America? The early Timely comics and the wartime serials are presented as having actually existed during his time as a mascot - it would be pretty hard to have avoided a "Steve Rogers as Captain America" billing in the opening credits, and assuming the in-verse comics are comparable to the real versions, they'd have the whole story laid out about the super-soldier serum and the vita-rays.
  • It's difficult to say without reading the comic itself, but since they considered the Super soldier program under Erskine a failure, it's probably safe to say they didn't consider it a huge security risk to tell them about it. It's not like they're giving out schematics on how to make your own Super Soldier.
    • If the in-universe comics did talk about Cap's origins, they probably screwed it up on purpose. For instance, maybe the comic simply claimed that Steve did a lot of training and muscle-building, with no mention of the super-serum. Or maybe they mentioned using super-science to boost his muscles, but they deliberately fouled up the details ("and then he had to eat a lot of seaweed!") so as to mislead any enemy who might try to copy the process. That seems realistic for wartime America, and of course the audience wouldn't know the difference.
      • On the other hand, given that the Nazis had the Super-Soldier Program first, and the American program is a catch-up effort led by a German scientist who defected from the Nazis' research project, they don't have any reason to lie about Cap's origins. After all, its not like it would fool the enemy for a second and its bad propaganda tactics to tell a lie the other side can prove is a lie.
  • The comic versions of his origins were probably inserted as a form of Plausible Deniability. Other than that there doesn't seem to be any great effort to protect his identity. The mask was most likely just a holdover from the original costume.
• Why would they use their Super-Soldier for propaganda instead of having someone else who looks good and can speak like, say, an actor?

• • Probably because all the actors who had the appropriate heroic build had been conscripted. Also since they had Steve, why not give him something to do...

• They pretty much state that he is used for propaganda because there is only 1 of him, rather than the many super-soldiers they wanted.

• So this shield Cap ends up choosing for battle: Steve picks it up only for Howard Stark to tell him not to bother with it because it's just a prototype. He then tells him that the Vibranium metal that this prototype is made of is extremely rare - all the known Vibranium available on Earth was used to create it. Why did he waste every bit of this incredibly rare, incredibly useful metal to make a prototype? Wouldn't you be wanting to save all that 100% vibration-absorbent stuff for, you know, a real weapon?
  • Like what, exactly? They only had enough Vibranium to make a single shield-sized object out of it, Stark wouldn't have been able to build one tank out of it.
  • True, but the fact that he says (paraphrasing) "Don't bother with that, it's just a prototype" bugs me badly. Stark talks about it in such a throwaway manner as if it wasn't worth anything to Steve. Yeah, it's a prototype made of an indestructible, 100% vibration-absorbent, extremely rare metal. Don't bother with it indeed...
  • Another thing too: prototypes are typically expendable models of less quality and function than the finished models they precede. If the "prototype" is made of the rarest, strongest metal on Earth, what the hell could it be a prototype for?!
    • Prototypes for weapons and new technology are actually much hardier than production models most of the time since the idea is to test it to its breaking point. If you do that with flimsy materials there's no way you're going to get an accurate idea of a weapon's performance and capabilities. The question you should be asking is why isn't lovely patriotic paint job stripped off after one shot from HYDRA's guns?
  • I interpretted it not as a prototype shield, but as a prototype use. When new materials are developed they're often tested by making them into a practical shape. Thus they didn't make a prototype shield out of a very valuable metal to see if the shield would work; they made their very valuable metal into a shield shape to see if they could, then to find out what it would do. Likely Stark was hoping to poke around at the Vibranium some more.
  • The "don't bother with that" was probably more along the lines of, "We're not finished testing it," or some such. The other shields Howard wanted to show Steve were probably just more battle-ready, made from known materiel. The vibranium was probably seen as experimental, and they wanted more time to see what it could do before sending it out into the field.
  • My take on that scene was that most of the other shields had features like built-in machine guns, concealed blades, attached grapple lines, or other such mechanical doohickeys.
  • In the original comics, Cap's circular shield was an accidental creation. An American metallurgist was trying to fuse vibranium with iron but fell asleep during the process. He woke up to find the experiment was a success because of an "unknown catalyst" entering the process while he was out. They couldn't think of anything else to do with it so they poured it into a mold for a tank hatch to create a metal disk which eventually became Cap's signature shield. Perhaps Movie!Cap's shield was created the same way.

• The Allied Forces. While I was impressed to see British, French, and Scottish soldiers, the movie seems to have forgotten that there were also Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, South African, Dutch, and Scandinavian soldiers fighting as well (to name a few). Considering that the Howling Commandos were intended to be more multinational, and that the POW camp was supposedly holding soldiers from multiple battles, there are a disprorpotionate amount of Americans.
  • I can only speak for the Australian and New Zelanders, but you wouldn't have found any of them in North Africa/Italy in 1943. They were all in the Pacific. Someone actually did their research.
    • What?! No we weren't. The Australian and New Zealand forces were heavily involved in Europe and North Africa - Rats of Tobruk, anyone? Although after 1943, the Australian military's main focus was on the Pacific theatre, significant numbers of Australians still remained in Europe. A cousin of my grandfather, who served in the Royal Australian Air Force, was shot down over Normandy in 1944. That said, Australian troops would have seemed to be fewer in number by comparison simply because we had a small population.
  • As far as Canadian soldiers are concerned I have heard from multiple sources they had planned to include a Wolverine cameo, which would have represented the Canadian troops, but were not able to get the rights from Fox who own the X-Men rights. As far as minor or background characters, its pretty difficult to tell a Canadian from an American or Brit in a small amount of time unless you ask them about hockey.
  • Fridge Horror in effect; the POW camp was also a factory complex where the prisoners were being worked to death as slave labor. By the time the Americans joined the War in Europe, the camp must've started running out of prisoners from previous European battles.
  • Also, the filmmakers probably assumed that viewers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Dutch and Scandinavian soldier anyways.
  • Because the film is called Captain America, not Captain Multinational.
    • This. The G.I. Joe movie went from "Real American Heroes" to "Real Multinational Heroes" and it didn't do them a lick of good (and may well have hurt them with the die-hard fans).
  • The Netherlands were conquered in 1940. Most Dutch soldiers didn't really have a chance to fight after that. There was of course the Dutch resistance, but that was mostly in, well, the Netherlands.
• Why does Philips praise Hodge as obedient? The first thing he does in the movie is disrespect an officer.
  • He obeyed the officer's order to put his foot forward in that same scene. Disrepect =/= Disobedience. And that scene was the only time we see any disrespect from Hodge towards his superiors. We can easily assume he proved himself to be a great follower over the training process.
  • Philips didn't see that. He only arrived in time to see Agent Carter hit him.
    • Or alternatively and/or in addition to, deadpan sarcasm.

• How is Captain America the First Avenger? Isn't Thor like several centuries old by the 1940's?
  • Maybe his successes in WW 2 were the inspiration for the Avengers Initiative.
  • First Avenger, not first super powered being.
  • It's "first Avenger", not "oldest Avenger". Cap will probably be a founding member of the team when the movie comes around, since in the Marvel Cinematic Universe he's explicitly unfrozen before then, unlike in the Marvel Universe. And when they write down that first roster, the only way anyone else could go ahead of him is if they write down the aliases in alphabetic order and count Black Widow first. Alternately, they consider his activities during World War II as part of the Avenger's mission even if no group by that name existed at the time, so he's an in-universe Ur Example of the trope. And that would predate Thor, since while he was alive at the time, he wasn't an avenger. Also, it sounds like a cool subtitle, so who cares?

• The Nordic-themed villains name their organization after a monster from Greek Mythology.
  • Using an object said to have been in Odin's vault does not make them Nordic themed
  • Because "Jörmungandr" is not as catchy as "Hydra" and way too complicated.
  • It's interesting that they resorted to Germanic mythology with the plane Valkyrie.
    • Valkyries are Norse Mythology.
      • Norse mythology and Germanic mythology are the same thing.
  • Nothing says Hydra is exclusively into Norse mythology. There are many realms, after all. Most likely the tesseract was just their best lead for something mystical and powerful, and that happened to be connected to Asgard.
  • Marvel universe doesn't only feature real Norse gods but also a set of Olympians. It's possible that both have artifacts worth persueing.

• Why did Cap have to pilot the flying wing into the ice? As soon as he destroyed the mechanism that connected the Cosmic Cube to the engines, the plane should have been powerless and started crashing on its own.
  • I don't think the cube was powering those engines. I think the Red Skull just decided to take it with him when the base was being overrun by Americans.
    And even if it was, planes don't just drop out of the sky when their engines turn off. It was going ridiculously fast, probably fast enough that it could've coasted to the eastern seaboard if Cap hadn't made it crash early.
    • I think the chance that WW 2-era engines could have gotten a plane across the Atlantic would be about zero (especially without in-flight refueling). Plus, Schmidt very obviously plugged the cube into the plane when he boarded it. True, planes don't drop out of the sky instantly upon losing engine power, but this one didn't even seem to be losing altitude. I don't think modern flying wings have good glide ratios. Besides, the engines still seemed to be running, although they shouldn't have had a power supply.
      • Charles Lindbergh, Spirit of St Louis, New York to Paris, 1927. WW 2-era engines were easily capable of such distances.
    • Of course thats based on an assumption. We are talking unseen before tech that are is mostly unknown. Cap isn't engineer nor pilot. He could make an educated assumption and bailed but if he was wrong a lot of people would have died.

• If the Super Soldier Serum "amplifies everything inside: good becomes great, bad becomes worse,”, why were they focusing on pure physical requirements in the first place? It demonstrates a dichotomy between the good-hearted Rogers and his less-fettered fellow trainees, but Erskine tells Rogers that using the SSS on the wrong kind of person would turn them into a monster - and of his personal experiences of how it turned Schmidt into the Red Skull. Colonel Phillips wanted to use it on a Jerk Jock - and we saw the result of that with Blonsky. If this is the case, Erskine never told anyone besides Rogers about that wrinkle.
  • More likely, he did try to tell them, but they believed that he was exaggerating or applying superstition to it out of guilt for having created the Red Skull. Anyone in the military brass who heard about Schmidt's deformity probably just attributed it to the formula being unfinished.
  • IIRC Erskine never actually states it as a fact, he says he *thinks* it *may* bring out the bad or good but never in a way that flat out confirms it as 100% fact. Which makes sense since as far as we know Schmidt was the only person he had actually given it to before talking to Steve. Red Skull's disfigurement could simply have been the result of the Serum he took being imperfect and Erskine was wrong about it being because he was evil.
  • Also, they can more easily measure the physical - and it's probably the physical characteristics that might have convinced Phillips to allow them to use Steve. It'd be one thing to have an already well-built soldier undergo the procedure, but the change is a heck of a lot more dramatic and visibly obvious with Steve. The second that capsule opened, the Senator who didn't give Phillips his generators completely changed his mind about the project.
  • There's also the survival factor. You don't want to kill the human test subject. So, you choose someone who is physically fit that hopefully won't die. They almost didn't complete the procedure because they thought they were killing Steve. With the power spike and no sign from the capsule, they thought they had killed him.
    • No sign from the capsule? Steve's screams of pain were what prompted Peggy to tell them to shut it down prematurely - the only reason they completed the procedure is because Steve insisted he could take it. (Otherwise, I agree; in the first few seconds after the power finally spikes and the capsule is dark and silent, they probably did wonder if he'd survived.)
  • If they could find a physically tough guy with Steve's heart, that would've been great. Instead they found a bunch of physically fit guys, and Steve. The serum was guaranteed to make the subject extremely fit anyway, so they went with the guy who seemed most likely to not go insane.
    • Note that this seems to be exactly the reason why the "Weapon Plus" program referred to in TIH was eventually shut down. While we haven't been told the story yet, I imagine that after the first couple of test subjects went crazy, enthusiasm diminished.

• The moment Schmidt decided to kill the SS oficers sent to monitor his progress, (or rather when they missed their check-in time with their superiors), why didn't Hitler (or at least Himmler) treat him like he did Rhoem and von Stauffenberg? Seriously, his actions by that time had shown that he was off the leash (if he was ever on it) and HYDRA itself had definitely become an institutional rival to the SS.
  • Hitler's a little busy with, you know, the war and all. And Schmidt has his own personal army, with stupidly advanced weapons. Makes it kinda hard for you to bring him up on disciplinary action, all things considered.
    • The SA was 3,000,000 men strong in 1934, but that didn't stop the Night of the Long Knives. Opperation Valkryie and its immediate aftermath happened during a much more delicate point in the War, but that didn't stop Hitler from exacting a terrible justice against those who had plotted and carried it out. And the fact that the Cosmic Cube based weapons weren't reacing the Eastern Front (where they could reverse the Soviet advances and free up more men and materiel for the Western Front) would only have made Hitler foam at the mouth for Schmidt's head that much more. Say what you will about his ideas of strategy, he knew treason he saw it.
    • The SA didn't have laser guns and a doom fortress and Nazi Germany wasn't fighting on three fronts in 1934.
      • The problem is that those events took place inside Germany, where Hitler's power was the strongest and where he still had many men loyal to him. Once he was back in charge, he could use the full might of his armies to bring the conspirators to justice. However, due to what is probably poor judgement, Hitler effectively banished the Red Skull to a remote mountain base that was heavily fortified and defended with men fanatically loyal to the Red Skull. There was no way he was going in there without suffering heavy casualties.
      • All true, but the problem here is, what can Hitler do about it? Send assassins to kill Schmidt? Runs into the problem that he is personally badass, superhumanly powerful, and surrounded by his own loyal troops 90% of the time. Kill him with main force? Now you actually do have to fight your way through his personal army, which has better technology than the Wehrmacht.
      • Equally likely, Hitler probably did intend to do something about Schmidt. However, this was probably one of the few cases when Hitler was going to be cautious. Given the way the Red Skull operated, it's likely he knew Hitler would come after him but would strike before whatever plan he had to get him was implemented.
      • Hence, Berlin's appearance on the first-strike-target map.

• Why didn't Captain America escape on one of the fighters when he crashed Red Skull's giant plane? He didn't actually need to go down with the ship.
  • Because by the time the plane was descending hard and fast enough to be assured to crash, there wouldn't be time left to get into one of the fighters. Assuming there were any still in the plane.
  • There were a few planes left. All of them bomb planes stuck in the hanger when he crashed the first one back in. Those weren't planes you could escape in. They were short range suicide bomb planes. There may not have been a way to land them if he hadn't destroyed the hanger without it going off. And are you going to chance taking the New York bomb to New York?
  • Also this is no ordinary hero, this is Captain America. He won't risk the slightest possibility someone might get hurt, so he personally puts the plane down even though he knows it will probably kill him. Someone like Indiana Jones might have managed an escape, but it's not in Cap's Character.
  • He still could have flown in a circle until they got Stark to figure out something, or make a forced but safe landing somewhere less icy.
    • Steve did say that there wasn't enough time to get Howard Stark on the line to help.
    • Because he thought it prudent to crash the plane as soon as possible, rather than fly in the said circles.

• Captain America's shield is made of vibranium, which absorbs all vibrations (bullets fired into it drop at his feet). How then does it ricochet?
  • Very well, apparently. ;) More seriously, comic book physics. It has the same properties in the comics.
  • Maybe the edge and back had to be made from another material. Maybe they didn't have enough vibranium for a whole shield.
    • ^ This. IIRC, in the comics Steve's shield is not 100% vibranium.
    • It's made of vibranium mixed with a steel alloy in the comics.
  • I figured it was due to the fact that even though the shield itself is made from vibranium, whatever it's bouncing off of...isn't. Honestly, I'm more interested in why it makes such large amounts of noise, being as vibration is all that sound is. No matter what Cap hits with the shield, be it animal, vegetable or mineral, it's KANG this, and WHONNNNG that. I mean, sure...It sounds cool. And I guess Comic Book Physics could be at play. Just sort of kills the suspension of disbelief a little.

• Bit of a minor one, but the girl who was in the recovery room with Steve at the last scene has been confirmed to be Sharon Carter. How exactly did she keep the "Carter" last name, though?
  • Sharon Carter was Peggy's niece, not her daughter.
  • If Peggy was in her 20s or older during WWII, it's more likely that Sharon Carter, who appeared around the similar age, would be at least two generations down from Peggy--granddaughter or grand-niece.
  • There's no reason that the name couldn't have been changed and then changed back or that Peggy could have never married or that she kept her name. That is, of course, assuming that she's a direct descendant rather than indirect relative.
  • One possible explanation is that Sharon's father simply happened to have the surname Carter. Coincidences do happen, after all.

• It's said that Steve's metabolism now works four times as fast as that of a normal human. Wouldn't that mean he has only a quarter of the lifespan?
  • That's not really how metabolism works.
  • But wouldn't he always be hungry?
    • Probably. Or he'd need to eat a lot of protein, at least. They didn't show him eating at all, though.
  • My concern was, wouldn't it make him a lot more vulnerable to suffocation, and why does he almost never need to breathe hard or exceptionally quickly when he should be breathing heavily all the time? Four times the metabolism means (roughly) four times the oxygen use and carbon dioxide buildup, and while he can survive a lot more than a normal person, with a lot more strength and endurance, those gases still need to come from and go to somewhere.
    • Four times the lung capacity? Lungs four times as effective? It's a comic book movie!

• When Schmidt is getting his portrait painted, he's listening to opera. Cool, but why not slip in what's canonically his favorite tune in the comics, Chopin's funeral march? It wouldn't change anything and would be a fun Mythology Gag to anyone who knows both the comics and the piece.
  • Probably because it would remind people of the Imperial March from Star Wars, or they thought a piece from one of the operas in Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen sounded more ominous, perhaps?
    • The opera is actually a bit of Fridge Brilliance - Wagner's works were incredibly popular with the Nazi movement.

• Did it bother anyone else how SHIELD's ploy to convince Steve that he was still in the 1940s seemed half-assed? Why play a baseball game from 1941 without considering the possibility that he would recognize it? And if you're trying to convince someone they're in a recovery room, I don't think dressing them in civilian clothing and laying them on top of the bedsheets with their shoes on is the way to go.
  • They probably threw it together at the last minute when they realized he was almost completely thawed and likely wouldn't be unconscious for much longer.
  • Bigger question is why they put him in the middle of Manhattan, instead of some secret military facility in the middle of nowhere. It would have been much easier to keep up the ruse in a controlled space, and he could have been kept a secret until they figured what to do with him.
  • Probably for the authenticity. Either that, or Nick Fury knew that Cap would eventually catch on with the ruse, hence placing the simulated 1940s New York in the real New York City.
  • It's also a homage to the 'Cap wakes up' scene in ULTIMATES, where Cap is simply in the Triskelion's hospital wing, thinks he's woken up captured by the Germans and fights his way out, and makes it to the Triskelion's roof -- where, of course, he's struck dumb looking at the modern NYC skyline.
  • Really, the whole point was most likely to ease Cap into the modern world. They present him with something familiar so when he wakes up he won't flip out immediately - only they didn't count on the fact that he recognized the game playing on the radio. Otherwise his introduction to the modern world would be much more gradual and less traumatizing.
  • What doesn't mke sense is why they would play a baseball game that predated his crash. They ought to have precise records, so why couldn't they use a game that hapened afterward?
    • Probably just an in-universe case of Did Not Do the Research. They were setting it up in a hurry and the person responsible for getting the tape of the game just grabbed the first one he found from the correct year without thinking about the exact date. It's the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life, people get focused on the major parts of a project and forget the little details.
  • The part that got me is that Cap figured it out after about listening to about two batters. Baseball situations tend to repeat frequently, so I'd think he'd need to hear more to make the huge logical leap to "It's a trap!" If he had been listening on the radio the first time around, they could blame it on an announcer's unique phrasing, but he specifically says he was at the ballpark.
    • He seemed to already believe that it was a trap the moment he woke up. His last memory was flying a plane into the water/ice. Then all of a sudden he is in New York. I'm sure that he felt something was off, and the radio was just his confirmation.

• When the SS officers took a closer look at Red Skull's map of the 'hostile capitals in European that he plans to attack, Dublin was one of his main targets along side with London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Moscow. But Irish was a neutral state and played a relatively small role in the second war world. So why did he put it as one of his priority targets? Shouldn't he first focus on other more strategically important targets instead?
  • Considering the Skull vowed that he's got the power to destroy every capital on Earth, it can be inferred that he really did mean that, and planned to destroy every single world capital, whether they're enemy nations or just mere neutral countries.

• What exactly is the "cosmic cube"? is it the same thing as the cube from the thor movie? is it something similar? Does it have an entirely seperate and different role in cannon altoghether? All I know at this point is that it provides limitless power.
  • In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract is exactly the same thing seen in both Cap and Thor. It provides limitless power, and can even bend reality to the will of whomever wields the power. As for why the Skull didn't do such, he probably just assumed it as an infinite power source and decided to use the Cube as such, not taking into account its other uses.

• Is Cap an actual Captain (US Army rank O-3)?
  • Considering that he is referred to on more than one occasion as "Captain Rogers", I had assumed that at least in this version, he was.
    • Fits with his actual actions in the movie. Teams of commandos weren't usually lead by lieutenants, and he definitely was the commanding officer of the unit.
    • It's also implied that the U.S. Senator promoted him to the rank of Captain to go along with the USO Bonds Tour thing. So, basically just doing it just for show, well, until Cap does his thing and opens various cans of all-American whoop-ass.

• "Then how come you're running?!" Why didn't Red Skull point out "Because my idiot scientist here was a coward and pulled back the bridge before I could finish you off."
  • Because the Skull had already made the decision to self-destruct the base and vamoose before he even came face-to-face with Captain America? Steve was right; the Skull was running.
    • And the Skull's mannerisms indicated that he acknowledged the point, as well.

• When Schmidt/Red Skull first meets Captain America in the detonating HYDRA base, Schmidt says "Captain America! How very exciting! I'm a really big fan of your films!" How on Earth was Red Skull even able to see any of Captain America's films in the first place, let alone be a fan of them? I mean, barring the fact that it was because of Red Skull that the scientist leading the project resulting in the Captain's creation was dead, and thus very unlikely that the US Government would actually loan reels of his films to Red Skull for that reason alone, the Captain America films were made as USO showings for the troops and to bolster morale of the American populace, making it unlikely for Red Skull, a Nazi German, to acquire them anyhow.
  • Sarcasm, dude. He was making fun of the fact that Cap had been doing nothing but making propaganda films. It doesn't actually, literally mean that Red Skull sat down, watched them, and is actually a fan of them.
  • Considering that the Red Skull knew that Steve Rogers/Captain America was the only other super-soldier in the world, I wouldn't be surprised that Red Skull had taken the time and resources to acquire Captain America's films, no matter what the expense, for the purposes of learning all he could about the man who shares the same origin as him.
  • Then again, we do see a scene where Steve is seen watching one of the Cap propaganda films in a theater with regular audiences, so it's not out of the realm that a HYDRA spy did some "intel" on the fate of the SSR's Super-Soldier candidate. Add with the fact that the U.S. government weren't exactly being discrete with the existence of their Super-Soldier, it's a possibility that HYDRA could've gotten some sort of dirt on Steve.
  • HYDRA agents managed to infiltrate the uber-secret test facility where Cap was created. Stealing a filmreel from a movie theater is a complete cakewalk.

• Why did the SSR mount an assault on the alpine base at the end? They knew the Red Skull was planning on launching a plane of some kind,and bombing/shelling the base would have ruined the runways, trapping the Red Skull there, to be dealt with at their leisure. If the SSR had the military force to take on Hydra in a fortified position on Hydra's terms, they definitely had the military force to keep the Red Skull from escaping.
  • It was an Elaborate Underground Base, hidden below 500ft of mountain. The runway was 90% inside that mountain. They might have ruined the hangar doors with a bit of luck, but the Skull would probably just blow them up and launch the plane anyway.
    • This and not to mention bombs and artillery had almost comically horrible accuracy during WWII. Unless you get a couple of dive bombers flying there is almost no guarantee you would actually hit the runway and the base may have had air defenses to keep smaller low flying planes away.

• Prior to the transformation, skinny Steve wear normal pants, when he grew big the pants fitted just fine... It just bugs me.
  • Magic Pants, it's a comic book trope that's as old as the medium.

• Aside from punch out Hitler and tell everyone to buy war bonds, what exactly did Cap do in those propaganda stage shows? Did he have a song and dance routine with the girls as backup?
  • Stand there and look sexy.
  • He had a whole speech promoting war bonds. We only see parts of it, but the gist of the shows would involve him giving his speech, the girls dancing and singing, maybe a feat of strength or two like lifting the motorcycle with the girls on it, and punching out Hitler.

• Bucky's 'death'. We all know he survived to become Winter Soldier, as confirmed by Word of God (word is, Bucky might be getting his own film as Winter Soldier along with Black Widow), but I can't help but feel like his death was, well, meaningless. He got shot out of a train and fell into some ice caps, as if he's just another Red Shirt. I know they wanted to 'kill' him off and all, but couldn't they have made it more dramatic?
  • He was blasted out the side of a train speeding along a mountain and his best friend in the world tried and failed to save him. His "death" actually drove Captain America to drink. I'm sorry but I must ask, precisely what about that was insufficiently dramatic? The fact that they didn't give Cap a Big No afterward?
  • The fact that it seemed to only be there to motivate him to have a fluffy moment with Peggy, and/or shock value. He spent one scene afterwards depressed over it, and then, that's it. No 'It's Personal' or Roaring Rampage of Revenge. When he sees HYDRA next, he acts like he did previously: Stoicly kick ass without emotion. I don't know, it just seems like his death didn't mean anything to the plot, in other words, turning him into another Red Shirt.
    • It's a war. You know how many friends Steve has watched die? Bucky is the only one we see who led him to try and drown his sorrows. Also, when Jones captures Zola, it looks a lot like he's seriously considering killing him because his friend just died, IMO.
    • ...But, that doesn't explain why he doesn't appear to be any different afterwards, except for that one scene with Peggy. While he likely lost other friends, Bucky was the only member of his squad to die, and the only one who he'd known since before the war. When he thought Bucky was captured he went ballistic, but when he dies instead he just tries to drink then have a heart to heart with the girl he likes. It just feels like the only reason he died, other than to set the stage for the future, was to give him and Peggy a reason to talk, and I just find that stupid.
    • It's war. All death is sudden.
    • He vouches to have every Hydra troopers killed or captured.
    • We see him set Hydra troopers on fire, and later beats the crap out of one of them and throws him out of a fucking airplane.
    • I'm not complainng about it being sudden, but that adds to it. My complaint is that nothing is done about it that wouldn't have had Bucky survived. He vouches to have every Hydra trooper killed or captured? That was already the plan. They were doing that since Hydra first came knocking. Seting one on fire? Didn't they try doing that to him, and he just turned it against them? Beating them up? He was already doing that. Throwing out of a plane? That was litterally self defense. I'm not saying there was anything wrong with the death, but from a story telling perspective, it doesn't seem to affect the plot, or Steve. His reaction was far less shocked than when Bucky was captured. It just comes off as a regular Red Shirt death.
• At the end of the film where Steve was presumed to be dead, shouldn't he be promoted to a higher rank in the military? At the present when he woke up he shouldn't be a Captain anymore.
  • He was Captain America to everyone. That was his identity, and how he was remembered. And not everyone gets a promotion on death.

• How the fudge did their surveillance flights fail to notice the huge column of men and armor heading straight towards their base? Peggy implies that the last one returned minutes before Captain America and the guys he saved marched in; was the crew blind? Seriously, the guys are using the main road.
  • Because they're not bothering to look down right next to their main base. Their job was reconning enemy territory at grid square #wayoverthere; perimeter defense was someone else's job. Being deployed on the front line already fills up your full normal workday and more; few people go enthusiastically chasing extra work on their own initiative.
    • Still, someone should've seen them and notified Col. Phillips of the large number of armed men coming right at him.
    • Large number of armed men who have already clearly been identified as friendly troops just to get anywhere within miles of the place, seeing as how they had to have already crossed the front lines without incident.
• So, the big final attack on the main Hydra base. How did the Howling Commandos know when to storm in through the windows to commence the attack? Did Cap tell them that Red Skull would likely try to kill him, and that would be the cue for them to strike?
  • I haven't watched the movie in a while, but I think Cap's plan was a Batman Gambit involving the tracking device Stark gave him. By bringing Cap deep into the base for a private interrogation the Red Skull unknowingly allowed the Howling Commandos to pinpoint the location of the Hydra base's command center.

• You know, Zola doesn't get half the credit he deserves. Not only did he design vehicles and weaponry on Schmidt's word that they would find the massive, cosmic-level power source to fuel them, but they actually worked the very first time he inserted said power source! And then went on to extract this power to use in batteries and removable packs. As of the Iron Man 2 film, we learn that Howard Stark never could synthesize the same kind of element for his arc reactor because he was "limited by the technology" (even though they had Zola's tech, and Zola himself, right there in government custody.) And now, by The Avengers, we also learn that SHIELD has had the Tesseract for seventy years, and despite their modern tech they are only now figuring out what to do with it, and have plans but no working prototypes (that we can see) of HYDRA-style weapons. Clearly, the guy was an unsung genius beyond either Howard or Tony Stark.
  • And the Fridge Logic here is...?
  • What do you mean "unsung"? In the scene where Howard is examining the Hydra mini-sub he says (with the typical Stark modesty) that he is, quote, "the best mechanical engineer in this country" and yet he has no idea how the sub works or what it's made of. This to me is basically confirmation that Zola is way smarter than Stark.
    • It's not necessarily that Zola is smarter than Howard Stark. Note that Howard Stark has, himself, designed a flying car... but obviously lacks a proper power source/distribution method to make it function properly. Zola was basically inventing whatever crazy crap crossed his mind, on the idea that he'd have effectively unlimited energy to power them with to force them to work. Anyone can invent amazing things if they effectively fudge part of the design process to read "And here, a miracle occurs." And he probably didn't precognitively design them so the power source could just be "plugged in"... he either designed the power cell first and then they just used the Tesseract to charge it, or he had to do some hasty redesigns to fit with how the power cells worked in practice.
• If the Red Skull has the tech to build himself a personal tesseract handgun, why do all his Hydra minions have to carry those bulky blaster things?
  • For the same reason there are rifles when we have pistols. Two-handed weapons tend to be more accurate, more powerful, and have a greater range. Pistols are weaker, so they're for close range and surprise attacks.