Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Captain America Movie Preview

Well, not so much a preview, as a look at all the tidbits we have, now that the new Hulk DVD is out plus lots of idle speculation.

We all know about the "alternate opening" on display in the 3-disc version, where we see Captain America and his shield embedded in the Arctic ice. It should be noted that Hulk's little rampage breaks up that bit of glacier, rather like Namor's did back in good old Avengers #4.

We also now that Tony Stark has Cap's shield--or at least a version of it, as it looks unfinished--in his lab in the Iron Man movie.

(Let me add that these tidbits look much better on the screen, particularly in HD, than they do in these screencaps.)

Now, we have no way to judge the relative time frames of these movies. Since we don't know when Hulk's North Pole smashing took place, there's really no way we can say whether or not the shield the Hulk sets loose is the one Stark has...perhaps recovered by the military and turned over to Stark for testing when he was still doing weapons research? Or, is he simply trying to recreate what once was (supposedly) lost?!?

But there's a couple of more hints we can dope out about this universe's super-soldiers from some tidbits in a couple of deleted scenes on the Hulk DVD.

The first takes place after they lose the Hulk in Brazil, and General Ross has to brief his superior, General Greller (whose part ended up entirely on the cutting room floor). Ross apparently hadn't fully informed Greller of what was going on, and he berates "Thunderbolt" Ross: "Are you telling me another one of your Super Soldier experiments has gone haywire? Is there anything that came out of that program that didn't turn into a mess?!?" Hmmmmm....

Next up, we have a greatly expanded version of the scene where Ross tells Blonsky about the Super Soldier program.

Blonsky: You said that (Banner) wasn't working on weapons, right?
Ross: No.
Blonsky: But you were, weren't you? You were trying other things.
Ross: One serum we developed was very promising. But it didn't pan out...or, it did, but it was unstable. It made subjects unstable. We were refining it, but then...Al-Haqeed happened. All those pictures at the hearings, Congress lost its nerve and they killed it.

Double hmmm...

And of course, there's the not-deleted bit at the end, where Tony Stark tells Ross, "I hate to say 'I told you so,' General, but that Super Soldier program was put on ice for a reason."

Now, if that wasn't a coy reference to Cap being frozen in a glacier...triple hmmm...

We've been told the Cap movie will be set in WWII...but we don't know if it all of it will be. We don't know for sure that Cap will be frozen then, or even if it's "the" Captain America up north we see in Hulk.

But we do know that, at some point, Ross made some more "unstable" super soldiers, and then something fairly horrific happened at Al-Haqeed. Perhaps we're borrowing the character of Nuke from Miller's Daredevil run, an insane and out-of-control super soldier experiment gone awry.

And would Ross have kept such a failure "on ice," that is, in suspended animation, rather than kill him? And could he get loose and face a revived Cap, either in the Cap or Avengers movie??

Lots of hmmm.....

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