Captain America (4½ Stars)

This is the fifth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, released in July 2011. Now Marvel has introduced four of the Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk and Captain America. (There were two Iron Man films).

Stan Lee appears in a three-second cameo as a general watching Captain America being welcomed as a war hero. Or at least, he would have watched Captain America if he had turned up. Steve Rogers aka Captain America is more interested in fighting the war than in wasting time at stupid ceremonies.

That's not the way his career starts out. After being injected with the super-soldier serum he's sent on tour with chorus girls to whip up support for America's war effort. This is a good cause. Wherever he goes large donations are gathered, but it's not enough for him. Steve Rogers would rather be in Europe fighting Nazis. Eventually he runs away from the tour and goes behind enemy lines to rescue captured American soldiers. That's why Captain America was a war hero and I'm just an Internet blogger. I'm not a fighter. I would have preferred to spend every evening on stage with sexy chorus girls.

I find it difficult to believe that I didn't like this film much when I first reviewed it. I enjoy it more every time I watch it. I know that I criticised Captain America carrying a gun when he went into action with the Howling Commandos, but even that seems acceptable now. It was his first active service, so he hadn't yet found his style. It was in his later years that he relied entirely on his shield.

That isn't the case for Agent Peggy Carter. She was never biologically enhanced, so she has to rely on a gun when doing battle.

It doesn't matter where she is. She even has her gun ready in the middle of a New York Street.

When you're looking down the barrel of her gun it's time to surrender.

If your hands aren't raised high in the air by now it's too late.

The whole of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is leading up to Thanos acquiring the Infinity Gauntlet, so we're introduced to the Infinity Stones (which don't all look like stones) early on. The Red Skull finds the Space Stone, which he calls a tesseract, even though it's only shaped like a cube. He uses this stone to power his weapons.

The Infinity Stones were first introduced into Marvel's comics by Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart in the late 1980's. The combination of the stones was described as the ultimate weapon, making a person an omnipotent God. In recent years Marvel has become obsessed with these stones, and inferior authors have written many stories about them. Technically, the stones belong to the post-canon years, but the Starlin and Englehart stories, culminating in the Infinity Gauntlet saga, are among the best Marvel stories ever written. The story of the stones in the films is watered down, but I grudgingly accept that it's a necessity to portray them this way in the film medium.

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