Captain America: The First AvengerSave

Present day, the Arctic Circle. A SHIELD ice-breaker is drilling through a Greenland ice shelf when ground-penetrating radar pings something massive buried two hundred feet down. A team in survival gear lowers themselves on cables into the cavity they've cut. What they find is the wreckage of a 1940s strategic bomber — frozen in the ice, intact, swastika-faded — and inside the cockpit a hand sticking up out of the floor. A single gloved hand, blue leather, a five-pointed star on the bracer. The wide shot reveals a circular shield half-embedded in the frost beneath. The cold open ends on that shield and the audience knows — in 2011, opening weekend, with no Marvel Cinematic Universe trailer to spoil it — that they're about to spend the next two hours watching how a man with a star on his shield got buried under the Greenland ice.

Cut to Tønsberg, Norway, March 1942. A Lutheran church on a mountain side, a German half-track convoy parked outside, an SS officer named Johann Schmidt walking up the aisle in a long leather coat with a small troop of black-uniformed soldiers behind him. The local priest stands guard at the altar. Schmidt knows where to look. He has a forged seventeenth-century etching tucked into his glove, and the etching tells him the church floor contains a hidden vault containing a Norse artifact known as Tesseract — the jewel of Odin's treasury, hidden by a Viking king nine centuries ago. He shoots the priest. He pries the marble altar apart. He lifts a glowing blue cube out of the cavity. The cube hums in his hand like a star. He smiles. "And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert."

Brooklyn, June 1943. A young man named Steven Grant Rogers, ninety pounds of asthma and stubbornness, has just been rejected at his fifth army enlistment office. The doctor stamps his form 4F. "Heart trouble. Scarlet fever. Sinusitis. Asthma. Palpitations. You see this list, son? They could use this list as a phone book." Steve walks out, defeated. His best friend James Buchanan Barnes — Bucky, in dress uniform, shipping out the next morning — finds him in the back of a movie theater getting beat up by a guy who was talking during a war newsreel. Bucky pulls the bigger man off Steve and walks his friend down a Brooklyn alley. "You're a punk." "Jerk." That's the brotherhood the entire MCU eventually pivots on, and the movie introduces it in one alleyway in five lines.

Bucky takes Steve out for one last good night before Europe — to the Stark Expo at Flushing Meadows, the 1943 wartime World's Fair, where a thirty-year-old Howard Stark is on stage flexing a flying car prototype to a swooning crowd. (The car flies for four seconds and crashes back to the floor. Howard winks. Period.) Steve, in the back of the crowd, sees a recruitment office annex set up inside the Expo and slips inside. He fills out a sixth enlistment form, lies on it, and gets caught — by a German-accented man in a long white coat looking through the one-way mirror in the next room. Dr. Abraham Erskine. The scientist behind a top-secret program at the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Erskine asks him five questions, the last one being "do you want to kill Nazis?" Steve says "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from." Erskine stamps the form. He's in.

Camp Lehigh, New Jersey. Steve, plus a half-dozen other physically gifted candidates, run drills under Colonel Chester Phillips — gruff, exhausted, played by Tommy Lee Jones with all his usual deadpan — and the British SOE liaison Agent Margaret "Peggy" Carter. Peggy is the only woman on the base and she punches an enlisted man in the face for catcalling on his first day. Steve, on the other hand, can't run the obstacle course, can barely climb a wall, and gets winded jumping a tire run. But Erskine notices the small things. The flagpole moment: every man in the unit climbs halfway up a thirty-foot wooden pole trying to retrieve a Stars-and-Stripes hung at the top. Steve walks up to it, looks at the pulley at the base, removes the pin holding the pole upright, and lets the pole fall flat. He walks up the lowered pole, takes the flag, hands it to Phillips. Smart, not strong. Then the grenade moment: in a tactical drill, Phillips throws a dummy grenade into the company and every man dives for cover except Steve, who throws himself bodily on top of it to shield the others. The dummy doesn't explode. Phillips watches him, expressionless. Erskine, watching from a porch, has tears in his eyes. Steve gets the green light.

Brooklyn, an abandoned antique shop. Project Rebirth. Steve is strapped into a vertical chrome capsule wired with vita-ray emitters. Erskine narrates the procedure to a glass-walled gallery of military observers — including a stone-faced senator named Brandt who's there to take credit if it works and disavow if it doesn't. Howard Stark, at the control panel, dials up the vita-rays. Steve takes the serum injection. The capsule closes. Vita-rays bathe him. He screams in there for ninety seconds — Erskine almost shuts it down — and then the doors open and Steve Rogers steps out of the capsule six-foot-two, two hundred and twenty pounds of cut muscle, gasping like he just ran a marathon. Peggy puts a hand on his bare chest in disbelief. "How do you feel?" "Taller." The room cheers. Then a glass observation window shatters. A planted HYDRA assassin named Heinz Kruger pulls a pistol and shoots Erskine in the chest before bolting with the last vial of serum. Steve, mid-transformation high, runs Kruger down through Brooklyn — through a movie theater, across the docks, into a U-boat — and catches the vial after Kruger crushes it on his teeth and dies of cyanide. The serum is broken. Erskine is dead. Steve is the only super-soldier the United States is ever going to have.

Without a formula and without a way to make more of him, the Army does the only thing it can think of with a six-foot-two muscle of a man who can punch through a brick wall: they put him in a costume and send him on a war-bond tour. For the next six months, Captain America — in star-spangled tights with a chorus line of dancing girls behind him and a fiberglass shield in his hand — performs in 200 American cities, punching a fake Hitler in the jaw twice a night to sell bonds. There's a kids' comic book of him. There's a propaganda short film. By the time the tour reaches Italy in November 1943 to perform for actual GIs on the front line, Steve is miserable. The soldiers boo him. He stops mid-show. He walks off stage. In the medical tent he runs into Peggy, who's now coordinating with Colonel Phillips on the European front. She tells him the 107th — Bucky's unit — was overrun by Schmidt's Hydra division at the Italian Alps and the survivors are POWs at a Schmidt munitions plant thirty miles behind enemy lines. "They're written off. They're not coming back."

Steve, in costume, breaks into Phillips's tent, pleads to be inserted into HYDRA territory. Phillips refuses. Howard Stark, also at the front in his bomber jacket, says yes. Peggy commandeers a Howard-piloted plane and drops Steve solo over the HYDRA factory at three in the morning. He walks in alone, in the goofy USO suit and shield, fights his way through every door, finds the holding cells, and frees four hundred Allied prisoners — every man of the 107th, every Howling Commando-in-waiting. He frees Bucky last, strapped to an operating table being injected with what we'll later learn was an experimental version of the serum. Steve carries Bucky out on his back through a burning factory. Behind him, the factory explodes. He walks four hundred soldiers across enemy territory back to the Allied camp in formation, in costume, on foot. He arrives at sunrise. Phillips stares. "You're late." "Couldn't call a cab."

Schmidt has been watching the rescue from his command office. He's livid. His chief scientist Dr. Arnim Zola — bespectacled, twitchy, eventually-will-be-digitized — explains that the man who broke into the factory must have been Erskine's recipient. Schmidt agrees. He removes the latex prosthetic from his own face and reveals beneath it a featureless, blood-red, skinless skull — the face of a man who took an earlier prototype version of Erskine's serum and got back what was inside him magnified into monstrosity. Red Skull. He's been hiding it under a mask for two years. He decides Steve has to die personally.

Back at Allied command, Steve recruits the survivors he liberated to form a permanent strike team — Sergeant Dum Dum Dugan in the bowler hat, Corporal Gabe Jones (the first prominently featured Black soldier in any major Marvel film), Private Jim Morita (Japanese-American, drafted out of an internment camp), Jacques Dernier (French resistance), and Falsworth (British). The Howling Commandos. They'll spend the next eight months chasing every HYDRA depot across Europe, blowing each one in turn, on missions Howard Stark designs and supplies. There's a beautiful, brief montage — Steve and Peggy growing closer, a kiss interrupted, Howard Stark assembling a flat circular shield from a piece of recovered vibranium ("the rarest metal on Earth, it absorbs vibration"), Steve's costume getting upgraded from USO clown suit to a tactical leather-and-canvas combat uniform. The shield is the centerpiece. He spins it once. He nods. "How about some stripes?"

Winter 1944. The Howling Commandos board a moving HYDRA cargo train running across a high mountain bridge in the Swiss Alps, hoping to capture Arnim Zola alive. Steve and Bucky leap from a zipline onto the roof of the moving train and fight their way through to the cargo car. A HYDRA energy-rifle blast destroys the side of the car. Bucky, holding a piece of the torn fuselage, dangles outside the train over a thousand-foot chasm. Steve crawls out after him. "Take my hand!" The handhold tears free. Bucky falls. Steve watches him drop into the snow valley below. The fall is fatal. Or it should be. Steve doesn't know yet that HYDRA recovery teams will reach the snow drift first, find the body alive but missing an arm, and start the Winter Soldier program in a Siberian bunker before the spring thaw. Steve does know that he's the reason his best friend just died.

Steve drinks alone in a bombed-out bar in London. The walls are half-rubble. The bartender is gone. He's working through a glass of whiskey the serum won't let him feel. Peggy finds him there. She doesn't try to make him feel better. She tells him she lost people too. She tells him to keep moving. She tells him about a final HYDRA fortress in the Alps that Phillips is preparing to assault. "The Red Skull's there." Steve stands up. They leave the bar. They make a date for a dance — "The Stork Club. Saturday night, eight o'clock on the dot. Don't be late."

The HYDRA Alpine fortress is built into a glacier wall, a hangar bay big enough to launch a strategic bomber called the Valkyrie — Schmidt's last weapon, a wing-shape larger than a B-29, loaded with five Tesseract-powered Hydra warheads pre-programd to detonate over every Allied capital simultaneously. Steve and the Commandos and Phillips's entire battalion assault the fortress on motorcycles, on foot, through a snowy night skirmish that practically defines pulp-cinema set-piece staging. Steve hijacks one of Schmidt's flying motorcycles, smashes through the hangar window, and lands on the Valkyrie just as it lifts off the runway. He climbs across the bomber's wing in mid-flight. He fights through Hydra crew to the cockpit. Schmidt is at the controls. They fight inside the cockpit while the plane cruises across the Atlantic at twenty thousand feet.

Schmidt, in their fight, pries open the Tesseract's containment apparatus and accidentally grabs the cube directly with his bare hand. White-blue energy travels up his arm. The deck of the Valkyrie warps. A column of light rises through the cockpit and opens a spinning ring of starlight in the ceiling. Schmidt looks up. He sees space. Vormir. Real stars. He's pulled up into the column of light and disintegrates as the cube falls through the bomber's deck, burns through the hull, and drops into the Atlantic Ocean far below. Steve, alone in the cockpit, takes the controls. The bomber is locked on autopilot for New York. He can't land. If he ditches, the warheads detonate over Allied territory. The only safe terrain is the Arctic ice cap a thousand miles north. He banks the plane.

He gets Peggy on the radio for the last time. "Peggy. Listen, this is gonna be a one-way trip. I have to put her in the water." "Please don't do this. We have time. We can work it out." "Right now I'm in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer, a lot of people are gonna die. Peggy, this is my choice." The plane is over Greenland. The radio static crackles. He looks at the controls. "Peggy?" "I'm here." "I'm gonna need a rain check on that dance." "All right. A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club." "You got it." "Eight o'clock on the dot. Don't you dare be late. Understood?" "You know, I still don't know how to dance." "I'll show you how. Just be there." "We'll have the band play something slow… I'd hate to step on your —" The Valkyrie nose-dives into the Greenland ice and the radio goes dead. Peggy holds the headset and cries.

1945. The Atlantic. Howard Stark, in a converted submarine-tender, dredges the Tesseract out of the ocean from where it fell. He cleans it. He bottles it. He sends it back to the Strategic Scientific Reserve, which evolves over the next sixteen years into SHIELD. He does not find Steve Rogers's body. The Valkyrie crash site stays buried under Greenland ice for sixty-six more years.

Present day again. Steve Rogers, alive in the ice the entire time, opens his eyes inside what looks like a 1940s recovery hospital room with a Glenn Miller record playing on a phonograph and a Yankees baseball game on the radio. A nurse in period uniform tells him the war is over. He listens to the radio call. He's heard this game before. He was at this game. The Dodgers played the Phillies at Ebbets Field on May 25, 1941, and it ended on a sac fly. The radio call he's hearing isn't a live broadcast — it's a recording from a game that ended three years before his last memory. He's in a fake room. He rips the wall apart, runs through the corridor, knocks down two security agents in tactical gear, and bursts out a back door directly into the middle of Times Square. Twenty-first century Times Square. Digital billboards seventy feet tall. Yellow cabs. A thousand cell-phone screens. He stops in the middle of Broadway and turns in a slow circle, eyes wet, while traffic backs up around him. Nick Fury — eye patch, long black coat, Samuel L. Jackson — walks up behind him. "At ease, soldier." Steve doesn't look at him. "I had a date." Cut to credits. The final post-credit sequence is the first official trailer for The Avengers (2012), premiering nine months out, with Nick Fury's voice over a shot of Steve doing pull-ups in a Brooklyn gym at four in the morning. "Mr. Stark? Mr. Banner? Mr. Rogers? The world has just gotten a lot smaller."