AICN Reporter Mike Sampson has confirmed that these images appearing above are the same images/designs he got exclusive access to in a special preview last week at Marvel. They reveal in great detail how the costume is going to be adapted for actor Chris Evans to
resemble the original design but work within the WWII world that Joe
Johnston is creating for the film. The images were sent to AICN via a reader called Broly's Legend. The movie, titled The First Avenger: Captain America, is slated a for a
May 2011 release.
UPDATE:
Joe Johnston, the director of Captain America: The First Avenger, the 2011 summer blockbuster that will coincide with the character's
70th anniversary, says the screen version of the hero will be true to
his roots -- up to a certain point. "We're sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers," said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include Jurassic Park III and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. "He's a guy that wants to serve his country, but he's not a flag-waver.
We're reinterpreting, sort of, what the comic book version of Steve
Rogers was."
None of that is surprising, of course -- Christopher Nolan pared away significant parts of the Batman mythology [such as Robin the Boy Wonder and any super-powered villains] that didn't fit his grim take on Gotham City, while Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. manufactured a version of Iron Man that is hard-wired for far more humor than the old-school Marvel Comics character. Still, Captain America, with his name and history, is a sensitive case. A red-white-and-blue character that dates back to the Franklin Roosevelt era stirs up plenty of civic emotion -- just take a look at the dust-up over the recent change to Wonder Woman's costume. Wonder
Woman comics are hardly a publishing-world sensation these days but
still, for a day or two, the whole world seemed to notice that she put
on some pants.
Johnston has been hard at work on the London set of the film but Saturday he'll be making a whirlwind visit to Comic-Con International in San Diego to promote the film. He'll be joined by cast members too, including his charismatic, young title star, Chris Evans, who
has shown a sly, wiseguy wit in many of his previous roles. Does that
make him an odd fit to play the earnest and somewhat square superhero
with the Betsy Ross fashion sensibility? Johnston
answered that in his film -- which is set in World War II -- the
character will fight the enemies of America but he won't be a stiff,
slogan-spouting guy.
"He wants to serve his country, but he's not this sort of
jingoistic American flag-waver," Johnston said. "He's just a good
person. We make a point of that in the script: Don't change who you are
once you go from Steve Rogers to this super-soldier; you have to stay
who you are inside, that's really what's important more than your
strength and everything. It'll be interesting and fun to put a different
spin on the character and one that the fans are really going to
appreciate."
Some pundits will pounce on all of this as another
desecration of an American touchstone, but how many of them have ever
read the books? The character, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon,
was certainly unconflicted about his country and its mission during the
clear-cut days of the 1940s, but it didn't always stay that way. In
late 1974, for instance, in the months after President Nixon's Nomad resignation, Steve Rogers chucked the star-spangled costume and changed his hero name to [although, by 1976, Cap and original artist Kirby had the hero in bicentennial mode].
In recent years, Marvel star writer Ed Brubaker's work
on the character has been exceptional and never two-dimensional.
Brubaker [the son of a Navy intelligence officer who was stationed at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba] came to recognize that Cap is a vessel that can
contain whatever any generation or reader wants to put in it. In 2007,
Brubaker told the New York Daily News: "What I found is
that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing
out on -- and giving speeches on -- the street corner against the George W. Bush administration, and all the really right-wing fans want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein."
Courtesy of The LA Times.
