Review: 'Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)' Blu-Ray Review

Captain America: The First Avenger has no concept art gallery. I was going to drop my rating because of it, but then I watched the gorgeous featurettes and stopped complaining.


Product Details

• Actors: Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Samuel L. Jackson, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan
• Directors: Joe Johnston
• Writers: Christopher Markus, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Stephen McFeely
• Producers: Alan Fine, Amir Madani, Dan Masciarelli
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: English, Spanish
• Subtitles: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
• Region: Region A/1 (Read more about DVD/Blu-ray formats.)
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Paramount Studios
• DVD Release Date: October 25, 2011
• Run Time: 124 minutes

Special Features

• Includes Digital Copy
• Deleted Scenes
• Behind-The-Scenes Featurettes
• Marvel One Shot: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer -- Go deeper inside the Marvel Universe and unveil secret plans to assemble the ultimate superhero team, the Avengers. 
• And more!

Here are some of the featurettes I found interesting along, with some admittedly poor screen caps from the disk. I just couldn't resist putting some of these on the site.

Featurette Review
Designing the Costume
The director and producer talk about the challenge of designing a faithful comic book costume while making out realistic. Some concept art with interviews with lead concept artist Ryan Meinerding and some brief, but beautiful pan and scans of the illustrations.

Heightened Technology 
The producers and actors talk about the desire to bring advanced technology to WWII without looking out-of-place. We get a few shots of concept art on boards during production and some beautiful images of Daniel Simons' vehicle designs. He's the star of the featurette since he talks extensively about his design principles.

The Transformation 
A great explanation of how the creators got Chris Evans to look skinny and why they did it the way they did. There are only two illustrations, but the focus is on the technology.

Behind the Skull 
This feature talks about how they brought the character of the Red Skull to life. Artists Ryan Meinerding and Charlie Wen take about the challenge of balancing the anatomical effect of a man with his face burned off while maintaining the classic image of the comic book character. Here are some really nice illustrations in this video. The best on the disk really.

Overall, it's a really good set of disks. The concept art for the Marvel films are some of the best in the business and, besides the lack of a gallery, it's still a good disk to own.




Charlie Wen's website is http://charliewen.typepad.com/ and Ryan Meinerding's is http://boyrobot.com/. Both guy's are pretty busy, so Wen's site hasn't been updated since 2010 and Meinerding's blog domain has lapsed. Just go to Marvel.com to see their stuff.