Review Detail

I'm continually impressed by the skills of the fan-editors on this site, and Problem Eliminator is no exception. I've only dabbled in film editing and the results have been sub-optimal. Problem Eliminator, on the other hand, takes the source material and deftly puts it together as he likes. Video edits are smooth, and music cues line up perfectly. If I wasn't so familiar with the original film, I would never notice the edits.

I went into this edit with high hopes, as I've always felt that the weakest moments of Captain America: The First Avenger are the present-day scenes. I understand their necessity in the greater MCU, but they detract from the main part of the film: Cap's origin story and adventures in WWII. Removing these bits and making the film a pure 1940s adventure seems like a good thing. Unfortunately, I think Problem Eliminator went a little too far. Many of the little scenes he cut are some of my favorite moments from the film. For example, the big fight at the end is trimmed extensively so that it feels rushed and too quickly resolved. This paradoxically has the effect of making Cap seem like both more and less of a hero: a super-superhero would quickly dispatch a villain, but in the full version you get to see Cap doing all sorts of hero stuff, like fighting a Hydra goon on a flying bomb.

Problem Eliminator is planning a fan-edit of The Winter Soldier, and it will be interesting to see how those two movies hold together. While this edit didn't quite work for me, I do recommend it as an alternate view of The First Avenger, and I'm looking forward to see how he tackles Winter Soldier.