1991 - THE ROCKETEER, another attempt to start a franchise

Well the plan apparently was to set up The Rocketeer as a three picture franchise.  Unfortunately the film wasn't the financial success that the Walt Disney Company had hoped it would be.  Still, the film is entertaining especially when approached as a summer popcorn movie.

For a film about a guy who straps a rocket on his back without burning his butt.  It has fairly decent special effects before computers completely took over the special effects industry in Hollywood.  The director Joe Johnson had been associated with the Star Wars series and he probably knew his way around big budget effects driven films. 

The film is set in the 1940's and has fairly decent period detail to it.  The main leads Bill Campbell, the gorgeous Jennifer Connelly (21 years old at the time of filming), Alan Arkin and one time James Bond Timothy Dalton (hamming it up as a thinly disguised version of Erroll Flynn) do I good job of putting over this stuff.

 

I think the major problem with this film was a meandering script with brought in a lot of extra characters and subplots that weren't needed.  Also all of the 1940's references probably didn't mean much to contemporary audiences.

 

Anyway, the film is entertaining for the most part.  The film was written by Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and William Dear.  The running time is 108 minutes.

2011 - CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER, more of the same.

The midsummer Marvel superhero that sets up their film The Avengers.  This was considered the best of the superhero films this summer.  In the Avengers comic book series, Captain America is a big deal, like Moe in the Three Stooges, he's their leader.

Not a whole lot of difference from this film and Thor.  The hero goes on a personal journey of character building, gets a hot girlfriend and tangles with a nasty villain.

The director  Joe Johnson, is a journeyman filmmaker at best but a big deal as an effects guy in his previous career.  Johnson had worked on the original Star Wars  and Indiana Jones films.  His career as a director has included such winners as Jurassic Park III,  The Wolfman and The Pagemaster.

No better or worse than any other super hero film I've sat through, this film is nothing but a 2 hour weekend time waster, it just should have been shorter.

124 minutes. written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.