Captain America Movie Red Skull Works For…?
Loyal and even semi-conscious comics fans know that Captain America’s arch-nemesis (love that phrase) the Red Skull was a big-time Nazi in the 1940s. The next decade, he was a Commie, proving you don’t have to be a Republican to conflate the two extreme opposites. In the 1960s – and ever since – he’s worked with (more or less) lots of organizations but was always in it for himself.
The movie Red Skull is a bit more confusing.
Entertainment Weekly released the above photo of Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull (a.k.a. Johann Schmidt) in this summer’s Captain America: The First Avenger, an origin story largely set in World War II. But if you take a close look at that belt buckle he’s wearing, it appears that at some point in the movie Skully gets… Hydrated.
Unless the shot is actually from the 2012 Avengers movie.
Wow – there’s a racket – starring in live-action films where you don’t even have to show up on the set, just phone in a voice track.
I think I heard that roughly half the movie is gonna be set in WW2, with Steve waking up in the present day. It’s possible bullshit, though; I really haven’t found a plot synopsis anywhere. I did, however, see a shot of the Skull holding something glowing and cubical…
I’ve heard an interesting rumor from someone I trust that while the “bad guys” are Hydra, they start out as the Third Reich. Johann Schmidt was one o the catalysts for changing the Nazis into Hydra. I’m not sure if Baron von Strucker comes into it, but i doubt that they’re going to adhere to canon.
To be fair, the 50s Red Skull was a Communist agent who had appropriated the indentity to capitalize on its reputation. But I digress.
All things considered, I think the costume looks cool and I don’t mind the Skull being a member of Hydra for the movie. As long as Marvel doesn’t go “gee, that’s a swell idea” and retcon the comics to match.
Identity, even. Wish we could edit these.
Last I checked Nazism and Communism were both socialist movements, not ‘extreme opposites.’ One is nationalist, one is globalist, but both are prison-state totalitarian approaches. An extreme opposite of these two would be Anarchism.
The theory that they were opposites as created by the Soviet Agitprop division during WW2.
Just trying to help.
“Socialism” in the name of the Nazi party was a buzzword, left over from earlier days. The Third Reich was “socialist” only if you define all dictatorships as “socialist”.