“Captain America: New World Order” is just a couple weeks away, bringing the star-spangled man back to the big screen in his own solo venture in nearly a decade. Of course, it will be Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson wearing the suit and throwing the shield this time, rather than Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers. Regardless, any Marvel Cinematic Universe sub-series getting a fourth installment is a big deal … although there have been more feature-length “Captain America” movies than just the ones produced by Marvel Studios.
Yup, today we’re talking about 1990’s “Captain America,” the $3-million feature directed by late B-movie legend Albert Pyun. Although the film was conceived as a theatrical release, those plans changed when the production hit financial problems, leading to a direct-to-video rollout. A planned $40-million budget was canceled late in planning, dooming the project from the start. These days, the film is seen as little more than a hilarious curiosity, as well as an example of what horrible comic book films looked like before the 21st century.
That said, a bit of renewed interest in the film has surfaced recently with the reveal of an alternate cut — one made public by filmmaker and film historian Justin Decloux. This cut, closer to Pyun’s original vision, is wildly different, but does it make “Captain America” any less of a mess? Let’s get into it.
What happens in the 1990 Captain America movie?
The official, video-release cut of “Captain America” is, in some ways, quite similar to the plot of the first couple MCU films. In other ways, of course, it’s wildly different and entirely baffling. The story begins during World War II with Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) receiving his Super Soldier Serum — the same formula, as we learn, that was responsible for turning an innocent Italian child into the villainous Red Skull (Scott Paulin) via a series of fascist experiments. In the first act, Captain America journeys into enemy territory, battles Nazis, faces the Red Skull, and is defeated, ultimately being strapped to a rocket that’s fired at the White House. Through sheer strength, Steve manages to divert the rocket’s course, landing it in the Alaskan tundra where he’s frozen alive.
That’s all just in the first 30 minutes.
The rest of the movie takes place decades later after Steve thaws. The Red Skull remains at large, now leading a criminal organization responsible for, among other things, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. (Yes, really.) The current President of the United States (Ronny Cox), who witnessed Cap’s heroic rocket diversion as a boy, is now in their sights, so Steve must fight his old foe again to save the President’s life. Along the way, there are some familiar plot points, including Steve meeting up with a wartime girlfriend who’s now married and grown old, him becoming romantically involved with her daughter (it’s a niece in the MCU, but still), and him constantly stealing other people’s cars by faking motion sickness, luring them outside, and then jumping in the driver’s seat and taking of.
Okay, yeah, that last one is pretty much only in this movie.
Captain America reflects where most superhero movies were in the ’90s
While the plot of “Captain America” is pretty straightforward (if a bit of a mess), the execution is where it really stumbles. Costumes are home-made Halloween-level bad, the action scenes hilariously choreographed and nauseatingly edited, and the script is just ridiculous. I mean, Steve Rogers literally steals two different cars from two different, good-guy characters by pulling the same “I’m going to be sick” bit.
Many of these issues clearly came from the budget being reduced dramatically at the last second, but even so, they aren’t too divergent from what most comic book movies looked like at the time. Tim Burton’s “Batman” had just come out the year before, bringing some big-budget, high-profile attention to the genre, and the Christopher Reeve “Superman” films obviously retained major cultural cache by the early ’90s, but Marvel hadn’t been able to find anywhere near the same level of success as DC.
Alongside “Batman,” 1989 saw the release of a live-action, direct-to-video “Punisher” movie starring Dolph Lundgren. While that adaptation is also generally looked down on, it’s nevertheless become kind of a cult classic due in part admittedly to Lundgren’s outsized (pun intended) star status. It wasn’t until “Blade” in 1998 and “X-Men” in 2000 that Marvel really started to make itself a big-screen presence.
An alternate cut of 1990’s Captain America has been making the rounds
Albert Pyun’s “Captain America” has long been a curiosity for comic book fans and B-movie lovers, but it’s gained a renewed level of interest recently with the emergence of the director’s original cut. Revealed by filmmaker and film historian Justin Decloux through a Letterboxd review of the movie in December 2024, this alternate cut is much more experimental and less linear.
Among other things, this version intercuts the World War II scenes throughout the “present day” portion of the film, paralleling different moments like the different fights between the Red Skull and Captain America. Steve Rogers’ nemesis also gets a more tragic portrayal, and the overall emotional arc is more thematically coherent, according to Decloux, who wrote a book on Pyun’s work and is friends with the late director’s wife. “I’m not saying this version is going to change everyone’s mind about the movie because, if anything, it double down on a lot of stuff people disliked,” Decloux wrote on Letterboxd. “But goddamit [sic], in his original cut you can see a genuine authorial intent guiding an impossible production, to the point that out of all of Albert’s films, it may be the most emotionally coherent!”
Time will tell if we’ll ever see a proper release of Pyun’s original cut. If nothing else, it seems like a fun bit of superhero cinema history that would be great to have available. Captain America’s film history goes back way further than both the MCU and the 1990 film, with an even earlier pair of TV movies starring Reb Brown having aired in 1979. With a full release of this alternate cut of the 1990 movie, another version of Captain America’s onscreen history would be returned to the masses.