Captain America: The First AvengerSave

The film opens in present-day Greenland. A team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents has detected a massive metallic object frozen deep within an Arctic glacier. They drill down and find a partially intact aircraft buried in the ice — a Nazi-era flying wing bomber, its painted insignia partially preserved on the hull. Inside the cockpit, frozen but identifiable, they find a man in a worn red, white, and blue uniform clutching a circular shield. Cut to 1942 Norway. SS officer Johann Schmidt, head of HYDRA — Nazi Germany's deep-science research division — leads a raid on a small coastal church. He kills the curator and steals an ancient artifact called the Tesseract: a glowing blue cube that hums with power. He believes it once belonged to Odin himself. Schmidt's chief scientist Dr. Arnim Zola begins reverse-engineering the cube's energy into weapons.

In Brooklyn, scrawny young Steve Rogers — short, asthmatic, undernourished — repeatedly attempts to enlist in the U.S. Army using forged paperwork from different recruiting offices. He is repeatedly rejected. His best friend Bucky Barnes has just received deployment orders for the European theater. The two spend Bucky's last evening at the World's Fair, where Steve attempts a final enlistment under another false name. This time he is overheard by Dr. Abraham Erskine, an exiled German scientist working for the U.S. Army's Strategic Scientific Reserve. Erskine sees something in Steve's persistence and accepts him into a classified experimental program: Project Rebirth. Erskine has developed a serum that amplifies the qualities of the man it transforms — making good men great, but corrupting bad men further. He believes Steve is exactly the kind of soul the serum was designed for.

Steve trains with the SSR at Camp Lehigh in New Jersey alongside other recruits, including British agent Peggy Carter, who organizes the trainees. Steve performs poorly in physical drills but demonstrates unmatched moral courage — diving on a fake grenade to save the others. Erskine's program takes him to a hidden Brooklyn laboratory. Steve enters the experimental capsule a 90-pound asthmatic and emerges six feet two and 220 pounds of pure muscle. The success is interrupted by a HYDRA infiltrator who kills Erskine, takes a sample of the serum, and is killed by Steve in a chase across the streets of Brooklyn. Without Erskine, the formula cannot be replicated. Steve is the only super-soldier the United States will ever produce.

Rather than send him into combat (the Army considers him too valuable to lose), the government uses Steve as a propaganda figure. Wearing a cheap stage costume, he tours USO shows across America, performing scripted bits with chorus girls and selling war bonds. He is treated as a pageant figure rather than a warrior. While performing for actual front-line troops in Italy, Steve learns that his friend Bucky Barnes has been captured along with the entire 107th Infantry Regiment by HYDRA forces operating thirty miles behind enemy lines. The Army has written them off. Peggy and SSR engineer Howard Stark — Tony Stark's father — defy orders to fly Steve to the area. Steve, in costume, single-handedly infiltrates the HYDRA base, frees over four hundred captured Allied prisoners, fights Schmidt directly (revealing his face is a horrifically scarred red death's-head — the Red Skull), and escapes with Bucky and the captives across enemy lines on foot.

Steve returns a hero. The U.S. military gives him an upgraded uniform — sleek, military-tactical — and a new vibranium shield designed by Howard Stark. Vibranium, mined from Wakanda, is the rarest metal on Earth and absorbs all kinetic impact. Steve assembles a special-operations unit — the Howling Commandos — comprising Bucky, Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, Jim Morita, and others. They begin systematically destroying HYDRA bases across Europe. Schmidt's empire shrinks. The Tesseract-powered weaponry is captured or destroyed at base after base. The Howling Commandos and Cap become a propaganda symbol of Allied resistance. Steve and Peggy slowly fall in love but never act on it; their lives are too consumed by war.

On a snowy mountain raid in the Alps, the Commandos attempt to capture Arnim Zola from a moving HYDRA train. The mission goes wrong. Bucky falls from the train into a freezing chasm thousands of feet deep. Steve cannot reach him in time. Bucky is presumed dead. Steve drowns his grief in alcohol — though his super-soldier metabolism prevents him from getting drunk. He dedicates himself to finishing Schmidt's organization. Zola, captured, reveals the location of HYDRA's central base. The Howling Commandos and U.S. forces lay siege to the fortress. Steve fights through the base alone to reach Schmidt's cockpit-control level. Schmidt boards an enormous transcontinental flying-wing bomber armed with Tesseract-energy bombs. Each bomb is targeted at a major Allied city, including New York and Washington, D.C. The bomber departs.

Steve manages to board the bomber mid-takeoff and fights his way to the cockpit. He confronts Schmidt directly. The two grapple for control of the Tesseract. The cube cracks open under stress and unleashes its raw cosmic energy on Schmidt — atomizing him into apparent nothingness. The Tesseract burns through the cockpit floor, falls through the bomber, and disappears into the ocean below. Steve, now at the controls of a bomber flying toward New York City carrying weapons of mass destruction, faces an impossible choice. The bomber cannot be safely landed. He radios Peggy and tells her he is going to crash the plane in the arctic to neutralize the bombs. He apologizes that he won't be able to make their planned dance date. Peggy weeps and begs him to wait. The radio cuts out as the bomber descends through clouds.

Steve crashes the bomber into the Greenland ice cap. The bombs detonate harmlessly in the frozen wastes. Howard Stark spends years searching for Steve's body and the Tesseract; he eventually recovers the cube but not Steve. The film returns to its present-day framing. Steve, having been preserved unconscious in the ice for almost seventy years, wakes in what appears to be a 1940s recovery room — except the radio playing is broadcasting a baseball game from 1945 that he attended in person. He realizes the room is fake and bursts through it onto Times Square. Nick Fury catches up with him in the middle of modern Manhattan. Fury tells him he has been asleep for nearly seventy years. Everyone he knew is dead or aged beyond recognition. The film closes on Steve in a S.H.I.E.L.D. gym, alone, hammering a punching bag with such force that he splits it in half. The post-credits scene is the original 2011 trailer for The Avengers, set six months later.

Captain America: The First Avenger grossed $370 million globally on a $140 million budget. Director Joe Johnston, who had previously made the well-loved 1991 period adventure The Rocketeer, brought a similar pulpy 1940s aesthetic to the production. Chris Evans, having previously played the Human Torch in two Fox Fantastic Four films, was an unconventional choice for Steve Rogers and reportedly turned down the role multiple times before accepting. The film established the period-piece register that the Russos would expand into Civil War and Winter Soldier, and laid every key piece — Steve, Peggy, Bucky, Howard Stark, the Tesseract, HYDRA — that the entire MCU would build upon. By the time Steve looked up at Times Square in the closing scene, audiences understood that the connecting tissue between Iron Man, Thor, and The Avengers had been carefully assembled. Captain America: The First Avenger is in many ways the foundational stone of the entire MCU's narrative architecture.