Captain America - Albert Pyun's Director's Cut

If nothing else, this posthumously released Director's Cut of Albert Pyun's famously disappointing, straight-to-video Captain America demonstrates that a conceptual boldness, when assembling lower budget material, can paper over many of the more obvious cracks in the overall piece. This isn't the first release of Pyun's film to present itself as the director's preferred edit though. During the 2010s Pyun himself sold DVDs and Blu-Rays through his website of an 'Unreleased Director's Edition' that took the theatrical (or, maybe more accurately, rental tape) cut and embellished it with dupe-level reproductions of one or two of the elided sequences seen here. This newly released assembly though - recently unearthed by his wife Cynthia Curnan and the Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Video label - was scanned directly from a celluloid print that Pyun owned but did not have the facilities to review and represents a massive reorganisation of the material that the director was able to get away with before the film's financial backers stepped in and locked him out of the production. 

When compiling their preferred version of the film, producer Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation opted for a literal, chronological procession of filmed events, beginning their release with scenes set during the Second World War before the viewer and Steve Rogers are catapulted into the modern day for some clipped, low-cost soul-searching. Pyun's approach is wildly different in both tone and execution, deliberately withholding the comparatively expensive, period-bound setpieces that detail the origin of Scott Paulin's Italian Red Skull or the rocket-bound adventures of Matt Salinger's Captain America. These moments, bold as they are, are hampered by the kind of obvious corner cutting deployed when struggling to impart scale in cash strapped productions. Massive environments that are intended to read as frightening or impressive are instead airy and poorly dressed; performances are hampered by a harried flatness or some other, unconvincing tonal note born of expedience. Plainly, when viewed in their video tape entirety, there just isn't enough of the kind of impressive, propulsive coverage required to cleanly navigate scenes designed (and failing) to be exciting. Pyun's Director's Cut solution is to break these moments up into arresting blips of information that are then deployed throughout a much more somber, downbeat film. 

We explore the simmering interior landscapes of the film's principle characters as they pick apart the lives that have trapped them in their current predicaments. Both Salinger's Steve Rogers and Paulin's Red Skull are fixated upon ideas of childhood or an innocence that they have subsequently lost. A heartbroken Rogers maintains an upbeat, gee-whizz facade but fails to reconnect with his former allies and worries incessantly about how he has contributed to the fallen world he now inhabits. This Red Skull, rather than the fanatical adherent of Adolf Hitler seen in the comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, is explicitly a kidnapped child. One who was mutated into a violent criminal to work in service of a power hungry, fascist state (in the modern era he counts American generals amongst his clients). Skull yearns to return to a parlour room within his childhood home, to play an uninterrupted arpeggio for his murdered family. Similarly, the rearranged sequences that turn over in the minds of super-soldiers are, fittingly, built with the storytelling language of serial cinema. Binary morals and motivation - not to mention super-powered rockets - are able to, momentarily, intrude upon a particularly downbeat interpretation of a 1980s struggling to free itself from an insidious and all-encompassing take on the military-industrial complex. Previously, viewers were asked to endure several minutes spent in a glaringly lit concrete bunker, complete with gleaming swastika, as resource poor filmmaking visibly strained to wring out something, anything, entertaining. Now we experience the same alarming iconography as the haunting, eidetic memory of an unnaturally strong man who believes himself to be a complete failure.