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 striking, 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 sombre 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. 

Captain America: Brave New World

Instantly a relic of a bygone era, thanks to the despotic churn of Washington politics, Captain America: Brave New World not only features a president who has managed to win his seat thanks to tenuous connections to in-world celebrities (in this instance, The Avengers) but a commander-in-chief who takes his responsibilities as a steward for the world's sole superpower seriously whilst also suffering enormous pain when estranged from his child. Pure fantasy in other words. Dogged by reshoot rumours, as well as whispers regarding the curmudgeonly nature of actor Harrison Ford, Brave New World arrives as a pretty great illustration of how older stars are, seemingly, far better armed to advocate for themselves and their own personal persona. 

As President Thunderbolt Ross, Ford enjoys a layer of expertise and attention that is absolutely not extended to his counterpart, Anthony Mackie's Captain America. Mackie makes do with a re-heated character incline that traps his airborne superhero inside further doubts regarding his suitability for such an incredible role. There is very little personal dimension given to any of his actions (certainly nothing romantic or sexual), beyond him thanklessly performing a series of tasks that facilitate pleasant outcomes for third-parties. And that's really it. Presumably, Disney have decided that a black actor at the forefront of one of their most prestigious properties is a difficult enough sell in today's socio-political landscape and that providing him with any interiority, other than the firmly held worry that he cannot possibly measure up to his white predecessor, would therefore be a step too far. 

This listlessness that has been applied to Sam Wilson is compounded by a style of action that leans so heavily on incredible displays of invulnerability that the audience has to be repeatedly coaxed and reassured with asides about magical super-soldier equipment that has been gifted to Wilson by Wakanda. There are deeper layers of disconnection though: Mackie's Cap is a human bird, able to whizz around sixth generation fighter jets without experiencing any of the intense nauseas that usually enact themselves upon our fragile bodies. That may be fine in a Summer cross-over (or their big screen equivalent) when this Captain America is one voice in an enormous chorus of zipping digital bodies but jarring in a piece that otherwise strains to frame itself as some version of a political thriller. Strangely enough Carl Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley, the forgotten Korean war era super soldier, enjoys a more considered framing when he finds himself cornered. 

Bradley, already a comparatively complicated approach to the idea that there have been multiple, successive Captain Americas (thanks to his trepidation when engaging with the rulers of his home country) gets to play a thoughtless The Manchurian Candidate-style assassin within an inciting incident then, almost immediately, the much older, frailer man that he actually is when he snaps back to reality as the full power of the state descends upon him. Of course, this compromised human perspective is immediately tidied away from Sam Wilson's wider adventure, lest it confuse the action figure roil. According to the misfiring The Falcon and The Winter Soldier TV mini-series, Bradley spent decades in prison being experimented upon by, essentially, Nazis. His return to unjust incarceration should feel a little more heartbreaking then than the temporary time out depicted here. Which brings us back to Harrison Ford. 

Ford's President Ross feels largely out of step with the rest of his film, as if the actor is delivering the performance he prefers to give rather than what was specifically, structurally, on the page. The way he's talked about within the piece - his abruptness or his alarming swings in temper - do not match up with what Ford is actually doing. Even away from scenes that depict extremely unconvincing statecraft (in decades gone by the studios financing these projects would fork out so hotshot political drama writers could take passes at these screenplays, injecting some hint of credibility into them), Ross is a man enacting personal change on a titanic scale. Not just to steward the country he's been elected to lead but as a way to attract the favour of the daughter he has pushed away. Ross has human failings then. Naked, emotional needs further complicated by a body that isn't up to the task of shouldering such relentless physical stress. 

Ford, as his character teeters on the edge of giving into his explosive anger, does something that really only Michael B. Jordan in Black Panther has managed to do in the Marvel features: he seizes control of the camera. He is no longer a passive, observed player within a hastily blocked superhero feature. The tidal wave of emotions that his President Ross is experiencing actually enact themselves upon the frame. Aboard a battleship that was itself very nearly breached, the screen begins to tip to one side as Ross seethes through another of his episodes. Director Julius Onah and cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau's film literally upends, standing almost vertical to sink into some unseen abyss while the biggest star in the piece claws at his throat, gasping for air. The transformations experienced by Ross in Brave New World are becoming unexpectedly exciting. 

Although pre-release material couldn't wait to trumpet the debut of a new Hulk, the circumstances of the monster's arrival are communicated in dramatically apprehensive terms, rather than just another excuse for a climactic special effects riot. The involuntary anxieties enacting themselves upon the failing Ross recall the shaking tremors experienced by his television ancestor: Bill Bixby's lonely David Banner from CBS' The Incredible Hulk. Another older man utterly appalled at what could become of him. Our familiarity with Mark Ruffalo's increasingly tame and psychologically well-adjusted Hulk, not to mention the demands of always escalating digital filmmaking, have completely dulled one of the core appeals of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's original comic character, that of an educated person who cannot contain an awful, uncontrollable violence within themselves. 

Perhaps then, with this in mind, Captain America: Brave New World's climax plays differently outside of its birthplace? Presumably we, as viewers, are supposed to be struck aghast that The White House is aflame during the finale; withered by helicopter gunfire and trampled beneath the feet of a boiling, blood-red ogre? However, and this is largely thanks to Ford's uncooperative portrayal of a Thunderbolt Ross who is essentially Jack Ryan with angina, it is actually supremely satisfying to see an American head-of-state rendered in this way: a thoughtless monster who has completely given in to the bilious rages that bubble inside him. Excusing this Hulk's recently extinguished political career, it's supremely entertaining to watch a creature that instantly sets to tearing down facile, faux-Grecian architecture with its bare, bleeding hands. Borderline therapeutic in its honesty even, given the lopsided reality we're all currently being battered through. 

Captain America by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War excels at portraying movement, each and every one of the Marvel characters has their own individual style of motion, matched to both their abilities and their personalities. It's a necessity in a film teeming with every conceivable variation of superhuman, but the implementation here goes beyond mere colour-coding or a succession of quick, featured spots. Anthony and Joe Russo use a thriller frame to inch the brand towards implosion before the next Avengers showcase, dressing the bones with a string of action sequences designed to provoke elation.

A heavily trailed airport clash is the exact opposite of the sluggish mediums we were promised, folding in Paul Rudd's Ant-Man and new kid Tom Holland as Spider-Man to achieve the kind of fluent, frenetic energy you'd expect from one of Joaquim Dos Santos' Justice League Unlimited episodes. Civil War's approach to computer generated filmmaking has more in common with animation than the usual Summer money shots. The effects don't demand awe, they communicate an impossible series of manoeuvres. We track individual elements as they scream in and away from each other. It's delightful. Antagonism rendered as gleefully inventive collisions.

Away from the server farms, Scarlett Johansson and her regular stunt double Heidi Moneymaker demand praise for their chimeric performance as Black Widow, the duo's efforts combining into the most credible physical presence in the entire film. Since Widow's powers barely stray into the fantastical, the action built around her is grounded in not just a believability but something recognisable, immediate and, most importantly, dangerous. Widow doesn't invincibly breeze through danger like the boys, she mantles it, her movements betraying both calculation and expertise. Her moments are fleeting, bracketed by extravagance, but the image of a red-headed missile weaving through a market in Nigeria lingers just as long as Civil War's franchise rehabilitating special effects.

Super Bowl Spot - Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War's superhero piley-on is a strange direction for Marvel's best sub-franchise. Captain America: The Winter Soldier turned heads by focusing on 80s action norms like car crashes and bone-crunching interpersonal violence. Civil War bucks that trend, threatening more weightless, CG tomfoolery.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Like last summer's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron is an accurate big-screen simulation of randomly dipping into Marvel's pre-Image output. Although a complete villain originates and disintegrates over the course of the film, you're left with an overwhelming sense that you've just had a brief insight into a larger, never-ending epic. Age of Ultron is reminiscent of an incomplete run fished out of a ballast bin or an 80-page Summer Special jammed with luridly coloured crossovers.

The first Avengers was notable for its smoothness. Whedon juggled umpteen leads, a get-the-gang-together plot, and a few decent car crashes with such ease that it was actually jarring. Whedon was too efficient, nothing stuck in your throat. Avengers was entertaining with well-structured character interactions but it didn't feel particularly personal. It was more like billion dollar problem solving. Momentarily exciting then quickly forgotten, like the red plastic lump Robert Duvall obliterates in THX 1138. In comparison, Avengers 2 is messy and overloaded. A rampaging mutant that offers zero resolution.

This cinema release (home video hype suggests an utterly superfluous hour is to be added for the BD/DVD release) is so laser focused on hitting beats that there's nothing else. The story's all in place but the communication is rarely verbal, it's geography or image or sometimes even a sound. The film is also littered with sequel embeds. Spotted around the action are elliptical, slashed to the bone interludes that promises further, catastrophic product. As far as the blockbuster sphere goes, this is world-building straight out of David Yates' Harry Potter playbook. Make it vague, keep them wanting more.

Doom is treated like a destination or a feeling, a word on the tip of your tongue. You can't quite get it out. A hypnotised Tony Stark sees Hulk pinned to an asteroid with barbed, alien spears. Thor takes a dip in a holy well and dreams of Ragnarok. Avengers 2 is the tipping point, permanence creeping in around the edges, putting the team off their stride for a two-part finale written and directed by someone else. Whedon's sequel is breathless, a smarmy set-piece generator that doesn't stop building momentum. The writer / director's parting gift to the Marvel Universe is an action collage that has learnt a valuable lesson from apex franchise entry Fast & Furious 6. Stay in your seats. There's a great big bruiser on the way.

Marvel's The Avengers

Joss Whedon brings his ensemble cast skills to bear on The Avengers, a billion dollar victory lap for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whedon finds plausible perspectives for each of his heroes as they find themselves unwittingly enrolled into the financially lucrative collective. Dr Banner wants to stay in the lab, Iron Man and Captain America rub each other up the wrong way, a bemused Thor acts like he's working with a gang of tall monkeys. Although no individual hero (or constituent franchise element, to be more exact) gets special treatment, Whedon puts work in elevating Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow from the haircut we saw in Iron Man 2 to an indefatigable linchpin. 

Johansson gets the real hero moments - shaking herself out of Hulk-induced shock to go punch some memories into her amnesiac friend or impressing the living embodiment of the Greatest Generation with her suicidal enthusiasm. While the guys call and play a cosmic game of gridiron, it's notably Widow who zeroes in on the source of the threat and sets to trashing it. Come the finale - Thor's bad-egg brother Loki summons an anonymous intergalactic army to level New York - Whedon uses action to express character beats, demonstrating how the team works instead of just telling us. It's all faintly reminiscent of the Nuke in Hell's Kitchen interlude from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Daredevil: Born Again; a page full of grimy panels blown up into a chromed, forty-minute set-piece. Cap shouts out the strategies, his team dutifully obey. It's Hulk who steals the show though, moving with the same soaring, anvil like grace as he did in Ang Lee's gem. Hulk is Mark Ruffalo scaled up into a ferocious hybrid of Lou Ferrigno and a Sal Buscema drawing; his gleeful lack of restraint easily the film's giddiest thrill.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Introductions out the way, the Marvel movie universe has settled into a groove of pamphlet filmmaking. Captain America: The Winter Soldier motors along with the same brisk efficiency as a 1970s Bond film, that is to say spectacular stunts and tabloid plot prompts wrapped up in an artistically impersonal whole. Terminally decent Steve Rogers lacks any of 007's wry psychosis, the levity here usually provided by the sheer absurdity of Cap fighting normal human beings. Rogers engages like a hit and run driver, crashing into terrorists and putting them in comas.

Despite the presence of sitcom mainstays Anthony and Joe Russo, basic human interaction stalls the film dead. Scenes between the leads grind horridly through plot outlining and graceless dick waving. Cap is approached like a deathless patriotic ideal but the destination is never anywhere other than fisticuffs. This then is the second unit's film, the team clearly obsessed with practical auto-carnage. Nick Fury's invincible car is an opportunity to quote The Gauntlet, while metallic cyborgs weaving in and out of multiple-vehicle collisions recalls the Terminator series.

Hand-to-hand combat doesn't disappear into a mess of rapid cuts either, this is closer to the Sammo Hung school of fight choreography than other, recent spy films. We get a sustained look at short attack chains, often featuring knives, cutting on blocks and impacts. Cap and The Winter Soldier's brawls tell their own story - these two are evenly matched. With the action sewn up, Captain America 2 flirts with ideas like totalitarian surveillance and mindwiped mercenaries, but doesn't really commit to any of them. Instead they're signposts on the way to the next pile-up. Like an ongoing comic, Winter Soldier's happy to shuffle the deck and posture, but is too afraid to burn it all down to the ground.

Super Bowl Spot - Captain America The Winter Soldier

After spending my formative years obsessed with Dark Horse's Terminator comics, I'm a sucker for highly motivated cyborg assassins beating up cars. So, of course, Captain America The Winter Soldier looks brill to me. Winter Soldier trying to claw his way into Cap's ride explicitly recalls the last issue of The Terminator: Tempest in which brawny Chris Warner drawn T-800s scrambled all over a fleet of fleeing resistance trucks trying to kidnap a Cyberdyne scientist. The highlight was when an aryan terminator punched a hole through the car's roof only to get a sawn-off stabbed back at him, taking half his face off. So, anything like that please. The whizz-bang CG bullshit is still a trifle off-putting, but seeing real cars getting flipped on humid Washington highways is always welcome.

PS - this isn't actually the Super Bowl spot, it's a slightly longer version prepared for the UK and Ireland which includes a shot or two of Revenge's Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter.

NO CHUTE

My favourite Marvel film gets a sequel directed by the Russo brothers, best known for lensing snappy TV comedies like Community and Arrested Development. Despite being a monolithic sludge company that hates the creators it's indebted to, Marvel are pretty good at picking direct talent. They seem to focus in on people used to corralling mobs of people in light, bright circumstances. Leave all the explosions to an accomplished second unit. Apart from trillion dollar helicarrier bollocks - which looks like it's been imported from a completely different film - Captain America: The Winter Soldier looks markedly less fantastical than similar comic crud. Cars are flipped and people are punched in small spaces. As an action proposition, it's threatening to be immediate and engaging.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger takes a character that could be perceived as a jingoistic brute and presents him as the earnest, physical manifestation of the Greatest Generation. Steve Rogers is small and sickly, but possessed of backbone and keen lateral thinking. Taken under the wing of German super scientist Abraham Erskine, Rogers is involved in an army run mensch program designed to stress the kind of post-identity idealism required to become a symbol.

This is were the film excels. Rogers, as Captain America, isn't written to be a downtrodden jerk enjoying the newfound power or status gifted to him by Dr Erskine's sun lamps. Instead, he's the exact same grafter he's always been. Rogers still fumbles around women, he oozes discomfort around actual soldiers. He carries no bitterness, or self-pity, even when the super soldier program blackballs and Rogers finds himself lost in vaudeville and propaganda. He grits his teeth and jobs.

Rogers doesn't abuse his abilities, instead he locates the task and knuckles down. He never cats about with his dancers, or re-visits a bully for a settler either. He seems to understand himself in the abstract - the human embodiment of the kind of virtues essential to the population of any country locked into an extinction war. Rogers excels as Captain America, first as a song and dance man shilling for war bonds, eventually as a one-man answer to Hitler's Satanic science division.

Sketch Saturday: Captain America

A quicky to keep things rolling. Obviously an alternative Marvel stomping ground were a seething Luke Cage somehow became Captain America. Obviously.

"You win wars with GUTS!"

After Hal Jordan's limp-dicked reluctance to be awesome in last week's Green Lantern, this enthusiastic biff-bosh trail for Captain America: The First Avenger is a tonic. Instead of a dull hunk dodging responsibility, we have a pint-sized member of the Greatest Generation actively seeking burden.

Captain America: The Fighting Avenger by Andy Kuhn

Super Bowl Spot: Captain America: The First Avenger

In contrast to Transformers hyperactive image avalanche, Captain America: The First Avenger sells on a more romantic, human action, teasing flirty relationships amongst sci-fi slanted Second World War secret servicing. Phew! Ahead of Matthew Vaughn's 60s set X-Men: First Class, the period setting is a novel twist for a genre close to saturation point. Plus! Who doesn't get a kick out of seeing the primary coloured Cap existing alongside bleach bypass GIs?

The Inadequate Hulk

Seemingly everyone hates Ang Lee's 2003 film Hulk. Except me. I love it. Lee's Hulk died way off at the box office; according to wiki the now-showing sequel only came to be because of Hulk 2003's impressive merchandise taking. A lesson: divorced from head heavy abandonment issues, a muscular green man toy is still a muscular green man toy.

POW!



When viewing Louis Leterrier and Ed Norton's The Incredible Hulk it is initially quite hard to get an angle on how much it is intended to follow Lee's film. In this pre-Avenger's overarching Marvel film continuity are we recognising Lee's film as canon or jettisoning it entirely? There's a conspicuous absence of a '2' in the title, and no cast returns. Events both tally and diverge with the first film offering. It's all a bit either, or. Especially telling though, is the lack of a bells and whistles 'Gamma Bomb!' DVD reissue of the 2003 Hulk flick.

The Incredible Hulk lacks anything but the most fleeting nod to a specific tale of origins; not necessarily a poor move, "here's why!" machinations foul up many a superhero flick. Norton's Banner is south of the border (as per Lee's ending) and struggling to keep a tight leash on his prowling id monster. In terms of screen progenitor, larger still looms the shadow of the Bill Bixby TV series - we get refrains of the miserable 70s piano tinkle theme, visual references to budget transformations, and past cast cameos. 80s children rejoice! We're jabbing at your nostalgia gland! I'd much rather they didn't bother. There's little to distinguish this sort of jabbing "remember this!" hostility from the sub-thought likes of Family Guy, itself an endless parade of wouldn't-it-be-funny-if noodling on 80s pop-screen. I could also do without having (Hulk co-creator) Stan Lee crowbarred into every Marvel imprint movie. Iron Man admittedly traded humorously on Lee's shysty bullshitter image by positioning him as a Hugh Heffner Lothario. Here, he drinks a soda-pop then drops it. Wow.



Anyway! The Incredible Hulk eventually starts to dribble the whiffy air of a reboot, Hollywood's new euphemism for raking over economic failures and pretending nothing happened. Bad Dad General Ross and the military are made parents to Banner's condition, Hulk is now the botched result of secret super soldier experiments. Come the conclusion the fraught psychological misery of Lee's film is abandoned in favour of controlling the beast as a super-identity. This then is the new starting point. Hulk not as rampaging beast, but as fractured alter ego. Cue heroic sequels, or operating as a team player on the team-up Avengers movie. Imagine Matthew McConaughey's Captain America ordering a lucid mid-transformation Norton's Banner into action!

Lee's Hulk is chronically unloved by many for only dolling out a meagre serving of action. There are about three sequences of conflict, two of which take place in near pitch black. The Incredible Hulk seeks to redress this by serving up sub-Bourne urban sprawl foot chases almost immediately. Norton resolutely lacks any kind physicality other than uncomfortable nerd and the slum sprints around a Brazilian favela follow accordingly.



There's some teases of lethality on Hulk's part early on (Hulk seemingly kills a trio of would-be bully rapists), but it's quickly forgotten. Norton aboard (no doubt hectoring and bullying the direction his way) The Incredible Hulk had a promise of being an extremely literal extrapolation of a core Fight Club idea: a created subconscious personality runs riot, whilst the original identity furiously mops up. Call it typecasting. Instead we get Hulk antagonised by a sports metal variant Hulk, played by Tim Roth. Shity threat renders aside, Roth, as it turns out, is the film's one true shining light.



Roth plays Emil Blonsky, a Russian born Royal Marine on loan to shady US special forces. Blonsky's pushing forty, but still loves a good scrap. After a woeful first encounter with Hulk, he volunteers to have Gamma McGuffins injected directly into his spine, eventually creating the exo-skeleton anti-Hulk: Abomination. Roth's best moments as Blonsky arrive just prior to this transformation, having had a World War II era super vaccination he's swift of foot and able to leap around like Spider-Man. Confronting Hulk, there's a brief exchange between the two - Blonsky ducking and weaving like a black-ops Jackie Chan. There's a convincing interplay between physical stunt effects and looming CG puppets. You also get a little fizz of a psychological monster battling a physical one. For a punchline Hulk kicks the outmaneuvered Blonsky into a tree, pulping his bones.



Other than that there's a scene vaguely reminiscent of one in Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale's Hulk: Grey. A childlike Hulk, with Banner love interest Betty Ross in tow, sets up shop in a cave during a thunderstorm. Enraged by the obnoxious weather Hulk picks up a boulder and hurls it at the sky, screaming long and hard at the heavens to meet his challenge.

None comes.

Yet Another Iron Man Sequel Strand!

Shiver my timbers! Who'd a thunk it? Marvel really worked the sequel angle overtime. In very related news, apparently hit-with-the-ladies Matthew McConaughey is being pursued to play Captain America / Steve Rogers. Hopefully Marvel will attempt to keep Cap's birth tied to World War II. Who wouldn't like to see a brawny blur of red, white and blue fighting alongside a squad of desaturated soldiers attempting a blitzy beach landing? Punch Hitler for me Cap!

Link that makes sense of this incoherent ramble is here.