Film guide · 2011
The whole film, start to finish, told scene by scene in words. Read this and you'll know everything that happens.
Contains every spoiler, up to the ending.
The present day. A team on the Arctic ice finds the wreck of a huge aircraft. Buried in the ice is a round shield painted red, white and blue. The story then jumps back nearly 70 years.
1942, Norway. Johann Schmidt, head of the Nazi science division Hydra, takes a glowing blue cube, the Tesseract, from beneath an old church. Said to be a treasure of the god Odin, it is the power he plans to conquer the world with.
Brooklyn, New York. Small and sickly Steve Rogers keeps trying to enlist and keeps getting rejected. He even moves and changes his paperwork to try again.
Steve tells off a rude man at a movie theater and gets beaten up in an alley. Knocked down again and again, he keeps standing up: "I can do this all day." His best friend Bucky shows up and saves him. Bucky has enlisted and ships out to Europe tomorrow.
On their last night, the two visit an expo of future technology, where young inventor Howard Stark tries to show off a flying car, and fails. While Bucky has fun with two girls, Steve slips away to another recruitment office.
There, Dr. Abraham Erskine, who has overheard him, asks why he wants to fight Nazis. "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies," Steve says. Erskine approves him for a special project.
Steve trains under Colonel Phillips and British agent Peggy Carter. He can't match the others for strength, but when told to retrieve a flag from a pole, he simply pulls the pole down.
Phillips tosses a dummy grenade into the group. Everyone scatters except Steve, who throws himself on it to protect the others. He's chosen for the project.
On the eve of the procedure, Erskine confides that he once gave an imperfect version of the serum to Schmidt, and it warped his mind too. The serum makes good men better and bad men worse. "Stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man."
In a secret lab behind a Brooklyn antique shop, Steve receives the serum and is bathed in rays from Howard's machine. He endures the pain and emerges taller and powerful.
Moments later, a Hydra spy among the observers shoots Erskine and flees with the last vial. Steve chases him down in his new body, but the spy takes poison and dies with the words "Hail Hydra." With Erskine dead, no one can make the serum again.
The army won't send its only super soldier into battle. Instead Steve tours the country as "Captain America," selling war bonds in a stage show. Kids love him, but it isn't what he wanted.
In 1943 he performs for real soldiers in Italy and gets jeered. Peggy tells him Bucky's unit has been captured by Hydra. Phillips refuses to send a rescue.
With help from Peggy and Howard, Steve is flown behind enemy lines. In his stage costume and prop shield, he sneaks into the Hydra factory alone and frees the prisoners.
Steve finds Bucky strapped to a table, used for experiments, and comes face to face with Schmidt, who peels off his face to reveal a red, skull-like head beneath. Schmidt blows up the factory and escapes.
Steve marches back to base with some 400 men and is welcomed as a real hero. In Howard's lab he picks up a round shield made of a rare metal, vibranium.
Steve forms a squad from the best of the men he rescued, Bucky among them. They start taking down Hydra bases all over Europe.
Meanwhile Schmidt uses the Tesseract to build powerful weapons, breaks with the Nazis and plans to rule the world as Hydra.
In a mission to capture Dr. Zola aboard a train crossing the mountains, Steve and Bucky fight Hydra soldiers. Bucky is thrown from the train and falls into the ravine. Steve reaches for him, too late.
The captured Zola reveals the location of Schmidt's last base. Steve sits in a bombed-out pub trying to drink, but his body won't let him get drunk. Peggy stays by his side.
Steve rides a motorcycle straight into the Hydra base. Just as he's taken, his squad and Phillips's forces storm in.
Schmidt takes off in a massive bomber loaded with weapons aimed at American cities. Steve kisses Peggy and leaps aboard.
In the cockpit fight, the device holding the Tesseract breaks. Schmidt grabs the cube with his bare hand and is engulfed in light and vanishes. The Tesseract burns through the floor and falls into the sea.
There's no way to stop the plane without it hitting a city. Steve decides to bring it down in the Arctic ice and talks to Peggy by radio. They make a date to dance on Saturday night, and then the signal goes dead.
Howard searches the ocean for Steve but finds only the Tesseract. The war ends, people celebrate, and Steve's friends mourn him.
Steve wakes in a 1940s-style room. A baseball game plays on the radio, but it's one he attended years ago. Realizing it's a setup, he bursts out.
Outside is modern New York, all giant screens and traffic. Nick Fury appears and tells him he's been asleep for almost 70 years. Steve's reply: "I had a date."
Fury finds Steve pounding a punching bag and offers him a mission to save the world. A preview of The Avengers follows.