July 20, 2023

TA119: The War Crime Bomb

36 minutes

Minute One Hundred Nineteen: From Cap Lost in a Looking Glass to Cap Lost in His ThoughtsFather David Mowry, Chaplain of the Movies by Minutes community, joins us in this episode!
In the one-hundred-nineteenth minute of The Avengers...We’re back with Cap in that little side mirror. What were they trying to say here? Or was it just something to do because it looks cool and perhaps feels a bit more like an image you’d find on the pages of a comic book? We land on the latter. Regarding Hawkeye’s message to Cap, however, we have no idea how he knows there’s an issue in the bank. He’s 400 feet in the air, after all, on the top of a building.
That takes us to our deleted scene where we get more backstory with Beth the waitress as she flees the Pershing Street Cafe, makes it through the streets, sees Officer Saunders get killed by a Chitauri blast, then gets taken herself. She ends up in the 42nd Street Bank as a hostage with dozens of other civilians, where we find her in the theatrical cut. There’s some odd and uncomfortable Holocaust imagery and themes here that come across more in the deleted scenes, but even without that, it raises too many questions for us. Why are the Chitauri rounding people up and killing them in this way? Why not just gun them down in the street? And why does their bomb only seem to work on two planes?
All that said, we have a great fight between Captain America and the Chitauri, not to mention a fantastically cool escape that Cap does, as the Chitauri are disintegrated by their own bomb. That leads us back outside where Cap’s dazed and looks at all the damage, and Beth the waitress just might actually recognize him. His mask did get ripped off, after all. Anyway, it’s a confusing scene but does have some fun action. Plus, we get another Christ and the Cape from Father David! Tune in!
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