‘This is not about America...’
"Some pundits will pounce on all of this as another desecration of an American touchstone, but how many of them have ever read the books? The character, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, was certainly un-conflicted about his country and its mission during the clear-cut days of the 1940s, but it didn't always stay that way. In late 1974, for instance, in the months after President Nixon's resignation, Steve Rogers chucked the star-spangled costume and changed his hero name to Nomad."
Johnston can spout all the talking points off he wants about artistic imperatives, but from an artistically imperative point of view the main motivation of his protagonist now make absolutely no sense.
There's a reason that the "Nomad" experiment fell by the wayside.
What's more, while Boucher equates Johnston's move with say Jon Favreau's take on Iron Man, it is arguable that Favreau's vision of Tony Stark/Iron Man is a fundamentally patriotic libertarian-conservative American hero. Both movies were wildly successful in both the U.S. and foreign audiences. By contrast, "GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra" -- which conservative pundit Greg Gutfeld panned as "a Benetton ad with rocket launchers" -- earned slightly less than half worldwide as did "Iron Man 2." What's more, the opening weekend for "GI Joe" earned only $54.7 million in its opening weekend compared to the $128.1 million "Iron Man 2" raked in during its first weekend.
“We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers,” said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include “Jurassic Park III” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. “He’s a guy that wants to serve his country but he’s not a flag-waver. We’re reinterpretating sort of what the comic book version of Steve Rogers was.”
“He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver,” Johnston said. “He’s just a good person. We make a point of that in the script: Don’t change who you are once you go from Steve Rogers to this super-soldier, you have to stay who you are inside, that’s really what’s important more than your strength and everything. It’ll be interesting and fun to put a different spin on the character and one that the fans are really going to appreciate.”
