That's a fair take on it. I didn't have any issue with the way they presented him, I just thought it was amusing is all. They present Tony in the first Iron Man as a child prodigy, graduating from MIT or something at the age of 13 or so. Dude can basically do whatever he wants with anything he gets his hands on. Yet, when we last hear about Howard, in Iron Man 2, we get all this stuff about him being the one to  discover this crazy new element that can save Tony, with him remarking on how his dad is still taking him to school, and then we cut to First Avenger with Howard basically looking like a scrub. Must have been a late bloomer, that's all.

Ya, like I said, it's fair. Still amused me

Captain America was pretty much as I remembered. You’ve got two solid first acts and a muddled, tedious third act. The writing and acting is strong throughout, with convincing peformances by Evans and Atwell, and nice supporting turns by Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Jones, and especially Stanley Tucci. The movie, gratefully, takes time to get to know Steve, and the scenes of him standing up to bullies, enlisting (again and again), and sacrificing himself go a long way toward making him a sympathetic hero. This isn’t a movie that tells you who Steve is; it’s a movie that shows you, and that makes a big difference.

The best scenes in the film are between Steve and Bucky, Steve and Peggy, Steve and Erskine, etc. I even like musical montage because it serves a narrative purpose — highlighting Steve losing sight of his goal and falling a little in love with his own celebrity. It makes the subsequent conversations with Peggy and the colonel all the more awkward and revealing.

As soon as Steve goes behind enemy lines, however, the movie stagnates. The movie focuses on action, much of which doesn’t drive the movie forward, and forgets that Steve the man is a lot more interesting than Cap the hero. There’s nothing wrong with action per se — the Brooklyn chase sequence is one of the movie’s highlights — but I need a little something more than Cap and his merry band busting up Hydra bases for 20 minutes. The film manages to ready itself at the very end, however, with a moving, bittersweet radio conversation between Steve and Peggy. And then of course there’s the coda, which has arguably the best final line of any movie in the MCU.

Overall, a decent movie. When it stays with Steve’s journey, it’s good. When it cuts to Hydra, it’s not-so-good. Probably somewhere between a 6 and 7, closer to a 6.

Final score: 6/10

You know that scene was probably less than 5 minutes right? 

Not disagreeing that it felt hurried, and it could have been fleshed out significantly - preferably taking some time to establish more rapport between Cap and his team - but an overlong action scene that outstayed it's welcome it was not.

Edit: Ya, it's like a 2 minute clip

I’m taking about the action that begins with Cap’s foray into enemy territory.

Oh, ok. Starting with the rescue mission then. I get that. A lot of the film's problems definitely start to manifest at that point. I still wouldn't say it's because there's too much action though. The real issue is that the writers wanted to give the impression that Cap and his team were active over this long space of time, having all these adventures that could later form the basis of Caps' legend, but they didn't think it through, because most of the movie's run time had already been allotted to establishing Steve as a person, rather than a hero. So they just try to have their cake and eat it too, throwing together these action scenes to make him and the team look cool, which ya ok....they do that fine, but there simply wasn't time for them to shine that way, 

They should have axed the idea of Red Skull having like 10 bases or whatever already manufacturing all these super weapons, and just condensed it to that first prison camp, where he forces people into slave labor, tests out some basic designs, etc, and then the big main base of operations. That way you get the rescue mission, with some action, followed by a bit of a break, and showing them work together to formulate a real plan of attack for the main base, and giving the characters extended scenes to play off each other rather than just cutting a few action scenes together.

Yeah we’re on the same page :)

I guess these two issues kind of aggravate each other. The movie spends two-thirds of its running time building up certain characters and themes and then uses the last third to quickly introduce (or re-introduce, in the case of Bucky) several new characters that don’t get enough love. So the action falls flat because, well, who cares about these dudes?

I think the movie works best when the war is in the background, affecting the decisions and lives of the characters. In the final act, the war IS the movie, and it’s just a tad tedious.

Captain America gets a 6/10 from me.

Well balanced movie overall, much more so than the previous ones so far. Chris Evans is very likable and believable as Captain America, and I got that sense of connection with this character a lot more than the others. Red Skull was ok, love interest was good, story arc was sort of...meh, acting was great.

I liked Captain America: TFA more than Iron Man 1 but I just can't give the first Captain America a 7.....so I'm going to go with 6/10.

The first time I saw Bucky fall I thought the same thing.  After rewatching the movie, I realized that he was being experimented on by Zola before his death.  Since the Winter Soldier is basically like Captain America with a metal arm, I explain this whole thing by saying he already had a lot of the Winter Soldier stuff inside him when he fell.  So basically he was "super powered" like Cap, but he still lost an arm.

As for Red Skull and the tesseract, I believe that Erskine says that he was always obsessed with Mythology about Odin and such and he always believed it was real.  That kind of suggests he's been looking for it his whole life.  And in another scene they say that Zola had been building these amazing weapons, but they didn't have an acceptable power source until they got the tesseract.

Anyway, that explains this stuff enough for me.  Not saying the plot is bulletproof, but they do put these quick lines in the script here and there to try to quickly explain the stuff that seems inconsistent.

Oh ya, of course they put their little throw away lines in there, and I mean I get it....they're not trying to make a mini series. You make a movie, you got your 2ish hours to tell a story, and depending on the scope you're gonna have to make some sacrifices to keep the pacing up. These sorts of things I don't really hold against any movie too much, which is why I just sort of threw them in offhand. They're just little details that amuse me.

As for the Bucky thing specifically, I know they were already experimenting on him, but given that they'd shown absolutely nothing about him to be physically remarkable throughout the whole film, I'm not exactly willing to stipulate that he was Winter Soldier enough already to survive that fall. Hell, I'm not even certain it would make sense for him to survive that fall even he was already at full on WS power level.