A sickly volunteer from Brooklyn is turned into the first super soldier, loses seventy years frozen in the ice, and spends the rest of his life working out which orders are worth refusing.
Steve Rogers was born in Brooklyn on 4 July 1918. His father was killed by mustard gas in the First World War, his mother died of tuberculosis, and by eighteen he was on his own, asthmatic, arrhythmic, partially deaf and too small for any recruiting office in the country. He kept applying anyway. That is the part the serum did not give him.
Abraham Erskine chose him for exactly that reason, and the choice is the whole argument of the character. The programme wanted a weapon and Erskine wanted a person who would still be recognisable afterwards. What Rogers becomes is not a stronger soldier so much as a fixed point, and the films keep putting him next to institutions to see which one bends.
He loses the war he was made for. Seventy years in the ice take his friends, his century and the woman he was going to have a life with, and he comes back to a world that has kept his name on a museum wall and forgotten what he was for. The rest of his story is him finding out, one organisation at a time, that being on the right side and taking orders are not the same job.
Show detailsWhy Erskine warns him first
The night before the procedure, Erskine tells Rogers about Johann Schmidt, the Nazi officer who runs Hydra’s science division and who took an imperfect early version of the same treatment. Schmidt was permanently changed by it. Rogers agrees anyway.
It is a tidy piece of writing, because it sets up a control case. The formula is the same on both men and the results are not, which means the story can never credit the chemistry for the character.
Major spoiler
He survives the final battle. Sent back to return the Infinity Stones to the moments they were taken from, he stays, marries Peggy Carter, and lives the life he was cheated out of. He returns as an old man and hands the shield and the name to Sam Wilson.
How he gets back is genuinely unsettled. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have said he created a separate timeline and then found his way home from it. The writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have said he broke the film’s own time travel rules and lived those decades inside the main timeline, which would mean two Steve Rogers were present at Peggy Carter’s funeral in Captain America: Civil War.