Captain America: The First Avenger Boot Camp Scene Explained By Army Drill Sergeant 12 Years Later

An Army drill sergeant has analyzed the boot camp scene from Captain America: The First Avenger. The 2011 superhero flick was Chris Evans’ MCU debut as Steve Rogers and showcased what made him such a great hero. While scrawnier and weaker than many other soldiers around him, Rogers had unmatched courage and rigorous determination that made him the perfect candidate for the super-soldier serum, and allow him to become one of the greatest heroes in the MCU timeline. These traits are expressed perfectly during the boot camp scene, where he struggles to finish some tasks but is the only soldier to jump on a grenade, potentially sacrificing his life.

The MCU super-soldier serum is unrealistic, but it isn’t the only inaccurate part of this movie. In an interview with Insider, retired U.S. Army drill sergeant Lamont Christian discussed several boot camp scenes from movies and rated them on how accurate it was. Christian revealed if there were any soldiers who were Rogers’ size and how they would perform at boot camp. He also talked about the scene where the recruits are fighting to reach the flag and Rogers’ decides to knock over the pole. Overall, he gave the film a 5/10, which isn’t terrible for a film that includes soldiers with super strength.

“When they were standing in formation and the leader stopped and kind of looked at this guy and he looks like a middle-school kid. There was actually a guy named Flaherty. This guy was 4 feet 9 inches, and they called him The Giant Killer, because of all the different exploits that he did during Vietnam. And he was smaller than Rogers was, right?”

“Yo, the smallest guy in the formation wound up coming up with the plan of success. In the basic-training environment, you probably wouldn’t have that type of situation placed on a trainee or a recruit. That’s some special-missions-type unit stuff that’s going on there where an assessment is being done, right? Because they want to know if you have a special skill set. What they were actually doing in the training would not necessarily be something that you would see in recruit training. So I’m going to give it a five.”

Why Captain America: The First Avenger’s Boot Camp Scene Is So Important

Even though there are many liberties taken with how the military is portrayed in Captain America: The First Avenger, it’s an essential scene for unveiling who the MCU’s Steve Rogers is as a character. Part of his story is that he is a skinny, unlikely underdog who wanted to prove himself to those who didn’t believe in him. Through the boot camp scene, viewers see that he is limited by his physical attributes, but he makes up for it with his leadership abilities, cleverness, and bravery. Without this sequence, audiences don’t see why the military believed he was the perfect candidate for the serum and why he would develop into Captain America.