With the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel Studios now have all their super-powered little ducks in a row, ready for next summer’s ultimate hero movie, The Avengers. Hoping to preempt the criticisms similar to those leveled at X-Men – that with so many characters there was no time to develop them – and giving each character their own starring vehicle up front, The Avengers can really hit the ground running and get on with telling an exciting story. Whether their grand experiment in franchise-building succeeds, which has already taken 4 years and 5 movies just to get to the point where they feel comfortable, remains to be seen. What we can say for certain is that with Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel has delivered its finest origin story to-date.

There was some criticism over the casting of Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, not least because he had already played the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm within recent memory. However, these fears are proved irrelevant almost immediately by Evans’ charismatic, earnest and dashingly heroic performance as the scrawny kid from Brooklyn turned genetically-enhanced super soldier. Director Joe Johnston uses some great CG trickery to paste Evans’ face onto the body of a much smaller actor for Rogers’ early scenes, to hide the fact the actor has piled on some serious muscle to lead the US troops out against the Nazis. Later on, of course, Rogers’ unique powers are required to stop an even greater force of evil, the splinter group Hydra, whose megalomaniacal leader, The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), shares a secret genetic bond with the Star Spangled Man.

As Johnston proved previously in 1991’s hugely underrated The Rocketeer, he does a great job of recreating World War 2 as an upbeat time of courage and heroics, when the nations of the world rallied together against a common evil. Taken to new extremes by the hyperbole of comic book fiction, Johnston conjures up a rollercoaster adventure filled with larger-than-life characters and ridiculously evil plans for global domination. The cast is impeccable throughout, most notably Tommy Lee Jones as the secret project’s military chief, Hayley Atwell as the scrummy English dame who falls for Cap, Hugo Weaving’s dastardly evil head of Hydra and Stanley Tucci as the German defector who created the secret serum.

Sure enough, a brief prelude and final coda bring the story full circle to the present day, although Rogers’ arrival in the 21st Century is tinged with a certain unexpected sadness as it dawns on us that everyone we have spent the last 90 minutes cheering on, no longer exists 70 years later. No doubt Rogers will have to deal with this grief himself in the future, but for now we can delight in a rip-roaring schoolboy adventure the likes of which have been absent from our screens since the glory days of Indiana Jones.