Joe Johnston makes adventure films the way the 1930s serials did, with a designer's eye and a soft spot for the small man in the big machine. He is better with the man than the machine, and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) shows both.
Fi1m perspective
For the first hour of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) the hero has no muscles, and the film is better for it. Chris Evans is a small, stubborn man from Brooklyn who wants to enlist and keeps being told no; Stanley Tucci is the doctor who believes in him; Joe Johnston gives them room. Then the serum works, the montages start, and the film we had been enjoying turns into the one we had been promised. That is Johnston in one picture: patient with people, and less patient once the machinery arrives.
He came to directing from the drawing board. He started in the late 1970s as a concept artist and visual effects art director at Industrial Light & Magic, on the original Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and everything he has made since carries the mark of a man who designed things before he directed them. His debut, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), was an effects film for families, and The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995) and Jurassic Park III (2001) followed the same line: large effects wrapped round a household. October Sky (1999), a smaller film built from real events, is the one time the people had the screen to themselves.
His taste is for the 1930s and 1940s, when, as he sees it, everything was designed, and The Rocketeer and Captain America are the two films where that taste and the material agree; our review of the second called it the same instinct as the first with more money. He has said that "any film should not have one more visual effect than it needs", and at his best he means it. The complaint that has followed him since The Rocketeer is that when the writing is thinner than the sets the films go flat, and there is something in that. We were more moved than we expected by the first hour of Captain America, by Evans playing stubbornness as a kind of good manners and by how long Johnston is prepared to spend on a man being turned down. It stopped moving us once the montages began.
The Wolfman (2010) and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018) came either side of it, and he has worked only occasionally since. Anyone deciding whether Johnston is for them should watch that first hour and notice whether they mind when the muscles arrive. If they do not, there is a whole shelf of his films to follow; if they do, he has already shown them the best of himself.
Biography
Joe Johnston is an American film director, producer and visual effects artist. Born Joseph Eggleston Johnston II on 13 May 1950 in Austin, Texas, he studied industrial design at California State University, Long Beach, and the ArtCenter College of Design.
He began his career in visual effects at Industrial Light & Magic, contributing to the original Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as an art director. Johnston made his directorial debut with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and went on to direct The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995), October Sky (1999), Jurassic Park III (2001), Hidalgo (2004), The Wolfman (2010) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).
