Perhaps the most famous example of Johnston’s talents comes with Captain America: The First Avenger from 2011. While Chris Evans (rightly) garnered a lot of praise for his ability to make Steve Rogers earnest without being hokey, Johnston was just as instrumental for pulling off that move in the character’s pivotal movie introduction. Johnston bathed the movie in sepia-toned nostalgia and kept things from getting cheesy thanks to great casting, which includes not only Evans but also Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter and Tommy Lee Jones as General Chester Phillips. Their no-nonsense response to the proceedings combined with Evans’ goodhearted hero to keep things grounded in emotion, even when repurposing tropes from adventure serials (or, the Spielberg and George Lucas reimagining of adventure serials, anyway).
But Johnson’s most personal movie is the one with the least amount of spectacle yet the most character. Set in the late 1950s, October Sky follows the dreams of West Virginia teen Homer Hickam, played by a wide-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal, who wishes to escape his fate as a coal miner. Instead he yearns to become a rocket scientist. Johnson adapts Hickam’s autobiography but does so by tempering the nostalgia with real characters and exciting sequences.
Hickam’s disapproving coal-miner father could easily slip into cliché, even when played by the great Chris Cooper, but Johnston is careful to emphasize the man’s inner conflict and fundamental decency. In an early scene, Homer arrives at the coal mine right after a collapse. “That’s my dad,” beams Homer as the elder Hickam bravely drags a man out of the rubble. But when Mr. Hickam berates that same man for a mistake that caused the collapse and put others in danger, Homer’s face drops a bit and he repeats the line with less enthusiasm: “That’s my dad.”
With that one short scene, Johnston tells viewers everything they need to know about the two Hickam men. That tension sets up the more fantastic and traditional adventure sequences in the film, including a daring and comic scene in which Homer and his pals steal a piece of track from a line they thought abandoned only to hear an oncoming train. When October Sky does make its few indulgences with spectacle, mostly involving Homer testing the rockets he sends into the sky, Johnston pays homage to his mentor Spielberg with reaction shots of people looking up in awe.
The Fantasy of the Flying Man
The climax of The Rocketeer brings all the pieces Johnston is so adept at together. Now in full regalia, Cliff rockets to a zeppelin to rescue his girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) from actor and fascist Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, doing his best Errol Flynn). Gangsters and G-men join forces against the Nazi soldiers who have infiltrated Hollywood by force, creating a sequence that combines every trope of the ‘30s and ‘40s into one delightful romp.
But the payoff comes when floodlights point at Cliff. Bathed in light, Cliff strikes a heroic stance straight from Stevens’ illustrations, with a raised pistol in one hand, the fin of his helmet arched back, and an American flag billowing behind. Johnston holds on the image for a moment to let us drink it in but then cuts back to the awed people on the ground.
