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CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD

2025

Directed by Julius Onah

Written by Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Peter Glanz, and Julius Onah

Spoilers: moderate

Here's a question: can you even have a new Captain America?  I mean, in comics, you basically can't have a new anybody, because nostalgists will always bring the old bodies back; but I don't mean in terms of the marketplace or even, really, fan response, what I mean is narratively and thematically.  And don't infer I'm limiting this to the actual new Captain America in Captain America: Brave New World, Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson; it would apply equally, indeed far moreso, to traumatized robot man Bucky Barnes f/d/b/a the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), to whom the mantle fell (for a little while) in the comics.  (Maybe Sam has been Cap in the comics too, who knows.)  But Captain America has been a throwback for almost his entire publication history: created as star-spangled propaganda for the purposes of punching Hitler, that's a vanishingly small fraction of actual Captain America comic books (and of course no fraction at all of Avengers comic books), but it's also really important; Captain America is Steve Rogers because Steve Rogers was a 4-F loser blasted with vitamins and rays so he could take part in his country's war—the war, our best war—and hence a product of maybe the last time that every American, or near enough, could embrace uncomplicated patriotism.  He was a natural, unforced representative of things that have become quaint—old school anti-fascism, New Deal liberalism, hazily-defined but genuinely-felt American values, Rockwell shit—and the idea of such a figure reemerging into the present day of 1964, or 2012, open-heartedly trying to remind us of what he/we stand for by punching Nazi remnants like the Red Skull for truth and justice, while nevertheless only occasionally understanding pop cultural references, is the core appeal of the character.  (I mean, even though I do understand most pop cultural references, I very often wish I didn't.)  This man-out-of-time quality was practically never tapped by the movies after The Avengers anyway, so who gives a shit; but without it, what is this "Captain America" of which you speak?  In our present case, a gaudy fucking costume made gaudier than you'd have ever dreamed possible, because Sam "Falcon" Wilson came with his own design elements already.  (In fairness, a red-white-and-blue shield-slinging angel winds up being easier to acclimate to than I expected.)  But America, as a cohesive entity, hasn't existed in some time, and less and less each day.  Just take this movie, which involves the president of the United States as a major character, played by an actor (Harrison Ford) who thirty years ago already played the president of the United States in another action movie.  Air Force One is pretty fondly-remembered, for, like Steve Rogers, it represents the markedly different society we used to have; and sure, I know, such things have always been a little kludgy in the movies, because the movies (usually) strive towards some level of apoliticism.  But when you put a president in your movie these days, it feels fucking weird, even uncanny.

It doesn't help that the MCU is uncanny anyway; maybe you could do something cool/meaningful with a 1978-born, black Cap, but they didn't, unless you're really impressed by a soundtrack with two or three rap songs.  (The credits allege Laura Karpman also provided a score; I suppose it's possible.)  But thanks to its highwater mark of Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has been untethered speculative fiction for a number of years; in fact, Sam (and Bucky) were our guides to Marvel's one halfway-serious attempt at exploring Endgame's aftermath in the Disney+ show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was unwatchably stupid, lumpy nonsense trying to lash "a metaphor about immigrants or something" to "so what would happen if half the world's population vanished and came back five years later?" and falling flat on its face.  Now, there are numerous reasons why Falcon and the Winter Soldier sucks so incredibly much, and maybe its absence-of-a-valid-point-in-the-context-it-wants-to-make-it isn't even the most fundamental thing about it that does; but since some of the ways it sucks are, it turns out, the ways that Brave New World sucks, let's deal with them in due course.  I will offer, however, that it's still a comprehensive improvement over the show, and in one respect a large improvement, because Falcon and the Winter Soldier looks absolutely wretched, too—a total gray miasma—and Brave New World, shot by Kramer Morgenthau, looks... well, pretty revolting a lot of the time, somehow sharp and mushy simultaneously thanks to the fact so much of it's a digital composite, but it's at least colorful enough to not be wholly miserable.

Now, Marvel has been trying to pull back on the semi-functional post-apocalypse their interesting-at-the-time decision left them with, and by this point—ten films later!—it would be fair to forget it, though they don't make it super-easy with a film this eager to remind us with its insane lost cargo of MCU lore.  Frankly, I'm actually sort of impressed that after several years of people tuning out from Marvel, Disney went with this fans-only inscrutability.  If the results were better, I could see myself smiling beneficently upon it.  Still, this is a movie that is shockingly dependent on you loving Marvel, and having an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty obscure MCU history. Besides jumping off from Falcon and the Winter Soldier—still just a TV show, mind you—it also rests its geopolitical thriller plot upon, of all the things, the ending of Eternals, a disfavored underperformer.  (Which I personally liked, though I'd strongly argue that Eternals' cosmic wooliness is not the kind of material useful for countering the feeling that the MCU has departed from a world remotely resembling the one outside our window, and therefore probably isn't the ideal piece of continuity to use to motivate your yeah-but-it's-kind-of-grounded-right?, quasi-Clancyesque military thriller.)  The truly aggressive thing, though, is that it's possibly less of a sequel to Falcon and the Winter Soldier than it is to The Incredible freaking Hulk, a movie that came out in 2008, itself quite badly disfavored (I also like it okay) and, until 2023's The Marvels, the biggest underperformer in the franchise.  It all means that it's a little hard to cut the movie the necessary slack its genre often depends on, when it keeps telling you it's a well-established old world yet all the conflicts its labyrinthine plot generates could be solved by just reminding its principals that hey, supervillains exist.

That plot's some ramshackle stuff, perhaps the inevitable consequence of the highly-publicized "Marvel essentially made the movie twice for some reason" process they seem so fond of (in this case even changing the subtitle not long before the release date from New World Order, a phrase that invoked politics albeit probably not with any great aptitude, to Brave New World, a phrase that mostly just perplexes).  It's far more coherent than I expected (I expected an imparsable boondoggle), but certainly not clean.  So: we begin with Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, formerly the Hulk's archenemy (also formerly William Hurt, d. 2022), which led to a break with his Hulk-loving daughter, a relationship which is very important to him but, I'm afraid, might not come off as important to us; more "recently," Ross was the guy that Captain America: Civil War deployed in Marvel's bid to accelerate a storyline from the comic books that depended upon decades of accumulated superheroic chaos to properly function, where he took the position—these are the "politics" of the MCU, incidentally—that violent vigilantes with superpowers should mayhap be subject to some manner of law and regulation, which in genre terms makes him "an authoritarian."

He's now president, and given where the movie's going this could be, maybe not intellectually meaty, but viscerally satisfying in the same gonzo way as that Captain America comic where he made Richard Nixon kill himself.  Of course, by the third shot of the film the prospect has been completely surrendered, thanks to Ross's astoundingly intense Democrat-coding (his campaign theme is togetherness?), and the sense that we're supposed to sort of like him.  He sends Captain America on a mission to recover a stolen whatsit from mercenaries, which turns out was originally stolen from the Japanese, in what seems like a bid to disrupt the quadrilateral accords being presently negotiated between the major powers of America, France, India, and Japan (and it'll drive you crazy how obviously this should be China, for purely dramatic purposes if nothing else) to decide the fate of the island-sized corpse of Tiamat the Celestial in the Indian Ocean, last seen in Eternals, and the stores of wonder-metal "adamantium" (sigh) which it contains.  Things get weirder when Sam brings his friend, the forgotten and railroaded Captain America of the 50s, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly)—a "but haven't you heard America is terrible and racist?" gesture from the comics, introduced in Falcon and the Winter Soldier for reasons that I don't recall having much to do with its plot, but then, what did?—to the White House for a celebratory dinner, whereupon superpowered Isaiah up and tries to kill President Ross.  Somehow this screenplay, credited to several people including its director Julius Onah, perceives itself to have found the right narrow passage to allow Ross to believe that 1)Isaiah really did intentionally attempt his assassination but 2)Sam has nothing to do with it, even though Sam imposed upon Ross to get Isaiah an invitation, thus Sam can go ahead barging straight into rooms where Ross is without getting shot, yet 3)a bunch of other random people with no ties to Isaiah also got in on the action, seemingly only thwarted by the superpowered intervention of Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), who was probably supposed to be Israeli supersoldier Sabra, but they changed that for, I don't know, some reason.

The upshot is Isaiah is imprisoned and Sam is determined to prove what's patently obvious, that he was the victim of a mind-control plot that aims to destroy Ross's legacy, which Ross should very quickly figure out himself from the available facts as well as secret fact (4), which is that during his time in the unproduced Hulk movies that seem to be what this film is referencing as much as the 2008 one, he was exploiting the Leader, or rather Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson; he never adopts his comics sobriquet), a gamma-irradiated brainiac who saved the ailing presidential candidate's life.  Betrayed, Sterns remains in his secret prison in West Virginia (what globetrotting fun this spy-thriller-adjacent movie is!), but he's managed to co-opt it as a base from which to enact his vengeful machinations, the final movement of which involves him intentionally getting captured, because it turns out once you start thinking about 2008 superhero movies you can't stop.  To make an apparently long story short, what we've got is Sterns emotionally battering the president until the gamma drugs he's been surreptitiously providing him turn Ross into a Hulk, a Red Hulk, this being the movie's absolutely singular goal, despite it not managing to get there till the last twenty-five minutes.

Other than the shaky set-up, this isn't a "bad" plot; I will repeat, however, that it's almost disorienting how they determined on such a ready-made metaphor for American politics (doddering fool with an unusual skintone is our president, causes carnage) and then meticulously removed all possible resonance from it (except for a denouement that's just offensively lame wish fulfillment), so I have some suspicion that's what all them "reshoots" were about.  Anyway, it's still a fun notion, in a pulpy sort of way, and it results in the film's best scene, a rather enjoyable extended climactic CGI bust-'em'up that clearly isn't its best self (the telling moment is when Red Hulk slows one of his prodigious jumps with the Washington Monument, but doesn't topple it onto bystanders, the kind of basic bloodlust spectacle that even a movie from the last time we had a general for president could manage), but has still learned some important lessons from worse Marvel movie third acts, so that this Marvel movie third act is defiantly simple, pinning its hopes on a battle between a single hero and a single misunderstood monster that's all clearly-told amidst a sunny spring afternoon.

The movie fails, instead, for more elemental reasons.  The blatant one is that Sam is an incredibly boring character, who's never been interesting previously, and pretty much his only deal now is being worried he won't live up to his predecessor, which is a reasonable self-doubt to have though the frequency with which the script calls him "Captain America" when Steve Rogers would've been called "Steve" or "Rogers" suggests a lack of confidence extending well beyond the character himself; and Sam's arc-or-whatever is manifested mainly through the dull literalism of Sam idly wondering if he should've taken the serum and gotten super-buff like Steve, which unsurprisingly lacks much of an emotional stake.  On the plus side, it does motivate Mackie's funniest line read in the movie while he's getting his ass waxed by a Hulk.  Maybe it's revealing that he's talking to himself, though: Mackie is, as usual, not moved to give an engaged performance with this boring character, and by Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I suspect he'd decided he straight-up didn't like playing Sam, and hence was passive-aggressively taking that out on his co-leads, so that while both his miniseries and his feature are, theoretically, "fractious buddy movies," they're more like collections of leadenly-antagonistic banter, which neither party really wants to be reciting and which curdles into sourness the instant it leaves their lips.  At least there's no therapy in this one.  But Stan, like Mackie, also possesses some basic movie star quality where you don't necessarily mind him on the screen (though his cameo makes me question this); and you'll have noticed that I haven't mentioned any "buddy" in this one.

Enter Danny Ramirez, playing the new Cap's unimportant new Falcon, and he makes Mackie easily identifiable as a man who might not be doing much with his performance but still does have "it," because Ramirez does not.  He's "comic relief" or whatever passes for that here, a starfucking fanboy who is also prone to bluster, whose every exchange with Sam is so forced all you hear during their interactions is a shearing sound.  I would defy you not to despise the new Falcon after his introduction to Isaiah, where, because he didn't know Isaiah was a Captain America, he immediately jumps on the senior citizen with insults on the model, "oh man, you sure are old, you old fuck, you gonna break a hip, you fucking old fuck?" (not verbatim, but closer than you'd think), and then, upon learning that Isaiah is a Captain America, retreating into cloying obsequiousness—speaking for myself, I was quite excited to watch him die on behalf of Sam's character development, though unfortunately he's only gravely injured.  He's where that old "Marvel humor" comes in, I suppose, though even that might be overpromising; the Marvelest line here, anyhow, is the enragingly glib "since when are they red?" uttered by an extra at what you'd think would be the paralytically terrifying sight of the president becoming a murderous crimson beast.

The movie, then, would be better if it did not have a sidekick (and it might well improve if you just brutely deleted every other spoken line), but even Ford's no help in his repetitive "sad president" modules, so that the only halfway-effective performance belongs to Nelson, mostly by virtue of a weird gravelly monotone, with some assistance from some grody brain-guy makeup that Onah at least knows he should be rendering as horror imagery even if he doesn't know exactly how.  Onah, who's heard that you don't like how Marvel movies have no visual dynamism, has exerted himself to address this deficiency with "style" that consists of just two tricks—"an extreme low-angle shot, communicating menace and/or distress" and "the camera describes a segment of a circle of about 100 degrees, communicating, uh, something, you work it out"—repeated several dozen times.  When the "direction" is basically down to the stunt or pre-viz departments instead, it's better, though in the former case Brave New World suffers from what so many of the lower-key Marvel projects have, which is that "Marvel action" isn't "action movie" action, and there's rarely been that much institutional competence at it.  They're okayish—the editing doesn't help (these can be, in fact, surprisingly confusing fights)—but they're awfully logy and stilted, and actually worse when they play at long takes and they're not being confusingly edited; if you screened this alongside Ballerina I think you'd be baffled how these could be movies from the same industry and the same year.  (Annoyingly, three or four times they feint at doing something cool with the shield gimmick, then get cold feet.)  There remains (some) institutional competence at big-ass CGI spectacle, opening up in earnest with Cap and Falcon fighting JMSDF jets on the high seas, which is surely "an idea," but isn't too good either (you don't know what a 25mm shell is, do you?), nor looks good (all the CGI here has more of a "high-end video game" complexion).  So it's really all about the final fight, which also isn't great.  It's troublingly easy to come up with more character-and-concept-driven excuses for that fight: "Ross, whose whole deal is mistrust of superhumans, determines in his paranoia that the only way for the president of the United States to survive in a world crowded with unruly gods is to become superhuman, and then carnage ensues" even winds up with some philosophical heft, right?  But forget heft; can we even glean entertainment from this series anymore?  It's not the worst Marvel movie, but it may be one of the most intentionally mediocre, and at this stage of the neverending franchise, that's almost more disheartening.

Score: 5/10