Directed by: Julius Onah
Distributed by: Disney
Written by Anna Harrison
35/100
If you asked someone on the street what their favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe entry is, you’d probably have a lot of answers with “Captain America” in the title. I’d wager decent money that almost no one would say “The Incredible Hulk” or “Eternals,” and yet “Captain America: Brave New World” is more of a sequel to two of the MCU’s biggest duds than a movie about Captain America. Considering that we have a brand new Captain America in Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, considering that the last few Marvel films have been flops either critically or commercially (often both), considering that we are a mere two films away from the next “Avengers” movie, and considering plain old common sense, this would, to most people, seem like a bad idea.
It is, in fact, a bad idea.
The movie’s number one problem can be found in its plot summary: Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford taking over for the late William Hurt and surprisingly invested) has been elected president of the United States, and while he relishes his victory, he is also bummed out that his daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler, whom you may remember from the last time you saw her in the MCU seventeen years ago), won’t speak to him. Ross has his work cut out for him as the nations of the world have discovered that the Celestial that halfway emerged from the Indian Ocean in “Eternals” has a new valuable element to mine—you get a gold star if you can guess what element. His potential treaty is threatened by the reemergence of a certain Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson, whom you may remember from the last time you saw him in the MCU seventeen years ago), who seeks revenge for what Ross did to him after a movie you might recall from seventeen years ago. Chaos ensues.
What’s the problem with this summary? Ah, right—I didn’t need to talk about Sam Wilson at all. Consider our previous installments when Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) was Cap: movie one, he decides to take matters into his own hands instead of playing dancing monkey for the Army; movie two, he once again goes against the powers that be to save his friend and unearth a conspiracy; movie three, he stands up against Ross’s government overreach (I’m #TeamIronMan but whatever). In each, Steve makes active choices, something that is considered an important part of character writing, I’m told—Sam, meanwhile, is reduced to the passenger seat in his own movie. Like Steve, he is often used as a pawn for the games of others; unlike Steve, Sam never breaks free. He is trapped in a movie that seems to want nothing to do with him.
And, unfortunately, Sam was never the most dynamic character to begin with. Neither was Steve Rogers, as his paragon personality makes him somewhat static by nature, but by placing him in ever-changing and morally ambiguous circumstances and populating the world around him with contrasting characters (such as Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, and Sam Wilson before he took up the mantle of Captain America), he became interesting.
Sam, meanwhile, gets plunked into a black-and-white situation—evil tech guy bad—and his sidekicks (Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres, the Falcon 2.0 who made his first appearance in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” on Disney+, and Shira Haas’s utterly useless, politically controversial Ruth Bat-Seraph, retooled from Mossad agent to former Black Widow) are too vaguely defined to highlight anything in Sam’s character. Even the inclusion of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, elevating every scene he is in both here and his debut in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”), a black man experimented on by the US government in an obvious parallel to the Tuskegee Experiments, only merits a few carefully nonpolitical lines about the burden of the shield. While the MCU has shied away from making capital-S Statements, Captain America’s movies have always been their most political (the bar is low but it does still exist), and it’s disappointing to see this movie, so rife with potential—an egomaniacal tech bro controlling an angry and insecure (and red) president, black men grappling with their loyalty to a flawed country and facing the threat of incarceration—drop the ball so completely.
“Brave New World” also suffers from an increasingly common fate for the MCU’s entries: it looks like shit. This is not a new phenomenon but has become more and more prevalent as Marvel’s output increased and its factory line became stressed, and now they no longer have semi-decent character work or plot shenanigans to hide their lifeless images behind. The final battle of “Avengers: Endgame” was a visual slog, but still managed to wring pathos out of its audience; in “Brave New World,” the climactic battle amidst the cherry blossoms of DC is so obviously green screened that it feels like an elaborate prank played on the audience.
Once upon a time, I might have given “Brave New World” a pass for some of its sins—it went through heavy reshoots and rumors abound about scrapped plots and characters, and director Julius Onah likely did the best he could. (Giancarlo Esposito, playing the villain Sidewinder, was only added in reshoots despite being a pivotal character to the plot.) The editing is so over the place that it’s clear the movie was Frankensteined together with string and chewing gum, but maybe, at one point, there was something salvageable in there.
Unfortunately, the finished product is just the latest in a long line of MCU misfires, catering only to diehards and the seven weirdos who still think about “The Incredible Hulk.” In the past, I have bemoaned Ike Perlmutter’s extinct “Creative Committee” at Marvel for their unnecessary meddling, but maybe it’s time for some guardrails. Alas, as the MCU careens towards their next “Avengers” movie with nary a comprehensible team or threat in sight, I fear they might be too far down the road to stop.
“Captain America: Brave New World” Trailer
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