This is going to sound like faint praise, but Captain America: Brave New World isn’t quite the disaster it’s been rumored to be. There’s certainly fun to be had here thanks to engaging performances and a a few fight scenes that make the full use of the big screen. But you can definitely see the gears turning in this movie, which was clearly cobbled together from several different scripts, as well as production times. Ultimately the biggest sin of the latest MCU film is that it doesn’t seem to have much to say about America — or Captain America for that matter. And it definitely doesn’t have anything to do with Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, with which the flick shares its name.
Part of the issue here is that Brave New World is overloaded with plot and exposition, particularly in the opening act. Sure that’s par for the course for a Marvel production. But this is the fourth Captain America movie, the 35th Marvel movie, coming directly off the plot of a Disney+ series (that would be The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and perhaps most importantly — and most prominently — a near direct sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Add in major plot points from Eternals and Black Widow, and this is the most homework-heavy Marvel movie since, well, the last one (Deadpool & Wolverine was also intensely closely tied in continuity, despite what director Shawn Levy tried to claim).
This may not be a problem for the Marvel faithful, but the production, directed by Julius Onah, spends a lot of time bringing fans up to speed. That comes through news reports, characters helpfully reminding each other what happened previously on the MCU, their character relationships to each other, and what has happened in the intervening time between — for example — 2008, and whatever point in the future this movie takes place (we’re still slowly catching up to real-time, after a five-year time jump in Avengers: Endgame).
And then once we do catch up, there’s the relatively dense plot to deal with, which revolves around the recent election of General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford) to the Presidency, a massive conspiracy going back decades, and a race to mine a new metal — Adamantium — from a big honking robot called a Celestial which has been frozen in the ocean since the end of Eternals. Stuck in the middle of this is Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, who has already gotten over his fear of being the new Captain America at the end of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. So despite Malcolm Spellman and Dalan Musson, two of the writers on the streaming series, serving as two of the five credited writers on this movie, there’s really nowhere else for him to go.
It’s unfortunate, because Mackie is an engaging performer who is perfect for the MCU’s Sam — a former counselor who approaches every situation thinking about other people, first. Mackie, as an actor, has a knack of giving his scene partners his undivided attention; and despite his big, bursting personality always makes the other guy (or girl) look good, without pulling focus. This is present in particular in scenes with Danny Ramirez’s Falcon-in-training Joaquin Torres, who gives the part a youthful energy, though all of his jokes fall flat.
That focus is also present in Sam’s relationship with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the best part of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, who makes his way over here as a patsy who tries to kill President Ross. While there’s not much new for Lumbly to do here — he’s a secret Super Soldier who was experimented on by the US government for decades, in shades of the real-life Tuskegee Experiment — he gives each of his scenes a swell of real, grounded pathos. It’s a fully-fleshed out, three-dimensional performance in what is otherwise a two-dimensional movie.
Ford also gives it his all as the conflicted Ross, and he gets more of a story arc than anything afforded to Mackie. It’s unfortunate, then, that so much of what he’s dealing with depends on the role previously played by the late, great William Hurt in Incredible Hulk, Captain America: Civil War, and other MCU movies. Ford is more than up to the task of playing the President of the United States, but the plot’s connection to Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who was last seen in the 2008 Hulk movie, let alone him constantly moping about his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler) just don’t land. Far more comfortable is Ford barking orders in the bowels of an aircraft carrier, than when he’s opining about MCU continuity, or turned into the CGI Red Hulk that serves as an antagonist for the very human Sam.
Ford also gets the closest the movie nods to some sort of a theme: can someone change? Despite being elevated to President of the United States, Ross is attempting to do better, both for his daughter Betty (seriously, drink every time someone says “Betty” in this movie and you’ll be dead by the end of the sub-two hour runtime), and by extending an olive branch to Sam to try and reform the Avengers — a group he helped destroy in Civil War. But naturally between multiple villainous forces including an underutilized Giancarlo Esposito as Sidewinder, a mercenary, his worst nature comes out again. It’s an interesting idea to explore, but since it doesn’t seem to connect in any way to the journey Sam is on — with few exceptions, the new Cap is pretty cool with his lot in life — the theme mostly falls flat, and becomes a referendum on the recast Ross, instead of anything the movie is attempting to say about redemption.
Perhaps worse, a movie featuring a Black man as Captain America, and a new President of the United States, stuck in the middle of amplifying global tensions, doesn’t seem to have anything in particular to say about… Any of that. Marvel movies have never been ones to take bold political stances, but even trying to compare this to the blunt racial statements of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, or the morally murky Captain America: The Winter Soldier makes Brave New World fall short. In the opening of the movie, Ross stands in front of his Presidential slogan, “Together,” and really all the movie seems to have in its thematic arsenal is “what if instead of not together… Together?” Which is nice if you’re teaching a pre-school; less if you’re making a movie with Anthony Mackie wearing an American flag and battling the President of the United States in the middle of Washington, D.C.
Are there ways to make something riotously entertaining, while still having a sharp, extremely pointed statement about race in America? I’ll point you directly to Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show at the Super Bowl just a few days prior, featuring the MCU’s own Samuel L. Jackson, for more on that. But at the same time it would have been surprising to see the usually non-controversial Marvel backed by Disney (which has recent downplayed DEI programs thanks to the current administration) say anything that makes a point other than “hope you enjoy your popcorn!”
Too harsh? Perhaps. And on that note, while most of the action is of the quick-cut variety in too dark environs, there are a few action scenes that work. An aerial battle around the frozen Celestial is a lot of fun, clear to see, and from Sam surfing on a missile to spins and explosions in the air almost seems like it belongs in a different movie (and given reported reshoots, maybe it did). Similarly, the fight between Sam and the Red Hulk is appropriately destructive, though a little head-scratching about how the non-Super Soldier-powered Sam isn’t just a smear on the pavement.
Shira Haas gets a brief, but fun action sequence as Ruth Bat-Seraph, another character who was originally supposed to be Israeli superhero Sabra, but shows up in the final cut completely devoid of anything that could be deemed controversial (clock how fast Ford blows past the world “Israeli” when introducing her, he gives the Micro Machines guy a run for his money). Here, too, there are shades of another version of the movie in a scene where Bat-Seraph shows up in a superhero outfit that is not referenced, nor comes into play or use in any way, and then immediately disappears.
Tim Blake Nelson is also wasted under bizarre, caked makeup as Sam Sterns, known as The Leader in the comic books. It’s disappointing to see such a great performer misused, particularly after 17 years of build-up. For better superhero-genre performances from Nelson, check out HBO’s superlative Watchmen, or, honestly, The Incredible Hulk.
And throughout the runtime, you’ll be reminded of better, more enjoyable MCU movies: a hallway fight is just like the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) fight in Iron Man 2; a villainous plan purposefully recalls the plot of Civil War, to the point that one of the characters notes this is similar to what happened in Civil War; and the movie tries hard to evoke the paranoid thriller atmosphere of Winter Soldier, but even as successful as that sequel was, it was still a copy of a copy.
Is Brave New World a death knell for the MCU? No. Despite everything mentioned above, and even with it feeling long even as it’s one of the shorter movies in the franchise, the fourth Captain America is just serviceable enough. If it was released in the summer, we’d call it an air conditioner movie, the kind of flick you go to see in the theater to escape the heat.
The problem is, Sam Wilson — and Anthony Mackie — deserve better than a barely adequate copy of previous Captain America movies. There was a real chance to enter a brave new world here, where the MCU said something about America, about our government, about race, about… Anything, really. Even merely what it means for a former VA counselor to be elevated to the most prominent superhero in the country. Instead, it’s just another ad for the next few MCU movies, coming after the ads for other movies and concessions. Hey, at least you’ll enjoy the popcorn.
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