The boldest thing about Captain America: Brave New World? Its title
The Marvel Cinematic Universe struggles to recapture its spark with this bland Captain America reboot
No one should get their politics from a Marvel movie, least of all one in the sorry fifth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe clinging to life through a series of increasingly pathetic outings.
But it does feel a bit like that's what Captain America: Brave New World, is asking us to do. Even ignoring the egregiously patriotic spandex, all the ingredients for an Uncle Sam interpretation are right there.
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), the self-consciously non-superhuman replacement for Steve Rogers' Captain America, is once again engaged in the Marvel hero's favourite pastime: working as an extra-judicial arm of the United States government.
Pointing that theme out here isn't a particularly deep read, either; just like Chris Evans' Captain American way back in Captain America: Civil War, Wilson does his own hand-wringing over the ethics of essentially operating as a drone strike with abs.
And he says as much when the red-and-blue striped tie wearing, comfortably non-partisan U.S. President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) summons him to the White House to ask him to reassemble the Avengers. Wilson is worried about what a warmongering demagogue who routinely screams at journalists would do with that much power at his disposal.
But the clock is ticking. Deep inside the recently emerged "Celestial Island" (that's the giant robot alien we all forgot about the second it popped out of the ocean in Eternals) the world's governments have discovered a gigantic store of adamantium.
This metal is apparently so precious and rare it threatens to destroy America's relationship with … Japan. Treaties have to be made to maintain world peace (as well as to cement Ross's legacy), and the burden of controlling that mineral must be secured, at all costs, by the friendly, peace-loving Americans.
Unfortunately for that peace, Wilson's old mentor Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) goes full Manchurian Candidate, attempting to assassinate Ross while seemingly under a spell. His bullets fly, but just barely miss the president. The parallels to real-life political events are hard to miss, but they're neutered to the level of pointlessness.
Given that this movie was originally scheduled for release in early 2024, and has been handed off between four different writers, its shallow pantomime of insight seems less a feature than a bug.
Marvel Comics have long taken inspiration from hot-button social issues, perhaps most famously in the way the X-Men comics have parallelled the civil rights movement. But as these stories pass through the corporate sieve of comics publishing, those messages get filtered out. And they become even more non-specific as they undergo another round of sifting on their way to the screen.
Brave New World provides a perfect example of this with the Marvel Comics character Sabra, a Mossad-affiliated, Israeli flag-wearing hero. The movie character, played here by actress Shira Haas, has had her superhero name removed and her backstory changed in what Marvel Studios told the New York Times was a "new approach" for the character, amid protest from both Palestinian and Israeli fans.
The decision to include her at all speaks to one of Brave New World's biggest problems: the MCU's tendency to always gesture vaguely toward difficult conversations without truly having them.
Was She-Hulk actually about feminine rage, or just wearing second-wave feminism as a hat? Is simply raising the imagery of Black nationalism and afrofuturism enough, or was Black Panther just randomly grabbing American and African iconography to mix together into a bland and unrepresentative stew? Is the frequently invoked theme of American imperialism ever actually examined if every movie has the U.S. coming out on top because their heroes punch stuff the hardest?
Here, the lack of deeper meaning is made worse because the conversations about what it means for Captain America to be a Black man, raised in the Disney+ prequel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — are all but abandoned.
But hey, don't get your politics from Marvel. However much headline-bait the films wave around, these movies are supposed to be fun. And as the rest of Brave New World deals with Wilson's efforts to exonerate Bradley, and the return of Tim Blake Nelson's cartoonish villain Samuel Sterns pulling strings behind the scenes, there are at least cursory attempts to satisfy that urge.
Brave New World is fairly convoluted, but no more so than Avengers: Endgame. It has a garish, ridiculously costumed bad guy, but nowhere near as egregious as the one in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — or in Blake's original outing as Sterns in The Incredible Hulk.
The fight scenes are tight, punchy and frequent. And Mackie, as always, is a solid if not earth-shattering lead: proficient and funny enough in a sort of steady, safe, forgettable way.
Critical bomb
Which is why a film that does nothing considerably worse than, say, Iron Man 3, is ranked among the worst Marvel movies of all time. It would feel fairly undeserved, if it weren't for the track record already established in 2023's The Marvels. That movie was similarly pilloried despite impressive performances by its leads, over the impossibly high expectations the franchise has built up, along with its titanic and unwieldy backstory.
And as Marvel has transformed from pop culture monolith to skin tag, its products — and those that create them — are suffering more and more by association. Once a surefire way to turn creatives into celebrities, Marvel movies are now more a career bug zapper.
Off the success of her Academy Award winning Nomadland, director Chloé Zhao was drawn into the clumsy Eternals — hamstrung by its need to satisfy comic fans, corporate interests and wide audiences. After heavy-hitting dramatic performances in Short Term 12 and Room, Brie Larson was tapped to star as the divisive Captain Marvel, a role she's attracted criticism for regardless of how good she is.
And now director Julius Onah, celebrated for social thriller Luce, sees his considerable skills as a cultural commentator squandered in a story that can't help but be crushed by all the boxes it needs to tick. A conspiracy drama butts up against a buddy cop movie and a convoluted political drama — and they're all bogged down by the increasingly impossible to remember callbacks from Marvel's huge back catalogue.
And however slick the action sequences are, they all feel a bit boring as we gradually lose track of why we should care. It's all compounded by maybe the biggest issue the movie has: Its superhero has no superpowers. Because sure, Martin Scorsese may say the MCU isn't real cinema, but it is fun to see the Hulk suplexing a giant magical wolf.
"Brave New World," the Aldous Huxley-adjacent subtitle (changed from New World Order to avoid misinterpretation as a "ripped from the headlines" commentary) is a potentially accidental signpost to Wilson's perceived inadequacy as a regular human. He's never taken the super soldier serum like Rogers, so can he be a true hero if he can't even leap tall buildings in a single bound?
As a character motivation, it's fine. But if I wanted to explore the depths of the human soul, I'd just rewatch C'mon C'mon. The MCU is event cinema, and the bigger it gets, the more an audience expects in return. Two decades in, a low-rent Iron Man with wings just doesn't cut it.
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