Falcon's Crest: Captain America: Brave New World Review

It's about politics despite trying really hard not to be

The biggest and most obvious takeaway from Captain America: Brave New World is that it's the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie I can remember to basically spoil everything in its own marketing. If you've watched all the trailers, or hell, even looked at the cast list and the poster, you've spoiled yourself for a midpoint reveal and a third-act reveal that feel like they were meant to be surprises. People do get too nuts about this stuff – I remember a Facebook acquaintance claiming that Spider-Man: No Way Home was absolutely ruined for them because they knew from the trailers who the villains were going to be. To be fair, Marvel has encouraged such behavior by treating every plot point of every movie as a national secret, but they're running out of big-name surprises at this stage of the game, so the plots from here on will have to be compelling and not just surprising. (There isn't even a mid-credits scene this time, and the one after the end credits simply restates a thing we already know.)

I'm going to try to be vague about even these, but I don't think it's out of line to presuppose you've seen the giant red fist on the poster and made some obvious assumptions about its owner. At any rate, we're about to see a new test of the notion that giving away third-act plot points in trailers actually brings in more audience than it loses.

The other major takeaway from the movie is the way it reminds me of writing for nerd sites that insisted on a “no politics” rule, only to have mostly disingenuous trolls make accusations of us playing politics anyway, via our interviewing someone like Gal Gadot (pro-Israel!) or Lena Dunham (don't even get me started, but she's like a bat-signal for right-wing trolls), or promoting something that shows gay people existing.¹ In depicting global politics, Brave New World goes out of its way to avoid including anything that could get it banned in any country with hurt feelings, so a Mossad character has been changed to a former Black Widow, and the big potential crisis looming is a war between the U.S. and...drumroll please...Japan. Even assuming there's no North Korea in the MCU that they want our protection from, it'd still be a pretty short war.

Then again, in real life we have a leader threatening potential war against Panama, Canada, and Greenland. So who's to say what's really ridiculous here?

Despite all this, it's inevitable that certain pundits and the hate-click industrial complex will jump at the chance to call this DEI Captain America, and they're not wrong – the movie does take on affirmative action, but not in the way they'll like. It's a running theme that America mistreats its Black superheroes, with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) returning from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the president flat-out telling new Cap Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) that he doesn't belong here because he's not Steve Rogers. Sam feels inadequate anyway, because he has no super powers, though his suit has been juiced up with vibranium. He knows he has to be perfect, because one screw-up lets down everyone who identifies with him. Though this is presented as a powers issue rather than a racial issue, we all know what's really being said – it's the same reason former Sec Def Lloyd Austin was the most qualified career military man ever, while successor Pete Hegseth is a TV host.

Considering the way the current government seems to want to dismantle diversity programs, that poster, debuting after the election, with a patriotic Black man being crushed by a red fist, felt super-timely. Harrison Ford's president seems like he was designed to strike a chord no matter who won – he plays him as both an 80 year-old with regrets and poor negotiating skills, and a red rage monster who just wants to smash everything at the behest of an evil inventor.

Marvel's claim was that this Captain America would return to “'70s political thriller” territory just like The Winter Soldier, and I'm starting to think that the only one of those Kevin Feige has actually seen is The Parallax View², with which this and TWS share the plot point of hypnotized sleeper agents. It doesn't quite hit the same when, instead of governments and corporations being responsible, it's just a super-villain. But that is true to comics.

The plot kicks in when Isaiah Bradley and Sam are perceived to screw up, and, just as Sam says, that immediately makes both persona non grata to the POTUS, who only moments earlier was considering restarting the Avengers. An assassination plot and leaked intelligence that's probably false lead Sam and his sidekick Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) to believe something larger is afoot. Meanwhile, world governments converge on that giant Celestial dead body in the middle of the ocean, because it's a source of the new and valuable metal adamantium (one assumes this was written back when the idea was to have a new and younger Wolverine, rather than Hugh Jackman back again). President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Ford) wants to negotiate a treaty where everyone shares, but our mighty adversaries France, India, and Japan aren't necessarily all onboard.

The conspiracy isn't exactly a fancy one – it's hard to imagine the viewer who won't figure it all out before characters explicitly explain things. It may get confusing just how much of The Incredible Hulk's plot becomes relevant again, and if you never saw Eternals, that giant dead humanoid who has become a literal island might seem strange too. Ford replaces the late William Hurt as Ross, and there's some weird archival footage retconning Ford back into footage supposedly from that same time period.

Story wise, this feels like a more expensive episode of the streaming series; it works more a as character study than a narrative, about what it's like to be the Black hero replacing a white one and getting lots of vocal pushback, but having lots of others with less of a voice still believe. I've no doubt Anthony Mackie has gotten some of that for real – thankfully, the fact that the SamCap debate already happened a long time back when the comics made the switch means it's less likely to recur. Also, it just makes more sense in the movies to have replacement characters, since actors don't live forever, and even James Bond stopped doing the same continuity with an unageing, constantly recast hero.

If you think Marvel's lost its magic, this may not be the one to make you feel like it's back. But if, like me, you agree that all Marvel stuff – except Secret Invasion; let's be real – has a baseline magic, Captain America 4 at least manages that. Am I damning with faint praise? Only the story, I think; the actors do a wonderful job, with most of them legit good and Ford simply hilarious as ham on wry. Rather than just his usual pointing finger thing, he literally uses all five at one key moment.

It's also not the movie's fault that the actual president right now is more high-concept than most comics would dare to go.

Captain America: Brave New World opens Friday in theaters

1. As Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler highlighted in their book Prius or Pickup, the transformation of political party into social identity has made everything political from beer brands to vehicle purchases.

2. The problem isn’t that he’s only seen The Parallax View, it’s that many 70s political thrillers weren’t actually all that complex or good compared to earlier decades. They were well directed and well acted, but they often were shallow and naive in their conclusions. The end of Three Days of the Condor is silly. Having “If I die, the New York Times will know!” be a solution when the movie is about how the CIA can easily manipulate public opinion is stupid. Yes, The Conversation was great but Blow Out (technically 81, but 70s vibes) unravels at the denouement even as it has one of the most exciting film editing sequences of all time. The Eiger Sanction parodies the genre and ends up being a better exemplar of the genre than most of its contemporaneous peers. Winter Soldier benefited from taking material from Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. and drew more on Hitchcock’s Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and The 39 Steps as well as Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt rather than from 70s cinema. Black Widow benefited from 80s/90s French Assassination films like La Femme Nikita.