Watched: 02/13/2025
Format: Cinepolis
Viewing: First
Director: Julius Onah
It was hard to miss the negative reviews for Captain America: Brave New World (2025), which was maybe a good way to go in. I already had pre-purchased my tickets, even knowing this movie has been delayed for months, had serious reshoots, and I'd noted Marvel was already pushing Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts as hard or harder than this movie.
I also know that taking to social media and bravely saying "this new Marvel movie isn't very good" is the current cool thing to do, whether it's Quantumania, which fully deserves every iota of hate it got, or Deadpool and Wolverine, which was amazingly meta and a fun Saturday afternoon at the movies (and richly rewarded for the effort).
After numerous misfires and mid-level efforts, it's fair to say Marvel hit the point where the quality of what they do has slipped. What I think folks fail to appreciate is that Marvel's long run of putting out fun, watchable stuff was singular and extraordinary. No one else has come close. And if you're younger, that's hard to appreciate. In a couple dozen movies - they became an institution almost as much as the idea of the Western or Costume Drama.* And, of course, being an institution rightfully means they're the ones to take down/ make fun of/ be skeptical/ cynical of, especially in their modern work.
At the core, I think the same problem plagues Marvel movies that plagues Marvel (and DC) comics themselves - which is that there's a crippling level of continuity in their sprawling universe, and that can be paired with the fact that Marvel seems unwilling to build any second-generation characters in the old-school fashion with their own mythologies, rogues gallery and *personal* continuities. Characters like Sam Wilson just kinda loosely fit into the big picture and exist in the Marvel Comics U. And that is how this movie feels. Captain America: Brave New World operates more as a sequel to 2008's Hulk and other MCU continuity threads than it is a Captain America film. Arguably, Sam Wilson is not the star of his own movie in much the same way, Steve Rogers was one of many characters with understandable motivations in Civil War.
Since he showed up in Winter Soldier, Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson has been one of my favorite characters in the MCU, and I remain excited to see him. And before proceeding, for anyone who visits the site regularly, they already know I particularly like the Captain America area of both Marvel comics and movies, with the long memory of world or MCU history bleeding into current events, espionage type stuff, and imagining what if people actually acted from a place of morality instead of paranoia or self-interest and fought for the public interest.
The story of Captain America: Brave New World has a fairly straightforward thru-line, and everyone's motivations seem fairly clear, which shouldn't sound like an achievement - it's really the baseline for a movie aimed at broad audiences. But it has been a problem at Sony and Marvel both in recent years, and certainly was something DC struggled with mightily. So when people want to complain about this movie, I will say that just 24 hours earlier, I watched Madame Web, and, friends... that is a movie with problems.
I think what you can say about CA:BNW is that it's kind of mid. And people don't want mid for Cap.
I wouldn't apply that label to Anthony Mackie, who is his usual Sam Wilson self, and that's tops in my book. The talent in front of the camera is fine to good. I like Danny Ramirez as the new Falcon. That said - for as much screentime as he has, no one is going to mistake this for Harrison Ford's best performance. But I think he's having fun.
The writing isn't amazing. There were certainly perfunctory lines that felt like they might have been eschewed in a better era of Marvel. Thaddeus Ross - who was played by the late William Hurt in a ton of Marvel movies - is really as important as Cap himself in this movie. Thus, it would have been nice to know *why* he wanted to be president (no, it is not a great way to win over an estranged adult child), not what legacy he wants now that he *is* president.
All-in-all, the villainous plan of our villain is pretty solid (if standard) comics chicanery, with mind control, and revenge for old slights as a motivator. But like many recent Marvel baddies, our guy has a pretty good reason behind his plotting. That said - I would have liked more time with our baddie. And better make-up. Definitely better make-up.
I do question if the director and behind-the-lens crew were just under budget or in over their heads. I don't quite get how or why this movie feels like a step backward, but in 2025, I don't think you can afford to be less than stunning or an event when people wander into a Marvel movie. We've now had Infinity War and Endgame and Black Panther. Not everything can or should be those, but we've had one top-notch classically designed Cap movie in First Avenger (thanks, Joe Johnston!) and two Captain America movies that literally changed how action movies have looked for a decade (Russos). That is the bar. Cinematography, editing, sets... we know the scale the prior Cap movies worked on.
Captain America: Brave New World doesn't deliver on the same soaring technical level of those other movies. Until it inexplicably does, and that can almost feel jarring.
I attribute a lot of the mid-ness to the fact that the film has a sort of odd feel to it, with dull camera set-ups, almost as if this was shot for television (which, curiously, I did not feel about Falcon and Winter Soldier which was for TV). Because a choice was made that we need to ground this more in our world, instead we've stepped backward when you think about Robert Redford talking to holograms and then, years later, we're watching the president just use Zoom.
What we got were a lot of really standard, uninteresting shots that felt like coverage more than lovingly crafted scenes. There's no real palette or look to the film. Nothing to make you say "I am now in the world of Sam Wilson, Captain America".
Adding to the feel of the film - or maybe defining it - the editing tends to lack zip or do much to control pacing except in CGI-heavy moments. I know what the highway/ bus sequence felt like in Winter Soldier, and how every bullet felt dangerous and every punch or kick landed. Here, it can feel slow or plodding and just didn't ever quite feels like what we've come to see in Marvel films. And I don't know why this would be true.
When we pivot to CGI-heavy sequences, like the encounter between American and Japanese forces off Celestial Island, it feels like what I want. That was Marvel. That was high-flying, exciting action.
Thematically, the movie is a bit more complex than what I think it's being given credit for, while also wallowing in fairly tropey super-villainous stuff. Sam's journey to accepting that he's Cap was handled in Falcon and Winter Soldier, and that's a big YMMV proposition regarding how well that worked for you. If a story is tracking how a person changes or what they learn along the way - that may actually be a challenge here for the audience. It's been 6 years since Steve handed Sam in the shield, and it feels like the movie directly says to the audience "what would it take for you to accept him as Cap?" So, yeah, I would have liked to say "this is what Cap learned along the way", and it shouldn't be this hard. I expect it's something like "we should probably be skeptical of power", which should not still be a lesson by Sam's 10th appearance in the MCU.
(late edit: this is both different from and tied to the "what would it take for me to be good enough?" question Sam asks, a reflection of the Black experience in highly ranked positions, wherein Black people are often aware that their ability is oft challenged and accusations of tokenism and, lately, woke-ism, are tossed around and succeeding on one's own merits is unbelievable to skeptics/ often those harboring less-than-favorable views regarding race)
Instead, the arc belongs to Thaddeus Ross, who begins with the job of the world's most powerful individual and ends as a shell of himself, having realized what a lifetime of bad dealings, fear of power while flexing it constantly, and harboring rage have cost him.
And there's certainly some allegorical and potent imagery that maybe was or wasn't intentional there in the last act (spoilers: it was intentional, but didn't anticipate current events, obviously). And I do think, much as Winter Soldier spoke to our concerns at that time, Brave New World was trying to speak to ours. And I'm a bit surprised in the review or three I looked at, none of this got mentioned. Just "Cap not good. Brrrrr."
All that said - I didn't hate this movie. I was never mad at it, and had a good time. I was rooting for it and what it wanted to do. As a Marvel Captain America movie, it just felt like an under-funded spin-off I could still enjoy for what it was.
As I stated in two places before the movie: I just need Cap to quip, bean someone with the shield, do a flip, fly around some and kick someone. And, y'all, check, check, check, check and check in the first few minutes. I am a man of simple pleasures. And, in fact, through the opening sequence, I was a bit confused what people were unhappy about. The bad reviews, if anything, made me sort of settle in just fine for what I was going to see.
For any future Cap outings, I think they've assembled a potentially interesting squad around Sam. I do like the guy playing Juaquin - but they need to give him more story. Sam came in packed with story in the first film, and Juaquin deserves something similar.
I had about thirty questions about the woman they cast to play head of White House security (can a non-US Citizen even be head of security? I have no idea. How are they letting a former sleeper agent into the White House this close to the President? What was up with her nifty jacket?). But she's a solid actress. I think Xosha Roquemore will probably earn herself some fans as Leila Taylor if they can give her more of a three-dimensional background. Both Leila and Ruth Bat-Seraph are basically recycled names and characters from older Marvel comics and being re-imagined here from the ground up - and that's fine, even welcome.
And, of course, I am always happy to see Carl Lumbly in *anything* and he is quite good as Isiah Bradley, the Captain America of the 1950's.
I liked some of the comics creeping in with Giancarlo Esposito showing up as Sidewinder and the promise of maybe more Serpent Society evil doings in the future (we had Copperhead, too!). We even had Dennis Dunphy pop up in ways that were not distracting but provide for opportunity if they pursue it.
Because I've seen Hulk from 2008 a pretty good number of times (there's a DVD somewhere in my house) I don't mind following up on that storyline, but it *is* from a generation ago, so I imagine if the last time you thought about Samuel Sterns was before Obama was in office, this could feel jarring. But... I also think there's a real danger of Marvel forgetting that 20 year olds were still in pre-school when that movie came out. And, honestly, this would not have been my preference - despite the fact I actually kind of liked how the movie resolved.
But I also wish this movie had been less concerned with old business from the Marvel U and, instead, building the mythology around Sam Wilson as Cap. Yes, it's spectacular to see an un-enhanced Cap fighting a Hulk to a standstill. But he needed a clean break and for audiences to accept him on his own terms, with his own crew, villains, etc... We need the promise of what it would mean for him to have a three movie arc as Cap, and we only get that, sort of, in the epilogue.
Marvel's addiction to cross-continuity stories is not going to serve it as well as doing what James Gunn was allowed to do, and that was just have movies that are in their own corner and sometimes touch on event movies/ Avengers movies. Ie: I think I would have been fine with an all-Serpent Society movie, or introducing AIM or anything like that. Maybe even get into the Roxxon thing, which is rich for exploration.
It's extraordinarily easy to complain when a movie isn't what you were hoping it could or would be. As I say, I was pretty fine with the movie while walking out the door after the credits (yes, there's a brief and unnecessary post-credits scene), but didn't feel the exhilaration that got me to see Winter Soldier in the theater something like 3 times. It wasn't life-changing and didn't set the world on fire, but it's as good or better than a lot of the Netflix and Amazon actioners I've watched of late, and nowhere near the levels of frustrating nonsense that I felt watching MI: Dead Reckoning this week. Just, when you know something well, like we all know Marvel well, it's so easy to pick at the flaws.
*if you told 20-year-old me superhero movies would be considered "the institution" back in the mid-90s, I cannot tell you how I would have smacked you for lying to my face
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