Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

PG-13 for traditional Marvel stuff.  There's a lot of violence.  I suppose the big not-all-that-secret bad guy looks a little gross, especially in the clear light of day.  Also, there's a lot of stabbing.  Cap's wings in this one have these blades that tend to stab a lot of Hulk flesh.  That could be a bit much.  There's also that family-friendly swearing that Marvel really seems to embrace.

DIRECTOR: Julius Onah

The way I watched this movie was not ideal.

I took my son to go see Captain America: Brave New World last Saturday.  Then the power went out.  As much as I write about movies, it is incredibly difficult for me to find time to go out to the movies.  I have five kids and life is always insane.  So we go through a good chunk of the movie.  We found out who the big bad guy was.  We got the plan.  Then the power went out.  So my son and I, post Boy Scouts, finally got to see the rest of the movie.  We, luckily, were able to jump into a show already in progress.  We only had to rewatch a few minutes of the movie.  That being said, some of the cinema purists out there would be horrified that I watched the first half and the second half of the movie a week apart.  That being said, I have strong opinions on the movie and feel like I can accurately write about this one.  

Post Endgame, y'all love dunking on Marvel.  Some of you will swear that "But this one wasn't bad."  And you should be critical of movies that aren't that solid.  I didn't necessarily love Eternals (and one day, I'll get around to rewatching the movie.) I feel like I keep coming back to this well when a Marvel movie is being attacked.  Brave New World is a bit of weird one because the distance between the audience score and the critics score is so wide.  But honestly, Brave New World is a pretty great movie.  I will give some caveats.  It may be the worst Captain America movie, but that may be more telling of the quality of the franchise than it is about this movie.  Some of you might not really consider it to be a Captain America movie.  Some of you might have an argument there with the idea that this is more of a sequel to The Incredible Hulk or Eternals than it is a Captain America movie.  I'll give you some points for that.  Some of you might say that Captain America is not in this movie.  To that, I'm going to tell you to shut up.

Here's what I liked about it.  Again, it is always hard to say why you liked a movie.  But here's what worked.  While Brave New World might not be the tightest political thriller, it was compelling enough to get me to want to unpack the film as a whole.  Yeah, I'm a little upset that we got to know about Samuel Sterns before the movie was even released.  But there is enough political intrigue to keep the movie going.  There were even mild revelations that kept me intrigued.  A lot of that comes from Harrison Ford's Thunderbolt Ross.  (And so begins the apologizing on my end.)  I thought it was weird initially when they recast Thunderbolt Ross.  I've always said that Marvel needs to get over its recasting issues, especially when it came to Jonathan Majors's Kang.  But someone needed to finish up the story started by William Hurt.  Golly, I didn't know that I needed an ultimate conclusion to that storyline.  But Brave New World kind of showed that it was necessary. 

Okay, "necessary" might be an intense word.  But Ross has been a character with us since almost the beginning.  While I mourn the death of William Hurt, that story is almost a tribute to this morally gray character that we've been following for a long time.  The one thing that Brave New World sells is the notion that Ross is a character who thinks that he's doing the right thing and is willing to sacrifice anything to get there, to his own detriment.   Brave New World plays with the notion that Ross forgot what it meant to be a good man in the pursuit of being a great man.  There's a big reveal that Ross threw Samuel Sterns under the bus in exchange for free health care (a truly American problem).  He doesn't really see the problem with this because Sterns had broken  a law in Ross's eyes.  (He aided and abeded the Hulk.)  The fact that Sterns is dark green and gamma mutated is the exact level of disengagement that Ross needs to see Sterns as subhuman.  When Ross gets his punishment to come back as a gamma-irradiated Hulk, it's this chef's kiss of a punishment.

I actually like the origin of this Red Hulk over the comic version.  The Red Hulk of the comics has Thunderbolt Ross turning himself into a Hulk to combat the Hulk. But that story always kind of rang false to me.  While Ross is someone who is always about sacrificing, it often comes in the form of Betty.  Brave New World still ties his regrets to Betty when it comes to the obsession with eliminating gamma creatures.  But Brave New World solidifies the fact that Ross is more about being closeminded to the greater goods of society.  Yes, Ross has tempered his attitude towards Hulks since The Incredible Hulk.  The fact that he is a liaison with the Avengers in Avengers: Age of Ultron stresses the notion that he can put the good of the country in front of his Hulk obsession.  But he also talks about the Hulk with such disdain.   The fact that the Leader made the Red Hulk a punishment is far more interesting.  It brings with it a self-loathing that is mirrored in his communications with Betty.  It's probably why Ross is cool with being jailed on The Raft.

It took me a minute to figure out why I liked Brave New World more than other people did.  I mean, sure, I tend to want to like things more than other people do.  I recognize my own flaws.  Sometimes I try to shed them; in this case, I embrace it.  Anyway, Brave New World did something cool for me that I hadn't seen in a superhero film before.  Clearly, the initial plan for The Leader was to be the villain in an Incredible Hulk 2 if that was ever going to happen.  But without that movie ever coming into fruition, it left a big hole for Marvel to either ignore or deal with.  With the case that they took almost a decade-and-a-half to address what happened to Samuel Sterns, it actually made us feel what the character was going through.  I'm actually listening to the 2009 Star Trek soundtrack while I write this, so the connection is apt.

With 2009 Star Trek, the villain Nero is held in a Klingon prison camp off screen for decades waiting for Spock's ship to arrive.  When Nero confronts Kirk and Kelvinverse Spock, he's dealing with having wasted a sizable portion of his life in that Klingon prison camp on Rura Penthe.  But we never really experience time.  All of that stuff happens off screen in an instant.  However, when we have fourteen years to think about The Leader, the notion of him sitting in a prison for simply existing actually gives the motivation for the character genuine gravitas.  The last time we saw Samuel Sterns, he was having gamma blood leak into a cut on his head and ever since then, he's been having his rights denied him?  That's an absolutely fantastic way to use The Leader.  

Now, I'm sure that there are some people who swear that The Leader is a top tier villain.  I couldn't fight that he's not a top-tier villain.  For the world of the Hulk, he's a decently big deal.  But for the Marvel Universe at large, The Leader is kind of expendable.  If we were never going to get another Hulk movie because of rights issues, this is the ideal way to use him.  Do I want to see him fight Mark Ruffalo's Hulk?  Oh, absolutely.  I'll welcome any more gamma grudge matches that Kevin Feige can come up with.  Bring it on. But for reintroducing a character that I haven't seen in fourteen years in a Captain America movie?  Yeah, that works pretty well.  He made himself a little scary and that's what I like about him.  Realistically, we might never see him again.  But I got a taste of what the Leader could be and that's sick.

I do want to talk about the shadow of Steve Rogers over Sam Wilson.  Now, I think a lot of the people who don't think of Sam Wilson as Captain America have some soul-searching to do.  Brave New World touches on the struggles that Sam goes through to be Cap in a world that needs a Super Soldiered hero on hand.  But part of the issue is that Marvel's talked about it a lot at this point.  The movie doesn't do a lot of the heavy lifting on that point because The Falcon and the Winter Soldier already kind of did it.  I like that we're getting a world that is starting to accept Sam as the new Captain America.  And it also seems like everyone acknowledges that he's not Steve Rogers.  I love Steve Rogers.  I do.  I think he's a cool character.  But the one thing that Steve never really could do that Sam could do is pull himself out of the past.  There was something always "Aw shucks" about the character that worked for him.  

But Sam thrives in his normalcy.  Steve could punch out a tank while Sam has to be the little guy fighting a battle that might be too big for him.  Yeah, I do think that the Red Hulk probably would have liquified Sam Wilson.  But I let my brain shut off and say that the suit was taking the beating so that Sam wouldn't have to.  Steve Rogers was an artist and a landlord.  But Sam Wilson was a therapist who dealt with PTSD.  That seems like a far more Captain America thing to be than artist.  (Not dissing artists, but Sam seems to be working the emotional element of Captain America, understanding the importance of a symbol despite thinking that he might not be worthy.) It's a great choice.

I do think that we need to have a little more time to develop Joaquin Torres as the new Falcon.  I liked the idea of the character, but I need to have him work up to being the new Falcon.  I'm thinking about how perfect the origin story between Steve and Sam was with the "On your left" thing that I want something that makes me love Joaquin as much.  It's not there yet.  But it's good.

It was an incredibly entertaining movie that tapped into the things I loved about the MCU once again.  Yeah, Sam is not Steve.  I don't want him to be Steve.  I want him to be Sam Wilson: Captain America.  If Steve ever comes back, I don't want Sam to become The Falcon again.  Just have two Captains America, just like the comics.  It wasn't a perfect movie, but it did everything a good Captain America movie was supposed to do.