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.