'Captain America: Brave New World' Continues the MCU's March to Irrelevancy
Oops all understudies, and the MCU's Obama-era hangover.
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Nerds conquered culture in the early 2010s, and the massive budget, massive return comic book movie phenomenon once stood as the greatest monument to their victory. Marvel was the undisputed king, and every distributor plotted how to create their own versions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). But everything ages, trends especially so, and with the release of their 35th movie, the MCU suddenly feels like an abandoned shopping mall.
Captain America: Brave New World has more than anything else the feel of empty real estate, of planned enterprises desperately pivoting. The MCU persists in degraded form solely to satisfy the most slavish completists, bad movies setting up future ones that sound even worse. Stay tuned for The Avengers: Sunk Cost Fallacy!
What’s the oldest and most classic variety of negative review: Who is this for?
That old chestnut applies in spades to this latest Marvel effort, which seems to be sort of about the Avengers, but couldn’t actually get any of them to show up, and has a Big Bad who maybe isn’t actually bad, plus some heroes-in-waiting and ghosts of villains future, yet ends with no one vanquished and one sort of anti-climactic showdown. Ah, well. At least there were no portals or multiverses! Not until the post-credits sequence teased one, anyway, at which point I groaned out loud.
The MCU was maybe always a middling soap opera for people who should have better things to do, but it used to at least evoke high production values. Now? I remember going to a charity basketball game when I was a kid, which was supposed to be played between teams composed of players from the local town’s police department and members of the San Francisco 49ers. Being a child, I hadn’t yet realized in advance that the latter would maybe include one starting O lineman and a bunch of special teams players and backups, and not, like, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice and Ronnie Lott.
Watching Captain America: Brave New World felt like that. Why are the only guys in this Falcon (who has been promoted to Captain America) and the second actor to play Thunderbolt Ross (Harrison Ford, who took over after William Hurt died)? At least in Madame Web it was clear that corporate rights issues were keeping the actual Spider-Man from showing up, in a movie about Spider-Man side characters. Captain America: Brave New World keeps bringing up The Avengers only for them to never show up. Aren’t they all the same company? What’s the excuse this time? It’s hard not to conclude that they probably just had better things to do.
Cursory online research tells me that this Captain America (the fourth Captain America movie) is a continuation of the The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series, from 2021. I never saw that, but I sort of assumed this would stand on its own as a movie (especially considering I’ve seen 32 or 33 of the MCU movies thanks to being a professional film watcher). I guess theoretically it does, but also it feels like I missed some stuff.
So: Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), formerly the Falcon, is Captain America now. The old Captain America, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is offscreen somewhere for the whole movie, though they never say exactly where or why (I think they referenced “a secure facility” at some point). Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford), as seen in some of the Hulk movies and in Captain America: Civil War (had to look this up, still not sure it’s 100% correct), is the president now. This is explained in a news montage that opens the film. Apparently he became popular protecting the world from The Hulk at some point, much to the chagrin of the Hulk’s girlfriend, Ross’s daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler) who shows up for about 45 seconds in the third act of this one (again, was she too busy for this? what was she doing?). Meanwhile, there’s a Celestial Object (oh God don’t ask) crash landed in the Indian Ocean.
The Celestial is made of Adamantium, a space metal even more valuable than Vibranium, and President Ross is trying to get an international treaty signed so that different countries don’t start big wars over control of it. The prospective treaty signees are, for reasons unclear, a seemingly random assortment of countries that includes the US, India, France, and Japan. The US, the world’s superpower, sure that makes sense. And India, the world’s most populous country and presumably right next door to something in the Indian Ocean, yep, that tracks. But France? Not the EU, not NATO, just France? And not China, the world’s second most populous country, but Japan? Are the heads of the more important countries being held in the same secure facility as Steve Rogers?
Anyway, the film opens, after the establishing montage, with Captain America flying through the skies on his way to infiltrate a “secure facility” (chug your drink!) where some bad dudes called “Serpent” led by Gus Fring from Breaking Bad are trying to sell a chunk of stolen Adamantium to some other nefarious entity (personally I always preferred XTCinium). It’s kind of insidious how quickly the idea of ever-present surveillance tech has been incorporated into every action film and twisted into a positive, to the point that all setpieces are now required to have a functionary in a control room somewhere watching all the action on a monitor and doing quips with the hero through an earpiece. Save some fun for us, eh Boss? Only if you save me some schwarma for me, Billy! Ha ha ha.
In this case, the control room guy is a troop named Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) a sort of hybrid old school sidekick meets the Fanboy Character that’s in all of these fucking movies now. Serpent’s Adamantium buyer never shows up, but Cap beats everyone up with the help of his flying super shield and a new AI assistant drone that works like some kind of baddie-zapping superhero Alexa. I think the AI drone was called “Redwing,” which means something way different to Hell’s Angels. Alexa, Kill Gus Fring.
Torres even gets in on the action himself at the end, surely an exciting moment for the lil fella. Nonetheless, they recover the Adamantium and all is well for a time, at least for the duration of the “all is well” montage.
Torres keeps begging to become Cap’s understudy, and come to think of it, this whole movie is sort of like “Oops, all understudies.” Finally caving to Torres’ eager, relentless begging, Cap takes him to train with an old friend, though Cap warns Torres that this old friend is “not a people person.”
The friend turns out to be Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the Black version of Steve Rogers, who also took the Super Soldier Serum back in the fifties — albeit with a much different outcome. I don’t know if I was supposed to be aware of this plot point already from the comics or from a Marvel TV show that I didn’t watch, but I swear to God, this was how it was explained in the film:
BRADLEY: (getting a far away look) They threw me in in prison for 30 years. Did unspeakable experiments on me.
TORRES: (pause) Dang. That sucks.
Cap and Torres get invited to the White House to celebrate recovering the Adamantium, and Cap begs Bradley to join them. Bradley, under some kind of Manchurian Candidate-style mind control, tries to assassinate President Ross and gets thrown in prison, leaving Cap to try to clear Bradley’s name (partly out of guilt for bringing him into the mix in the first place). Meanwhile, there’s a mysterious voice on the phone, Gus Fring still at large, and President Ross’s enigmatic new “chief of security,” Ruth Bat-Seraph. Played by Shira Haas, Ruth Bat-Seraph looks like she’s about 4’10,” though with the long arms and general physique of a runway model.
Slight tangent here, but when I think “chief of security” I generally imagine someone who looks like Philadelphia Eagles security chief Big Dom DiSandro, or Donald Trump security chief Matt Calamari. So when one who looks like Haas shows up instead I guess I expect some sort of explanation, or preferably, a payoff. Was she raised by murderous carnies? Rescued from a family of rogue trapeze artists? Bred to be some kind of karate jockey? Even in a movie that consists of 40% expository dialogue the flashback montage never comes. Just Bat-Seraph unconvincingly kicking ass and some tossed off asides about Israel and the Black Widow program. Sure? Again, feels like I missed a meeting here or something.