Review of Captain America: Brave New World (d. Julius Onah, 2025)
The final scene of Captain America: Brave New World finds its titular hero ill at ease. Never mind that Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) has just completed yet another round of globe-trotting and world-saving, as is the standard for the Marvel machine, of which this is the 35th feature-length installment. His pal Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), whom he befriended in 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (one of several recent Disney + series that have further distended this now not-entirely cinematic universe), was gravely injured amidst all the Sturm und Drang, so Sam has paid him a visit during his recovery in the hospital. Torres is still bed-ridden but will be fine, though more lasting damage has been inflicted inward: in one of his first major tests as the Falcon—not just for his character but for us filmgoers, too—he failed to complete his mission alongside Wilson. The pair typically share a jocular but knowing rapport: they recognize that each—Wilson picking up the shield Chris Evans wielded for almost a decade, Torres in Wilson’s old gig—has a big spandex suit to fill. Here, though, Wilson (who, like Mackie, is black) and Torres (who, like Ramirez, is Mexican American) commiserate over another, more pointed impediment: that for men like them, who don’t share Evans’ all-American (i.e., lily-white) appeal, defeat does indeed sting a bit more. For Wilson, failure would mean he’d be letting down “everyone else who was fighting for a seat at that table.” The pressure of that responsibility weighs heavily, even for Captain America: “It makes you wonder if you’ll ever just be enough.”
This anguished exchange exemplifies the film’s tonal divergences from the Marvel house style: if the studio’s key to world domination has been making the stakes of saving the universe seem feather-light, that breeziness is all but gone. Even by the standards of the previous Captain America movies, which have aped the paranoia of ‘70’s political thrillers to varying levels of success, this is a dour affair. Curiously, it’s also primarily a work of table-setting. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson, somewhat bafflingly reprising his role from the film that started it all, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk), green of complexion and big of brain, will most certainly be back; here though, he mostly lingers ominously in the background, portending future conflict of unimaginable scale, though I’m sure Marvel President Kevin Feige will manage. But the main conflicts of this film are wrapped up tidily, betraying a story lacking an animating evil for our hero to contend with. Seth Voelker/Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) briefly heads the Serpent Society, a criminal syndicate meddling in Oaxaca, but is summarily dispatched by Wilson halfway through. More central is former general and newly-elected president Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford, taking over the recurring role from the late William Hurt), a strongman whose persona becomes increasingly literal in the film’s climactic battle. In a development spoiled in the film’s trailers, his seething rage eventually boils over, transforming him into a scarlet-tinted beast that is essentially the film negative of Bruce Banner’s green giant. After some clobbering, lent some welcome visual spark via a chase dotted with blooming cherry blossoms on the National Mall, Wilson cuts him back down to size by reaching across the aisle: “I know you’ve done some terrible things, but I think you’re trying to change.”
If that smacks of mealy-mouthed equivocation, that’s likely a result of the film’s turbulent journey to the multiplex. Brave New World’s flimsy invocation of Huxley appears to have been borne less out of creative inspiration than corporate face-saving: the film was originally titled "New World Order," before Feige and Co. realized that a film with that loaded title, released shortly after a real-life presidential election, in which a newly-elected demagogue turns into a red-hued monstrosity that destroys the nation’s capital, provided more of an allegorical jolt than they had bargained for. Similarly, the film’s introduction of Ruth Bat-Seraph/Sabra, an Israeli graduate of the Black Widow program and Ross’s current security advisor, couldn’t have come at a worse time: created in the 1980s, Israel’s best-known superhero is (canonically) a former Mossad agent motivated by the murder of her child by Palestinian terrorists. Here, though, played by the talented Israeli actress Shira Haas, she has been mercifully sheared of the character’s Zionist grievances; with the embers of occupation as hot as ever, though, even this selectively-pruned version of the character takes on political dimensions beyond its makers’ control. Which is not for want of trying: the film underwent numerous reshoots, with subsequent behind-the-scenes reports wafting out that all involved parties sensed that even if they had avoided an inflammatory disaster, they still had a stinker on their hands.
Which is also not to jump the gun on a movie before one has seen it. But it, along with Marvel’s ongoing retrenchment from the pop-cultural zenith, does help explain why this film feels like a link-in-a-chain increasingly headed nowhere in particular. Yet that strangely defensive final scene lingers, as it sheds some light as to why director Julias Onah, making his first venture into the world of capes, was tapped for this project. His 2019 effort Luce rigorously examined the fault lines cracking asunder an adopted black teen and his bourgeois white parents, a fraught story of the evergreen tension between racial assimilation and individuation. And so it is here, too: Brave New World is a minor work—one terminally self-conscious about its status as such—about how minority talents are thanklessly courted by eminent institutions into impossible positions in the name of progress that does just that to its black lead, director and Mexican-American co-star. If those institutions were really committed to progress, they wouldn’t force this talent to work on political commentary as toothless as this, and they certainly wouldn’t ask them to absolve them—on their behalf, no less—of their own role in perpetuating that craven paradigm. There’d be nothing new, and certainly not brave, about any of that.
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Reviewed 2/25/2025