'Captain America: Brave New World' of shit
I didn't pay to watch this, okay?
“Captain America: Brave New World” is one of those movies where it is more fun to read about its troubled production than it is to watch. For those of you who have better things to do than read the Hollywood trades, “Brave New World” was supposed to be something of a reset for Marvel Studios after several years where the wheels appeared to be coming off the well oiled money printing machine. The dumbfuck fans seemed to believe the quality of these movies was in decline – which is strange, considering the best movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are only a solid C-. Perhaps having an interconnected narrative that stretches over 35 movies and 12 television series that only people who self-diagnose as autistic on TikTok can keep up with actually isn’t a good idea. After a couple of years of declining box office receipts and dismal reviews, Marvel only put out one movie last year, the borderline irritating, likable enough “Deadpool & Wolverine.” (I didn’t hate it. A solid C-.) That movie took place in the morass of the “multiverse.”
“Brave New World” is a return to the played out Avengers narrative. It cost $180 million to make and another $100 million to market. There are five credited writers, which means at least a dozen more uncredited ones took a crack at the script. Following disastrous test screenings, a red flag raising 22 days of reshoots were ordered, during which entire completed sequences were dropped and replaced. An additional villain played by Giancarlo Esposito was added.
Beyond the plagued set, there were political problems. The title was changed to “Brave New World” from the more conspiratorial “New World Order.” The new Captain America, Anthony Mackie, is Black, so the vile MAGA internet hates him and makes a fake controversy out of everything he says. Harrison Ford, who was apparently difficult to deal with during filming, plays a demagogic, divisive newly elected 80 year old president with a rage problem who survives an assassination attempt before he blows up international alliances – all character traits Disney executives feared could further inflame their Republican problems. The Israeli actress Shira Haas plays an Israeli character, so to the watermelon emoji people of the internet, she is the epitome of evil who is responsible for every war crime committed in Gaza and this comic book movie that is essentially jingoistic fan fiction about the U.S. military-industrial complex must be boycotted solely because of her presence.
Unfortunately, all of that is much more interesting than anything that happens on screen. I ran into a friend who subscribes to this newsletter over the weekend and I was asked why I sometimes go to see such bad movies. I don’t really have a good answer to that other than sometimes it’s fun to see this garbage. Also I pay $25 a month for a Regal Unlimited subscription that allows me to see as many movies as I want for 50 cents each. An open invitation for abuse, last year I saw 88 movies at Regal theaters alone, costing them over a thousand dollars in missed revenue. (They also give discounts on concessions, and sometimes free drinks and popcorn. This isn’t an endorsement. I’m just saying, it’s nice to feel like you’re ripping off a corporation!)
I will also admit, as embarrassing as it is, I want to like comic book movies. (Maybe I’m one of the dumbfuck fans?) Tim Burton’s “Batman” movies were two of the first films I ever really loved as a child. They’re totally empty, but they’re really cool looking and I love them both to this day. (Shamefully, as an adult homosexual who will be 40 in a year and a half, I will probably watch any Batman-related property with excitement as long as I live.) I think quite highly of “Blade,” “X2,” “Logan,” and “Spider-Man 2.” There are movies like “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” or “X-Men: Days of Future Past” that I wouldn’t argue are good, but I’ve enjoyed watching more times than I’d care to admit. Every now and then, something like “Blue Beetle” has just a glimmer of originality that makes me like it more than I should. But for the most part, I find superhero movies tedious, loud, confusing, ugly showcases of murky, slapdash CGI and annoying quippy, sitcom-style dialogue where characters constantly say stuff like, “Did that just happen?” and “Don’t be that guy!”
Nowhere are these tendencies worse than in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is sort of rendered as a long-running workplace sitcom. There’s a sameness to all of the Marvel movies. Marvel is notorious for plucking young directors of independent films out of obscurity and rolling them over with a house style that always feels less like a director’s vision than the product of a committee. (Julius Onah, who directed “Brave New World,” is the studio’s latest victim.) MCU movies are all ugly in the same way, full of tacky costumes and digitized slop. Most of them are shot in the same handful of locations, which has the effect of making multiple cities, dimensions, planets, and realms all sort of resemble the Atlanta metro area (home of a thirty percent production tax credit). All the characters are neutered and sexless. There’s a generic quality to the advanced technology, the otherworldly creatures, and the intergalactic vistas, like someone fed old “Star Wars” movies into generative AI.
If you’re reading this thinking it doesn’t sound like I much care for Marvel movies, that is true. Yet I have seen all 35 installments that comprise the MCU, all of them in theaters with the exception of “The Marvels,” a confounding 105 minutes which I vowed to never see and then watched on TV three months later. Apparently I’m a masochist, because I’ve even forced myself to sit through several seasons of a few MCU shows during the brief durations I’ve subscribed to Disney+. (Maybe I really am one of the dumbfuck fans. Uh oh.) For some reason, I need to know how this thing I don’t like, and know will never stop, ends. I can barely recall what’s happened in any of these movies and shows. They’ve all gone down the memory hole, and not just because I was stoned out of my mind watching every single minute. It’s because they’re forgettable junk. (Also, if you’re over the age of 13 and you’re not stoned out of your mind watching these idiotic children’s movies, what the actual fuck is wrong with you? Why aren’t you reading a book or volunteering? You’re enjoying this?)
Like all the newer MCU entries, “Captain America: Brave New World” sets a high bar for entry, demanding that its audience be familiar with a TV show as well as multiple movies stretching back the beginning of the MCU in 2008. That would be “The Incredible Hulk” – not to be confused with Ang Lee’s “Hulk” from five years prior – the often forgotten first of the interconnected Marvel movies, where Edward Norton played the big green guy and then refused to ever play him again. (The only thing I recollect about “The Incredible Hulk,” which is vivid in my memory, is a scene where the big joke is New York City cabbies are bad drivers, which played to zero laughs in a packed New York theater.) Two of the three villains in “Brave New World” come from “The Incredible Hulk,” though one of them is now played by Harrison Ford, just to make things even more confusing.
That would be the excellently named Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, an antagonistic Army general, who previously popped up in five MCU movies played by William Hurt. (Hurt died in 2022.) Ford steps into Hurt’s shoes with the gusto of a cranky old man who has just been awoken from his nap. Ross has just been elected president of the United States, despite, as a newscast tells us, being best known to the public as the man responsible for destroying Harlem in his mad pursuit of the Hulk. I had to look this up, but this is actually how “The Incredible Hulk” ends – a white general levels Harlem. Harlem has been wiped from the map in the MCU. I always like to think about the vast amount of collateral damage these superhero movies tend to ignore. If you think the third Marvel movie (after both “Black Panthers”) to star a Black hero might have something to say about America electing as president a white man who is best known for decimating its most storied Black neighborhood, don’t hold your breath.
The plot is barely worth discussing. “Brave New World” tries to replicate “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which got some mileage out of passing itself off as a political thriller in the vein of “The Parallax View.” (It has little in common with “The Parallax View” other than Robert Redford.) This time there is a mind control plot, a la “The Manchurian Candidate.”
As usual in the MCU, a lot of good actors debase themselves for a fat paycheck, first and foremost Mackie. Giancarlo Esposito, age 66, plays a lethal assassin, who was obviously shoehorned in during reshoots. I love Esposito, but he has been relegated to the villain role since Gus Fring. He’s a great bad guy. But this is the same person who played Buggin Out in “Do The Right Thing.” He’s got serious range. No more of this, please.
Tim Blake Nelson, who apparently was in “The Incredible Hulk,” returns as a character no one remembers from 17 years ago. Danny Ramirez reprises his role as Joaquin Torres, the new Falcon, from “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” the TV predecessor to “Brave New World.” I’d suck his dick. He can stay. The great Carl Lumbly also comes back as Isiah Bradley from “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” Isaiah is one of those characters where the filmmakers almost pierce through the veil and actually have something to say. A Black man given the same super soldier serum as Steve Rogers, the original (white) Captain America, Isaiah was imprisoned and experimented on for years by the United States government. In a frivolous way, in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” Sam Wilson (Mackie) wrestles over whether he, as a Black man, wants to pick up Captain America’s shield after meeting Isaiah. Upon hearing Isaiah’s story “Brave New World,” Joaquin says, “Damn, that sucks” and leaves it at that. (Which is fine, because Joaquin is too sexy to think hard about racism.)
Haas, an elven figure with a gigantic head that looks like it is precariously close to falling off her emaciated body, plays Ruth Bat-Seraph. We learn she is an Israeli national who was trained as a Black Widow (like Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh), which was some sort of Soviet superspy training program. Ruth now works as a security advisor to President Ross, which honestly doesn’t sound all that crazy considering the real life Senate just confirmed cuckoo for Coco Puffs Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence.
In the movie “Black Widow” (which is primarily remembered for Johansson netting a $40 million settlement after she sued Disney for putting the movie out on streaming the same day it was released in theaters), characters with names like Alexei Shostakov, also known as the Red Guardian, speak with Russian accents and action takes place in bleak, vaguely former Soviet looking locales. But the word Russia or Russian (or Soviet or USSR for that matter) is curiously never mentioned. Continuing the MCU’s bizarre take on other nations, in “Brave New World,” America’s primary geopolitical foe is, um… Japan. Japan and the U.S. go at it in a neo-Pearl Harbor naval battle, fighting over mining adamantium (the super metal that is infused to Wolverine’s bones in “X-Men”), which is located on a giant island made out of a dead robot god from “The Eternals,” probably the most loathed of all Marvel movies. (If you didn’t understand that sentence, neither did I.) At the end of “Brave New World,” the “most powerful nations in the world,” which are the United States, Japan, India, and, ummm, fucking France (??????) sign a treaty to share the adamantium. It’s hard to tell if the filmmakers are stupid, trying to avoid pissing off Chinese censors, or making some weird comment about geopolitics (which would also make them stupid).
The politics of superhero movies are muddled and contradictory at best. The genre is inherently fascistic, yet comic book heroes are supposedly defenders of life and liberty. Comic book movies are populist entertainment made by some of the largest media conglomerates in history. (Several recent Marvel movies and shows, including “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” have even have superficial anticapitalist messages… from… the Walt Disney Company, market capitalization $200 billion.)
I think it would actually be sort of interesting if Marvel were to make a movie where they focused on the world of the MCU where regular, non-super powered people live. What would happen if the public were aware of fantastical, all-powerful technologies, magic, alien life, alternative universes, time travel, gods, witches, mutants, etc.? People would lose their fucking minds. Now that’s an interesting movie!
“Captain America: Brave New World” is now playing in theaters.
