I decided to snag a random day off, and while I ended up wasting half of it at the gym and then a good quarter at the doctor's office (because things happen at random, don't they), I also found the time to go to the theater to watch the latest Captain America movie.
As I say in my headline, it's a step, but it remains to be seen if it's enough of a step. Spoilers for the whole movie after the jump:
Couple of exciting things here: it is genuinely nice to see the new Cap running around, and in the kind of espionage-type shenanigans that I've always associated with Captain America. It seems heavily indebted to the second Cap movie, The Winter Soldier, but also draws on more recent stuff, like Eternals. And the Maguffin in this movie is a canister of (and control over the worldwide supply of) adamantium. I was hoping for a "snikt" sound effect at some point, but alas, this was not a film, or indeed end-credits scene, that teased the X-Men.
Anthony Mackie is pretty reliable as the new Cap, Sam Wilson, building on about a decade's worth of films. We also see his own sidekick, the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres, who brings a completely new energy compared to what Sam brought when he was hanging with Steve Rogers. I also generally enjoyed Harrison Ford as President "Thunderbolt" Ross, taking over from the late William Hurt; in his first scene or two, Ford gave a little of the energy from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (eh? That exists? -ed.), that is to say, not really caring... but as the film goes on, I can appreciate him as the irascible general/president. For me, the mark of a good Harrison Ford role is when you're not sitting there noticing that it's Harrison Ford, and this movie is mostly successful at that.
Giancarlo Esposito plays Sidewinder, aka Seth Voelker, about whom I know absolutely nothing from the comics. In the lead-up to this movie I read comments by Esposito that he was going to play a mind-blowing role in the MCU, but I think that's being generous. He's always a treat to watch (I also happened to catch him in the episode of The Boys I watched tonight with dinner), but I'd have loved to see him in a meatier role. Hell, maybe they should have made him Doctor Doom.
Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Seraph was okay. I don't know if she got enough scenes to justify the buddy-buddy thing with former Cap Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, who's pretty good in this), and I was vaguely hoping someone would mention she was a mutant, or at least that she'd have some kind of superpowers, but she's been positioned, at least for now, as a Black Widow stand-in. I don't really know enough about the character or actress to say anything more.
The other notable thing about this movie is how much it draws from 2008's Incredible Hulk. There's shots of the Hulk and the Abomination from that movie, and Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) even has a couple of cameos, plus the villain is the Leader/Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who had a minor role in that earlier film and has never been seen since. There's a scene where Ross calls Betty, and my thought was that Liv Tyler literally phoned this cameo in; her affect was so weird that I honestly thought she was being mind-controlled or Sterns had managed to fake her voice. But then she appears at the very end, so I guess not.
In terms of how it hangs together with the rest of the MCU, this is what I mean by it being a step in the right direction. We haven't had a full Avengers movie since Endgame, back in 2019 (and it feels so much longer because it was before the pandemic). The first three phases of the MCU were structured in such a way that you got individual characters' movies for a couple of years and then everything was tied back together in an Avengers movie that closed off that phase. Phases 4 and 5 haven't done that, which I think has led to the narrative drift of the past couple of years.
Indeed, it struck me while I was rewatching Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that the Multiverse Saga (Phases 4-6) hasn't been as closely tied together, except for references to the Multiverse and Sacred Timeline here and there. Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) was supposed be the BBEG for the saga, but even before Majors was fired by Marvel, he only appeared in Loki and Quantumania. That's hardly a foundation on which to follow up one of the most successful series of films in history.
I raise all this because of the post-credits scene in Brave New World. Having consigned the president of the USA to a high-security jail cell (imagine that, circa February 2025...), Sam Wilson goes to see Sterns one final time. He says something about many worlds and how "they" are coming. I suppose this is a reference to the next Avengers movie, Secret Wars, and presumably to the worlds-collide elements of the 2015 Secret Wars crossover event in the comics. It doesn't stir the blood the way Nick Fury's cameo at the end of Iron Man did, or Thanos's at the end of Avengers, and it comes quite late in the game, but hopefully it all stays on track.
My other thought for Brave New World was about Sam's previous appearance, in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier series from 2021. They mostly do a good job of getting you up to speed on stuff from that, apart from Bucky appearing late in the film to give Sam a pep talk and then going back to his run for Congress (I didn't know about that, and I don't know how it'll fit with his appearance in Thunderbolts, coming in May). I don't think Disney's plan of making things from its Disney Plus shows super-important to the movies is very sound, so it's probably best that movie continuity mostly refers to other movies. On the other hand, if you haven't seen that show, then you haven't seen Sam in anything since 2019, which is a long gap between appearances for a character you're hanging the franchise on.
So to sum up: Brave New World is okay, nothing earth-shattering or life-changing. It does a nice job of remembering that there is indeed a Marvel shared universe, drawing both on older stuff and hinting at promising new stuff. But on its own, it can't really fix the bloat that's set in with the MCU. The Multiverse stuff has gone in a lot of different directions over the past few years, and presumably Secret Wars will draw it all back together, but with hindsight, you wish Brave New World could have come sooner, to set up more of what was happening in the main continuity.
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