Captain America – Brave New World

It has taken me a while to get to see this film. I didn’t catch it in the cinema, and although it has been available on Disney+ for a while, I haven’t managed to put two hours aside to watch it. Frankly, given the reviews I have seen, I was expecting it to be awful. I was pleasantly surprised.

The most obvious thing about the film is that, with William Hurt having died, Marvel needed to get someone else in to play Thaddeus Ross. They got Harrison Ford. That’s quite a coup, and I suspect that, alongside a big pile of cash, Ford also asked for a role that he could get his teeth into. Brave New World gives him that. I’m not going to suggest that Hurt could not have done the role as well. The guy has an Oscar. But Ford definitely has to do some acting in this film, which is not always the case for characters in a superhero movie.

So what’s the problem with the film? Why did it get so badly panned? Well, as I mentioned in my review of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a project like the Marvel Cinematic Universe sometimes has to do stories that simply move the overall plot along. Brave New World has two jobs to do. First, it has to get The Avengers back into the good graces of world governments following the mess of the Civil War era, and the disaster of Thanos. In theory the Sokovia Accords are still in place, and it is hard to see how a publicly known team like The Avengers could exist under them.

Second the ridiculous Eternals film has a giant Celestial emerge from inside Earth and ends up as a giant stone island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is inconceivable that world governments would not notice this, and attempt to profit from it.

Neither of these things are terribly sexy as far as superhero movies go. So instead the scriptwriters turned to events from The Incredible Hulk. This is an old film. It was released in 2008 alongside the first Iron Man film. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t seen it. That gave me some catching up to do, and I suspect that many present-day film-goers may have been equally confused. Heck, there will be teenagers going to see Brave New World who were not even born when The Incredible Hulk was released.

Nevertheless, a sequel to The Incredible Hulk is exactly what the script team needed to fill this hole in the developing MCU saga. Thaddeus Ross, by nefarious means, has become President of the USA, and finds himself having to deal with the Celestial crisis. He knows he is dying, and he’s desperate to secure his legacy, and repair relations with his daughter, Betty, from whom he is estranged thanks to the events of the Hulk movie (she was Bruce Banner’s girlfriend at the time). Samuel Sterns (aka The Leader) is a perfect villain, determined to get revenge on Ross, and handed a perfect opportunity by the Celestial emergence.

So why Captain America? Well firstly because any story involving the USA in an international crisis has to involve Cap. And secondly because the situation with Ross is perfectly suited to Sam Wilson’s other career as a counsellor. Sam is good at talking to people as well as punching them.

My main complaint about the film involves the big action sequence in the second act. The USA and Japan are about to go to war over the Celestial, and Sterns has used his mind control powers to take over two American pilots. At one point Sam has to stop what appears to be a kamikaze attack on what I assume was the Japanese fleet. I thought that was rather tasteless.

The final problem that the film has, and this is by no means Marvel’s fault, is that it has rather been overtaken by events. It is a film about how the President of the USA turns into a rampaging monster and has to be stopped. But we now live in a world in which the President of the USA is a monster, has always been a monster, and is apparently too powerful for anyone in that country to stop. Where is Captain America when you need him?