I’m sort of morally opposed to seeing Marvel movies at this point because there really doesn’t seem to be a point if Florence Pugh and Hailee Steinfeld aren’t in it (Thunderbolts*, you’ve got my number), but I felt like there was a chance that I was being too harsh and that my memory of Marvel movies being kind of like attending a family reunion where you just KNOW your shitty uncle is going to be there being a shitty guy and it’s going to ruin your day to go but you want to go just on the off chance that he had a cold or just forgot or whatever or maybe he’s out of the state or something?
Anyway, the other thing is that I kind of accidentally invited a person from work who was going through a breakup and we don’t know each other super well and I didn’t think they would say yes, but they did and I kind of would prefer to see a trainwreck by myself because then at least I don’t have to wonder the whole time if the person next to me is tacitly judging me for choosing this, their one and only movie for the year or whatever, or, worse, they LIKE the movie and you have to judge them for their shitty taste.
What I can say about Brave New World is that if you’re going in cold, i.e. you haven’t seen the Hulk movie from two decades ago or the Eternals movie from whenever it was last that you were off the wagon, then you should know right now that there is a loooooot of Hulk lore stuffed into the front end of this movie that’s sort of just taken for granted as something you should remember and appreciate for how long it’s taken everyone to close some of those loops–or maybe like me you’ll wonder if a bunch of stuff is getting retconned or if Harrison Ford actually WAS in one of the earliest Marvel movies and you just blocked it out or something?
Someone mentioned that they’d been told that Captain America movies are more spy movies than superhero films, which I think is totally what we all liked about the follow-up to WandaVision and all the twists and turns of the Disney+ show that introduced some excellent anti-heroes and some of the most challenging racial discourse to the MCU ever permitted in a Disney movie. And the Captain America standalone movies are really fun! The first one is such a gem sending up countless jokes about the propaganda machine’s misrepresentation of the sacrifices of war. The Winter Soldier gave us Bucky Barnes, yet another villain audiences Stanned enough to rehabilitate like Loki. But ultimately this is sort of a mess of a movie with a lot of callbacks that seem intended to conjure up some pathos for a long awaited payoff from a movie and a set of stories that I’m not familiar with and didn’t care about.
What makes things worse is that Sam’s Captain America is sort of an ill-formed, muddled version of the pure essence of Rogers’s Cap. His kit of powers is so unclear and ill-defined that it makes it hard to predict what he is capable of doing in any particular situation. He’s going a plucky Latino wingman and a robot that can Go-Go-Gadget whatever he needs that’s convenient in the situation but also he’s not a super soldier, so he’s just a regular guy, but that’s really Clint Barton’s WHOLE deal.
So Sam sort of occupies this awkward space as like one leg of the former trifecta that held the entire MCU in place, and his task he’s given at the beginning of the film by the president–to reassemble the Avengers–is intriguing but ultimately kind of a red herring.
The film’s chief virtues seem to be its Stan Sebastian cameo about midway through the film and the canon-making event of adamantium being introduced into the world of the MCU–weirdly as a counterweight to Wakandan vibranium. Otherwise, it devolves quickly from a competent spy thriller into a series of ever-escalating and more and more improbable fight scenes, including a dog fight over the Indian Ocean and an anticlimactic showdown between Red Hulk and Captain America in DC. There are two kind of scrappy fight scenes early on that echo some of the energy of the “I can do this all day” of Cap’s past, where Sam seems content with getting well and truly ass-whooped by Giancarlo Esposito’s minions. (Esposito’s villain is awesome in direction proportion to how awkward and out of place Tim Blake Nelson’s Megamind is.) On the point of Samuel Sterns, playing the MCU’s version of Lex Luthor, I guess? Or maybe more Alan Moore’s Ozymandias? He suffers from similar power dysmorphia as Captain America in that sometimes his vast and considered mind control devices seem to be all powerful and far-reaching and then at other times he seems absolutely powerless to protect himself from entirely foreseeable circumstances. Jewish Black Widow was absolutely charming! I thought she was going to be probelmatic from all the discourse I had seen about her leading up to the wide release, but no notes! Absolutely love.
A minor grievance is that there really doesn’t seem like there’s a tie-in to the title either from The Tempest or Aldous Huxley. Like is Sam Wilson Miranda? He’s definitely not Prospero, is he? Is the Brave New World that he’s too naive to expect that the President might be manipulated by mistakes he made in his past? Or is it just that he’s naive to think that the US government would treat a black super hero with respect? But, I’m hoping someone can explain the tie in from the comic book or something? Anyway, this was pretty bad and you’re sort of better of reading a synopsis or just taking pride in being super ignorant when the inevitable X-Men tie in references something from this painful transitional period of films.
