Sigh. There honestly was not one second where I thought this movie was going to be good. For what feels like years now we’ve been hearing about the mess behind the scenes of making it. It took 3 years to make, which included extensive additional photography that replaced several sequences with new ones and added new characters and plot points. This led to Disney pushing the film’s release from July 2024 to February 2025. Already this seemed like it would be some kind of Frankenstein disaster. Once the first trailers came out, that was all but confirmed. It looked bad. Trailers are not always representative of the actual film. They’re usually not. But I didn’t have much faith that this film would appear any better than the trailers. So why did I see it? Well, because I’m in too deep with the MCU. This is the 35th film. I’ve seen them all. I’ve seen all 11 seasons of television. I have no choice but to keep going at this point and finish this thing out. If Marvel’s going down, we’re going down together.

Captain America: Brave New World is ostensibly the 4th standalone Captain America movie. This is significant because it is the first Captain America movie to star Anthony Mackie as Cap now that Chris Evans has departed the MCU. That being said, the movie ends up being more like a Hulk movie smuggled into a Cap movie. Disney does not currently have the rights to make a solo Hulk movie which puts them in a tough spot as Hulk is one of the most popular and well known Marvel characters. They’ve tried to loophole this over the years by adding significant Hulk plotlines to other movies, like in Thor: Ragnarok. Captain America: Brave New World seems to follow in that tradition, albeit with a different Hulk. Cap is still the hero, but Hulk goes on the emotional journey. At the same time, it also feels like a retread of one of the most successful Marvel movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The story beats and ideas all closely mirror the previous film. The main plot here is set in motion when Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is invited to the White House. He brings his sidekick Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and elderly former super soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) to an event hosted by former Army general and newly elected U.S. President, Thadeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, originally played by the late William Hurt). All hell breaks loose after Isaiah suddenly takes a shot at the president. It turns out that Isaiah and others in the room were triggered into mind control by an unknown villain. Sam and Joaquin set out to find the culprit and exonerate Isaiah. They discover the evil plan, hatched by scientist Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), was not to kill President Ross, but to make him angry enough to become a monster himself. Like Winter Soldier, the film involves espionage, Cap and a partner on the run, and a secret government bunker. But like the internet keeps saying right now about reheated nachos, they’re just not as good as when you make them the first time. (And in this case, they barely resemble nachos anymore.)

One of the issues this movie has is that none of the characters really work. I always enjoyed Anthony Mackie as Falcon but it’s weird to see him as Captain America. I think mostly because he doesn’t have any powers. This Cap never took the Super Soldier Serum so he’s more like a Batman than a Captain America. And that’s a fine type of hero to be. I don’t necessarily think having powers or not makes a hero more or less interesting. But I just personally don’t think you can be a “Captain America” without the powers. Isn’t that the whole idea of him? If you’re going to have human-level fighting capabilities, you cannot be taking on Hulk-level threats essentially on your own. The power scaling and disparity felt very apparent and took me out of the movie a little bit. Harrison Ford was entertaining but it was hard for me to watch him play the president in the current state of the world. I want to watch a superhero movie for the fantasy and escapism and not have to think about presidents. I especially do not want to hear characters discussing how they should “respect the president, whoever he is”. Hard no. Also, I think the movie would have been a lot better (okay maybe not “a lot”) if they didn’t spoil that he was Red Hulk in the trailers. They tease his transformation throughout the film but it’s not really a tease since we all knew it was coming. It took all of the suspense out of the story. I thought Shira Haas as Black Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph was completely miscast. She is 5’2” and looks even smaller on screen standing next to giant, jacked men the whole time. Maybe it was the point for it to be impressive to see her fighting at her small size but it was completely unbelievable to me. Lastly, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes (a fan favorite) makes a brief appearance for a heart-to-heart with Sam. The dialogue is bad throughout the film but was particularly painful in this scene. This Bucky felt totally out of character with previous performances and the real kicker is that he mentions that he is running for Congress. This man is a 100-year-old Super Soldier who was previously a Hydra assassin. Although now that I’ve said that, having someone like Bucky in Congress doesn’t actually feel so far-fetched in 2025.

Some of the characterization of this version of Captain America is built into the plot. Sam wrestles with his new identity as Cap and if he can live up to his predecessor and close friend, Steve Rogers. This storyline and internal struggle is complex and fascinating, however, most of this was covered already in the Marvel television show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that came out back in 2021. Additionally, Sam’s crew in the film, Joaquin and Isaiah Bradley both first appeared in the same show. The entire concept of the MCU is built on connective tissue. Some movies stand alone more than others, but they all have something, a character, a plot point, a throwaway inside joke, that ties them to the larger universe and keeps fans (or at least the obsessive ones like me) coming back every time to be in on all the jokes. But the longer the MCU stretches out, the larger the dichotomy is between the die-hard fans and the casuals. And Marvel doesn’t know who to cater to. If you watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Sam’s character arc feels repetitive. But if you didn’t watch the show, it would be the first time you are seeing Sam stepping into the Cap role and it would make a lot more sense. On the other hand, you wouldn’t know who Joaqiun and Isaiah are and the movie does not go out of its way to explain them. 

That being said, most of this movie seems geared towards the die-hards. There’s a mention of “Adamantium”, the fictional metal that makes up Wolverine’s skeleton. As Marvel slowly mixes the X-Men into the MCU, these nods become more and more noticeable. (Yes, Wolverine himself did appear in the previous MCU film, Deadpool and Wolverine, but that was in a different timeline. Are you following?) There is also a decent chunk of plot in this film centered around “Celestial Island”. If you don’t remember (and why would you?), Celestial Island is a landmass in the Indian Ocean, created when the Celestial being Tiamut emerged from the Earth’s core during the events of the 2021 MCU film Eternals. This was a galaxy-changing event that happened at the end of that movie and I’m pretty sure has not been mentioned once since then, so it was surprising to see it come back. And speaking of things I never thought would come back again, suddenly the MCU is reclaiming the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk??? There are many reasons why this film has long been ignored: rights issues over the character and distribution made it unavailable on Disney+ until recently, Edward Norton played Hulk in this film but was subsequently recast by Mark Ruffalo for all future MCU movies, and it was only the second ever film in the official MCU so it didn’t have much important “connective tissue” other than introducing Hulk and Thunderbolt Ross who popped up occasionally. Until now. The villain of Captain America: Brave New World is Dr. Samuel Sterns who first (and last) appeared in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, a fact I would never have remembered had it not been for the internet. Liv Tyler also reprises her role as Betty Ross, Ross’s daughter and Bruce Banner’s girlfriend. I was genuinely shocked they got her, well both of them I guess, to come back for this after largely neglecting the 2008 film and their characters along with it. Also, in the post-credits scene, Samuel Sterns tells Sam “Do you think this is the only world? We’ll see what happens when you have to protect this place from the others.” One, the others? Is this Lost? Two, are they seriously trying to tease that there are other worlds? We know this already. We’ve seen it in other MCU properties. If this was meant to be shocking or exciting, it did not succeed. Marvel has been getting a lot of flak these days for the “homework” required to see and understand their films. Whether they intentionally chose to lean into it or not, Captain America: Brave New World definitely contains a lot of deep cuts from the Marvel lore.

Many people seem to think this film is astronomically terrible. I admit, it’s not good. The script is heavy-handed. The CGI looks bad. The story has no point, no moral, no lesson, no growth. There’s just no energy in it. No soul. No spark. But I’ve seen some people arguing that Captain America: Brave New World is worse than Madame Web. That I don’t agree with. Although if the argument is that Madame Web was a more enjoyable watch because it was so bad it was entertaining and comical and this was just bad and boring, then maybe I can get behind that. Anyway, if you aren’t a Marvel completist, there’s really no reason to see this movie.

2025 Count: 13 movies, 11 seasons of television, 3 specials