[COLUMN] Captain America: Brave New World Is Anything But | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Captain America: Brave New World.

“People are not defined by their past,” Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas) states at one point in Captain America: Brave New World, a deeply ironic statement for a film that is so preoccupied with the franchise’s history and lore, to the point that it feels like the inevitable endpoint of the nostalgic culture that brought audiences Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine. Brave New World dares to ask if it’s possible to be nostalgic for things that nobody remembers.

The emotional pay-off at the end of Brave New World finds Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) visiting her father, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). The film plays this as a huge moment: an estranged father and daughter reunited. However, Betty and Thaddeus have not shared a scene together since The Incredible Hulk seventeen years ago, Tyler and Ford have never shared a scene together, and the cause of their rift, Bruce Banner (Edward Norton or Mark Ruffalo), is completely absent.

Instead, Brave New World acts as if it is enough for Ross to keep mentioning the rift in conversation. In his introductory scene, Ross asks an aide, “Have you heard from my daughter, Betty?” Later, in a tense conversation with Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Ross explains that he became President of the United States in the hopes of healing the rift with Betty. When Ross transforms into the Red Hulk, Sam calms him down by luring him to the cherry blossoms where he used to take Betty as a child.

However, Betty is entirely absent from the movie. Barring that one-minute appearance at the end of the film, Tyler makes a brief vocal cameo during a phone call. There is no sense of Betty as a person. Betty has no motivation or agency. There is no texture to the relationship between Betty and Ross, particularly given that Betty’s relationship with Bruce has not come up in the nearly two decades since The Incredible Hulk.

Brave New World never shows Betty’s relationship with her father, it simply exposits it. It hopes that the audience might vaguely remember that Liv Tyler was in a Marvel Studios movie from 2008, and so spare the film the effort of establishing or developing character. This is just how Brave New World works. The film similarly establishes a charged relationship between Wilson and Ross, two characters who have never truly interacted on screen, by infodumping about Captain America: Civil War.

At this point, it is facile to observe that modern pop culture has become increasingly nostalgic. This is particularly true of Marvel Studios’ recent output. Deadpool & Wolverine was a nostalgic love letter to the Fox X-Men movies. The trailer for Thunderbolts* is very evocative of The Avengers. Fantastic Four: First Steps is decidedly retro futuristic in its aesthetic. Marvel Studios have been looking backwards for a long time now, but Brave New World takes that to an extreme.

So much of Brave New World is just reheated leftovers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier: a hostage rescue that reveals conspiratorial shenanigans, a street ambush by an international assassin, a secret military base housing a villain from a previous movie who has been physically transformed to help the shady authorities, a former Black Widow who serves as a cynical ally, an old friend who is almost killed and winds up fighting for life and death on an operating table.

However, there is also a sense that Brave New World drew the short straw when it came to the nostalgic properties that it had to reference. The film is basically a stealth sequel to The Incredible Hulk, the shared universe’s first critical and commercial flop. It also draws very heavily from Eternals, which was the lowest-reviewed movie in the shared universe to that point. There is a real sense that Brave New World is a limit case for what a film can make an audience nostalgic for.

Of course, it makes sense that Brave New World would be so inherently nostalgic. Looking backwards allows the franchise to avoid having to meaningfully engage with either the present or the future. Like The Winter Soldier before it, Brave New World has the affectation of a political thriller, but it also has nothing meaningful to say about the current political moment. What little contemporary resonance the movie has feels painfully and horrifically misjudged.

There is a hollowness at the heart of Brave New World that feels like clumsy Trump apologia. Both Brave New World and Thunderbolts* feel like relics of the Biden era, movies that were greenlit in the orgasmic afterglow of Marvel’s arrival on streaming, sequels to the franchise’s second streaming series, Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was (to put it mildly) a mess. However, it at least had things to say, even if it got quite mealy-mouthed in execution.

Brave New World occasionally vaguely gestures in the direction of ideas. After a failed assassination attempt on Ross, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the first Black Captain America, is once again incarcerated by his government. The villain pulling the strings is revealed to be Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a scientist exposed to gamma radiation who was held without trial and experimented upon by Ross in the hopes that he could provide invaluable knowledge to the American government.

This premise should be familiar. It is the same thing that happened to Isaiah Bradley in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a horrific abuse that the show very explicitly connected to the real-life experimentation on African Americans as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and which also evokes the radiation trials conducted on unknowing American citizens. In this context, it is perhaps worth nothing that Sterns’ skin color changes due to these experiments.

With all of this context in mind, one might imagine that Sam Wilson would have some thoughts. Sam has just been confronted – again – by the government’s callous mistreatment of veteran Isaiah Bradley and by evidence that the authorities are still conducting illegal human experiments. One might expect these revelations to prompt a crisis of faith in a hero who literally calls himself Captain America. At the very least, one might expect that this would render Ross a clear-cut villain.

Indeed, Ross certainly evokes the current President of the United States. The introductory exposition dump reveals a combative relationship with the press, he has a single-minded fixation on his own daughter, he survives an assassination attempt, he has an extremely short temper, and his first actions in office strain the country’s relations with its long-term international allies. By the end of Brave New World, Ross even has his own criminal conviction.

However, despite the terrible things that Ross has done, Brave New World bends over backwards to minimize and excuse him. When the Japanese Prime Minister (Takehiro Hira) calls out Ross for shady dealings, Ross is actually innocent – he has been framed by Sterns from his underground prison as a sort of a literal “deep state.” Characters keep trying to excuse and forgive Ross. “I know you’ve done some bad things,” Wilson tells Ross at the climax. “But I believe you’re trying to do better.”

If Brave New World has a political message, it is one of reconciliation. Ross runs for office under the slogan “Together.” The closing scenes reveal that Ross resigned from office and surrendered himself to the authorities. “I had to let the country move on,” Ross explains of his noble gesture. Sam and Betty both appear to forgive Ross for all the damage and harm that he has caused, while the film reserves no such empathy for Sterns’ attempt to avenge himself on Ross for his torture.

Then again, this is very much of this political moment. Disney has made it clear that it has abandoned even the outward appearance of progressivism, removing transgender characters from upcoming projects, making a barely-disguised payout to Trump, rewording introductory warnings on racist media and messaging that the studio has no interest in any ideology, even one as seemingly banal as equality and inclusion.

This emptiness is reflected in the movie’s central geopolitical conflict, the international posturing over the resource-rich “Celestial Island” that emerged in Eternals. On the surface, this feels like a possible metaphor for American foreign policy, but it’s rendered toothless by the fact that the conflict concerns an empty rock. It’s hard to construct a meaningful metaphor for colonialism if there are no people to be colonized. The film’s political commentary is as bloodless as its onscreen violence.

More broadly, Brave New World is proof that Marvel Studios have given up on the future. The studio has spent the past few years introducing a younger pool of heroes across their properties like Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) and Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), seeding a more diverse future of the shared universe. Brave New World was supposed to affirm one of these characters, Eli Bradley (Elijah Richardson), but he was cut entirely from the film.

Indeed, with the exception of Ford stepping into the role of Ross, replacing the deceased William Hurt, it is notable how little star wattage Brave New World has. Over the past five years, these movies have built the franchise outwards adding stars like Charlize Theron, Harry Styles and Mahershala Ali to the expanding talent pool. Brave New World feels like it is taking the opposite approach, cynically using expiring contractual commitments from actors like Tyler and Nelson.

There is a strong sense that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is locked in a cinematic holding pattern, pending the inevitable soft reboot of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars that will finally allow the franchise to earnestly dig into that sweet X-Men intellectual property. It is telling how much mileage Brave New World gets out of Harrison Ford saying “adamantium” and that the film’s post credits conversation between Wilson and Stern finds the latter overtly alluding to Secret Wars.

There is something cynical in all of this. Marvel has spent the past five years building up a fairly diverse pool of new characters, potential successors who could carry the franchise into the future. There is something undeniably exciting about the idea of a Black Captain America facing into the second Trump Administration. There is so much that could be done with that idea, just as there was in the comics towards the end of the Obama Administration.

However, the comic book publisher retreated from that diverse selection of characters at the start of the Trump Administration, arguing (incorrectly) that diversity did not sell. However, given the current state of the comic book industry, it seems reasonable that retreating from books designed to attract a younger and more diverse readership in favor of serving reheated leftovers may not have been the best strategy. Now it feels like the film franchise is doing exactly the same thing.

It is depressing to look this slate of projects featuring characters like Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and Sam Wilson, and realize that they are likely to find themselves brushed aside for the return of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Tom Holland in Doomsday and Secret Wars, and then a soft reset that will likely foreground the X-Men and maybe the Fantastic Four. This is all just treading water, buying time, stalling with small nostalgia before the bigger nostalgia hits.

This is perhaps the bleakest aspect of Brave New World. This feels like a franchise that has given up and retreated into its own past, because it has nothing of value to say about the present and no meaningful vision of the future. Even the title Brave New World feels like something of a complete misnomer.