Review: "Captain America: Brave New World" is potently political, whether or not it wants to be

I went in expecting little, and came out with a lot to think on

I walked into Captain America: Brave New World with fairly low expectations, not just because of the generalMarvel malaise of the past six years, but for the extremely weird hodge-podge of properties this film follows up on: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (mostly bad despite some good moments), Eternals (Marvel’s worst movie), and The Incredible Hulk (a 17-year-old Marvel movie few people saw, has mostly been ignored since, and whose two main characters – Bruce Banner and Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross – are now played by entirely different actors).

But you know what? I liked Brave New World. It’s got a great cast, finally putting Anthony Mackie front and center and getting a more committed, soulful performance out of Harrison Ford than that that found in Disney’s Star Wars and Indiana Jones sequels. The film is well-paced, comes in under two hours, and has some good, solid action, making imaginative use out of the way Sam Wilson combines his Falcon tech with Steve Rogers’ Shield-based fighting style; the set piece in the Indian Ocean, around the remains of the ‘Celestial’ from The Eternals, is genuinely quite thrilling, and visually eye popping.

And that last part goes for the whole film, actually, as Brave New World is one of the very few Marvel films that looks like an actual honest-to-God movie, instead of a lifeless slab of cold digital concrete. The film was still shot digitally, to be clear – on the Arri Alexa, like most Marvel productions – but processed to look like 35mm film, complete with a thorough, more-than-competent color grade that makes the image look dimensional and gives skin tones real life and vitality. Marvel hires plenty of good cinematographers and usually strands them amidst the company’s stifling aesthetic constraints, but Director of Photography Kramer Morgenthau is one of the only creatives who’s actually managed to get a good-looking Marvel movie into theaters before, also shooting the underrated (and visually adroit) Thor: The Dark World. Whatever else one has to say about Brave New World, it’s an immense step-up visually from the Russo Bros-directed Captain America and Avengers films in whose shoes this movie otherwise walks.

So yes – I had a good time with Brave New World; it’s definitely one of the better Marvel films from the troubled post-Endgame era. But I don’t really want to ‘review’ the film in the traditional sense. Instead, I want to talk about how this film clarified for me something about Marvel’s entire approach to Captain America, as a character and a concept – about the way they’ve addressed the existential conundrum of bringing a hero created as WWII propaganda to a modern America that cannot even begin to agree on a basic definition of what America is, let alone what it means to be American.

And the answer, I think, is that in the 21^st century, Captain America’s job is to protect America from itself.

(Spoilers from here on out, though honestly, the trailers give most of it away)

The climax of Brave New World is shockingly potent visualization of this idea. It sees the President of the United States – ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, now played by Harrison Ford after the passing of William Hurt – transform into the Red Hulk, a giant crimson rage monster who tears through the nation’s capital, ripping apart iconic infrastructure from the White House to the Washington Monument, while Captain America tries to get him back under control.

That is, suffice it to say, extremely loaded, extremely political imagery, whether Marvel intends it to be or not. Even in the realm of silly superhero fiction, you cannot present a sequence of an American President transformed into a vengeful monstrous id, literally laying waste to the United States’ seat of power, without saying something, whether or not you want those things said. Marvel wants to be ‘apolitical,’ which just means accommodational; its parent company, Disney, is paying bribes to the current sitting President – who frankly looks, sounds, and acts a lot more like the CG-created Red Hulk than he does an actual human being – out of a cowardly desire to align themselves with our own ‘Brave New World,’ one of rapid fascist encroachment on all levers of power.

But like it or not, Brave New World does make a statement. The Red Hulk climax comes at the end of a story whose entire conflict extends from the horrible, extrajudicial actions of this fictional President, the sins of his past life as a bullying military leader coming back to bite him and his country in the ass. The ostensible antagonist is ‘The Leader’ (Tim Blake Nelson, returning from an Incredible Hulk cliffhanger that’s gone unresolved for 17 years), who Ross locked away without trial, experimented on, abused, and lied to; we could get very Freudian with all this if we wanted, seeing The Leader as America’s repressed shame, locked away in the basement, where it wreaks havoc on us anyway, since what is repressed always bubbles back up in the end. The more immediate point is that the film’s real villain is Ross himself, or more accurately, his arrogance and subterfuge, his belief that anything and everything can be broken, without consequence, so long as one does so with a patriotic zeal in one’s heart. All the action stems from that mistake. Nothing Captain America has to deal with in this film is an external threat: no aliens, no Hydra, no infinity stones. Just America’s chickens coming home to roost, as Malcolm X would say.

The bulwark against all this – the force trying to stop these sins of the past from carving America apart – is Captain America. This is, in fact, the third consecutive film with that title – after The Winter Soldier and Civil War – where Cap goes rogue and fights the US government, to orient our nation away from corruption, infiltration, or just plain old shitty decisions back towards a greater ideal. The difference this time is that Captain America is a black man – and that, again, is loaded and political, whether or not Marvel wants it to be. This is a film about an African-American patriot, uneasy with power structures he knows are rotten, fighting both within and without those structures to stop America from doing more self-harm than it already has. And the image of a black Captain America fighting a big Red Hulk through the streets of Washington D.C., putting his body on the line to stop this creation of America’s unbridled imperialist id from tearing America’s architectural iconography apart – well, that’s loaded too. I thought about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ opening essay from The 1619 Project, where she writes about her father’s very real, very fraught sense of patriotism to a country that saw and treated him as inferior. She uses her family story as a microcosm for a larger point, about the long, arduous work put in by black Americans to push America towards the ideals it espouses. “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans,” she writes, “our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.”

Is that a weird connection to make from a scene about a guy in a colorful costume fighting a big CGI monster on a green screen? Maybe. But when you’re playing with iconography this big – with a superhero named Captain America, his costume literally wrapping him in the flag, fighting a military-General-turned-President-turned-Hulk through the streets of D.C. – you open yourselves up to big ideas. And I think there is a potent visualization in that sequence, and throughout the film, about the way black Americans have had to fight for a better version of America, have had to claim American ideals denied to them for themselves, against power structures that are short sighted and self-destructive. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America has always been saving America from itself; but when Sam Wilson does it, it’s different than when Steve Rogers does it. There is a different history being evoked. A different set of stakes brought to the fight.

The film ends on a conversation between Sam and his Hispanic-American protégée, Joaquin Torres (a charming Danny Ramirez). Sam talks about the wrenching, awful pressure of having to be a perfect hero, knowing that while it is human to fail sometime, his failures will inevitably be seen differently than those of his white predecessor. Joaquin talks about having never seen himself in a hero before Sam came along; heroes and heroism seemed neither human nor attainable until he saw a black man fighting alongside the lily-white Avengers. I thought about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay “My President Was Black,” where the writer describes his own fraught relationship to the nation’s first African-American President, describing where Obama fell short politically, while also describing the enormity of the challenge. “For eight years,” Coates writes, “Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell.” He couldn’t fall, Coates argues; the stakes were too high. The first black man in this job wouldn’t be afforded an iota of the personal failings America gladly tolerated from the white men before and after. Obama had to be a symbol, not just a man; and as Coates reminds us, “there is nothing ‘mere’ about symbols.”

Sam grapples here, as he did in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, with the fact that physically, he is just a normal guy, with no superpowers like Steve Rogers had. That alone is a potent bit of metaphor: That the black Captain America does not have the same superpower as his white predecessor. On a literal level, that power is the super-soldier serum, but in the meaning of narrative it is ‘whiteness’ – what Coates called the “badge of advantage” in his essay about Obama, and later refigured, in his essay calling Donald Trump America’s “First White President,” as “that bloody heirloom,” a superpower of privilege “which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.” Steve Rogers was a good man, who saw goodness and strength in Sam Wilson; both can carry the Shield, and both can wear the flag. But as Captain America, Sam doesn’t have the same tailwind at his back as Steve did.

Despite being paired up with Sam in several prior films and throughout The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) only shows up in one scene here. It’s a good one, though: a pep talk, where these ideas are nodded to, and Bucky acknowledges Sam’s real power lies in the way he shows up every day, trying his hardest, despite the lack of ‘superpowers.’ That’s what real heroism is, of course: it’s easier to achieve the more power one has to expend, but it means more the less one have to give. Again I come back to that image – used as one of the film’s theatrical posters – of Sam as Captain America holding the Shield forth against the fist of the Red Hulk, this image of America’s worst and ugliest impulses made manifest, held back for a moment by a Captain America who hasn’t been blessed with the same privileges as the guy who came before. Marvel can tell me their movie is apolitical all they want; I find the image provocative all the same.

Brave New World squares its narrative and thematic circles in a more optimistic way than I think ‘feels’ true of our world right now. Sam is ultimately able to talk the Red Hulk down, and back into the frail body of Ross, by appealing to his better nature; and after the climax, Ross willingly gives up his power, expressing a desire for America to move forward from his sins. There is a thread throughout the film about Ross wanting to be a better man and a better leader than he was before, wanting to rise above his past sins and secure a better legacy than he knows he deserves. Naturally, we all want that for America too, even when we are angriest about all the horrible things this country has done. Sam Wilson taking up the Captain America moniker means that, at a minimum, he wants that too. I want it, even though it’s never felt more impossible or distant in my lifetime.

What I wouldn’t give to see Donald Trump publicly confess his sins, willingly give up his ill-gotten power, and quietly surrender himself to the law for his many crimes, allowing us to all collectively start a process of moving on from the horrific division he has caused. That will never happen, of course. We imbue fictional characters, even reprehensible ones, with souls, because in the realm of our imagination, it is comforting to think that even the worst of us have a wellspring of humanity somewhere deep inside them, a source of latent goodness that could one day prompt redemption. In the real world, we have to reckon with the uncomfortable truth that some men are born broken and incomplete, and that they will burn our world down trying to fill that soul-shaped void inside themselves.

But men will never fly or turn into Hulks, either. Sometimes there is catharsis in fantasy. Wisdom, too. Men like Trump can never change, but maybe we need to periodically imagine a world where they can in order to help us set about the work of all individually striving for something better in spite of him. Maybe we every so often need to see a hero in a silly red, white, and blue costume on screen modeling that faith for us, as a little shot in the arm to keep up the fight ourselves. Sometimes that’s what fiction is for.

I understand the impulse to dismiss what the film is doing here as naïve. In some ways it very much is. But I don’t personally want or need a Marvel movie to comment too realistically on America as it is right now. I don’t think they’re remotely equipped – creatively or commercially – to have that conversation, for one. But even if Marvel could paint a compelling vision of how their heroes would exist in a world of democratic collapse and fascist entrenchment, I don’t think I would want to see it. I take in more than enough awful news and serious, depressing analysis these days; I don’t need it from Marvel too. Superheroes should, on some level, be aspirational, and that includes, to some degree at least, their worlds and the solutions they are able to find. The entire bet of bringing Captain America to life in the 21^st century is that we can buy into something aspirational about the word ‘America’ even at this historically low moment of national spirit or unity. I don’t think Marvel has ever found a perfect way to achieve that idea, either here or in the previous Captain America films, and to be fair, I don’t think they ever could. But I like this latest attempt. I like this kind of aspiration, like seeing Marvel put their money and iconography and ludicrous blockbuster maximalism towards illustrating an America both literally and figuratively tearing itself apart. And I like them putting a guy like Sam Wilson, who has seen the worst of this country and wants to believe in its best, out there in the breach to try bending the arc of the moral universe back into shape. It feels good. It feels like hope.

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