Captain America: Brave New World 2025

After a brief break and a catch up of Falcon and the Winter Soldier I’m ready to get back to my MCU catch-up with the new Captain America. I know I didn’t hear a whole lot of positivity about this movie when it first came out, mainly negative to middling reviews but I thought it was a fun movie that struggled a bit with identity issues. And yet, that in and of itself fits right into the character development of Sam’s Cap. I will also say that it was absolutely the right move for me to watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier before watching this movie. I’m not sure if I would have been a little lost, but the context of that show goes a long way towards understanding where this movie fits into the timeline which still feels a like a weird concept to a certain extent to have a movie be a sequel to a TV series. The show introduces two important characters: Joaquin and Isaiah Bradley and I’m not sure how well they were introduced in this film to someone who hadn’t watched that show. The other interesting connection is how it goes all the way back to the Incredible Hulk movie, bringing back three characters and plot points from that movie.

One of the biggest issues with this movie is that it seems to attempt to recreate the magic that was the Winter Soldier. That movie was highly regarded for its spy movie feel and structure and it created a struggle for the characters who didn’t know who they could trust. In the Winter Soldier it was due to the vast infiltration of Hydra, here it’s due to the mind control from the Leader. But it just doesn’t work as well overall to recreate the same feel because they’re also trying to include several other elements to the story like introducing the new Falcon, re-introducing Thunderbolt Ross as not only Harrison Ford but also as the new President, and eventually the Red Hulk, and including the element of Sam trying to live up to the legacy of Steve Rogers as the newest Captain America, while only barely including the racial elements that were handled so well in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It also doesn’t help that even though it seems to have a higher budget than the TV series, it just doesn’t have as strong of a story or emotional elements that the series leading up to it had.

What this film does do well is how it picks up characters and threads from nearly 20 years ago and re-integrates them into the MCU surprisingly well. While all of the storylines as a whole don’t exactly come together in a satisfying way, the Hulk threads were brought back as well as they could have been. It made sense to have Sterns working behind the scenes in a highly secure prison which would have kept him off the radar. The use of the song Mr. Blue to trigger the mind control was a fantastic choice. The look of Tim Blake Nelson as the Leader was a bold choice but it was interesting and unique. Having him be two steps ahead of Sam for most of the movie was where the writing lost a little bit of steam and felt a bit more forced, as well as the push into the final conflict between Red Hulk and Captain America. And that cameo by Liv Tyler first through voice only and finally in person at the end was total fanservice, but it’s the kind of fanservice that I live for. It was also just the right amount of meta to have one of the first lines from Sam to Ross be him commenting on loving the new look, which makes sense in-universe as his presidential look, and has the extra meta level because he’s a new actor.

Sam Wilson as the lead character in this movie worked well despite the film not entirely knowing what level of super powers he should actually have. There are several conversations about how he should have taken the super soldier serum which implies that he’s just a regular soldier with a high level of training. But even when you take into account the powers granted to him by his new Wakandan flight suit, he takes a superhuman level of punishment and simultaneously dishes it out at the same superhuman level. He gets two stab wounds during a fight and basically acts like it was nothing. There’s a line about Kevlar, but that’s not really enough of an excuse. There’s also moments about him questioning his worthiness to wield the title of Captain America, but again, after how well it was handled in the lead-up series, it felt more like an afterthought here.

There’s also the new characters, or technically one of them was only new if you skipped the TV series. Juaquin Torres was initially Sam’s inside man: the one doing all the legwork and computer work, and in this movie he gets his chance to spread his wings, literally, and become the new Falcon using Sam’s old suit. He’s a fun character though a lot of his character development was shifted into the series. The other new character was Ruth Bat-Seraph who’s Ross’s head of security and a former Widow. In the movie she doesn’t get a whole lot of development, she more or less just follows Sam’s leads on the whole mind control angle, gets one halfway decent fight scene, then just stays in the background for the rest of the movie.

While there are a lot of negatives to this film when you sit and start breaking it down piece by piece, as a whole it’s still a generally fun movie. The action scenes are good, the mind control angle was done well even though it did feel like it was trying to copy the Winter Soldier’s homework but not make it look too obvious, Sam is a great character and is being put into position as the leader of the New Avengers* (note: I haven’t seen Thunderbolts* yet so I don’t actually know how or if Sam fits into that movie). The Red Hulk was a little forced, but turned out well enough. This isn’t a great film by any means and it has a lot of great stuff within it, it just didn’t fully come together as a well-polished whole. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.