The New Captain America Has an Odd Message for Our Political Moment

The movies have long been fond of reducing the White House to smithereens, but Captain America: Brave New World marks the first time the destruction has been doled out by its most famous occupant. As anyone who’s passed through a theater lobby in the past few months knows, the movie’s climax features Harrison Ford’s president Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross transforming into the Red Hulk in the middle of a Rose Garden press conference and promptly laying waste to his surroundings. Columns crumble, cornices are crushed, and even Old Glory gets turned into an offensive weapon as the world’s angriest POTUS swings an enormous flagpole at a military helicopter. By the time Sam Wilson’s Captain America (Anthony Mackie) has finally subdued his commander in chief, the building is a smoldering ruin, a monument to the destructive power of the former president’s fury. But not to worry, a news report reassures us: Next up is “the restoration of normalcy to the White House.”

That line inevitably lands differently now than it would have even a few weeks ago, let alone if the film had met its original release date in the summer of 2024. The movie is styled as a paranoid thriller along the lines of its 2014 predecessor Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with a plot featuring shadowy mercenaries, a Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing scheme, and a black-site prison on American soil. The plot even loops in a character from the series’ TV spinoff, Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley, the “forgotten Cap” who was subjected to the same experiments that created Sam Wilson’s superpowered predecessor, Steve Rogers, and then imprisoned for 30 years to hide the evidence of the government’s crimes. In a classic paranoid thriller like They Live or The Parallax View, the hero is a white man who discovers that the world he thought he knew is rotten to the core, controlled by forces whose existence he never expected. But as Isaiah Bradley’s connection to the real-life horror of the Tuskegee Experiment implies, it’s less of an adjustment for characters who have always known that the government lies to find out the precise nature of the conspiracy. The trick is getting others to see it too.

Although he began as a member of the armed forces, Sam is, like the “winter soldiers” who testified about the atrocities committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam, more loyal to the country’s ideals than its leaders, particularly now that his old nemesis, General Thaddeus Ross, is in the Oval Office. Although Ford has replaced the late William Hurt in the role — “I’m still getting used to the new look,” Sam quips, ostensibly in response to his clean-shaven face — Brave New World presumes at least a passing familiarity with his previous appearances, going all the way back to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, a movie that invariably vies for last place in rankings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s nearly three dozen entries. That’s the last time we saw Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns, a scientist whose exposure to gamma radiation has given him the ability to mathematically predict the future, and also left him looking like an enormous pickle. (In the comics, he’s known as the Leader; here, he’s simply bumpy and green.) Like Isaiah Bradley, he’s been stripped of his rights and treated as subhuman for the sin of being useful to people in power. Or really just one person: Thaddeus Ross.

Ross’ ostensible goal is to broker a truce among the world’s great powers so they can share the miracle metal of adamantium, mined from the corpse of a continent-sized Celestial in the Indian Ocean. (Surely you remember that leftover detail from Eternals, another strong contender for the worst Marvel movie of all time.) He’s trying to change, to find a better self and reconcile with his estranged daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler), who has also not been seen since 2008. He’s spent years, with Samuel Sterns as his quasi-clairvoyant adviser, building a path to the White House, hoping to be known as a statesman rather than a warmonger. Heck, he even gave up smoking. Still, the rage that got him his nickname is still just beneath the surface, pushed closer by the pills he pops that control his life-threatening heart condition but, unbeknownst to him, are also slowly bring out his inner Hulk — part of Sterns’ long-term plan to get revenge by showing the world who Thaddeus Ross really is.

President Ross claims to be a uniter, not a divider; the movie’s opening shot is him standing on the stage of a campaign rally in front of a massive screen that reads “Together.” But that’s a little like saying Thanos was an environmentalist. His country is reeling from disruptions even greater and more unbelievable than our own, including a five-year spell during which half its residents simply disappeared. So if it takes a false flag operation or a little extrajudicial detention to get everyone on the same side — Ross’ tactics include keeping Samuel Sterns in an illegal prison for well over a decade to hide the secret behind his ascent to the presidency — so be it. This, of course, is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. But Brave New World doesn’t have the courage to walk that road, so it chalks Ross’ actions up to personal failings rather than the lust for power. No matter how grotesque his misdeeds, he’s framed as a man struggling to be good, a sympathetic monster. Why else cast the lovably irascible Ford in the part, rather than someone whose anger might actually read as a threat?

Back in 2012, The Avengers redefined the original Hulk with a brilliantly simple phrase: “I’m always angry.” Perhaps ironically given his own shaky history of anger management, Joss Whedon realized that having Bruce Banner doing breathing exercises to keep from losing his cool wasn’t a sustainable basis for a 21-century character; you can’t have the Hulk smash up a city and then claim it’s not his fault because he got mad. If anyone in Brave New World has a right to that kind of all-consuming rage, it’s Sam Wilson, who is constantly reminded that while he may have claimed the mantle of Captain America, he will, at least in the public’s eyes, never be Steve Rogers. But Mackie doesn’t get to play that emotion until the movie is almost over, in a hospital-room soliloquy where he finally voices the frustration that even twice as good is not good enough. But it sits side by side with the scene in which Sam visits the now-defeated and imprisoned Thaddeus Ross and thanks him for owning up to his crimes and relinquishing his office. Sure, he brought the world to the brink of war for the sake of his pride and his hold on power, but now that he’s sorry, the country can begin to heal.

Brave New World, whose script has more credited writers than Doctor Octopus has mechanical arms, wants to say something about power, and the moral exemptions that men, particularly white American men, will grant themselves in the name of what they can convince themselves is right. But it’s so studious about not taking sides that it can’t say anything at all, and the fact that it’s plainly been reshot and recut within an inch of its life doesn’t help. The use of Kendrick Lamar’s “i” over the movie’s end credits acts as a callback to 2018’s Black Panther, but it also inadvertently, and unluckily, sets up a comparison with Lamar’s Super Bowl performance, which pointedly situated America’s Blackness at the heart of the red, white, and blue. Brave New World takes center stage, but it never turns on the mic; lips move, but we don’t hear anything at all.