CAPTAIN AMERICA BRAVE NEW WORLD (2025)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

BRAVE NEW WORLD made me miss THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER. 

I found that MCU series deeply offensive with its reverse-racism (a new iteration of White Captain America must perforce be evil) and its championing of terrorism (if the rebels check the right boxes). However, at least FALCON made me angry. BRAVE was just boring.

Reputedly the script was reworked many times to make it less polarizing in a political sense. The touchups didn't help BRAVE's box office, which only made back about twice what the film cost. But it seems what the screenwriters sought to do, before the edits, was a more extreme version of the general scenario in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. Instead of the hero confronting the excesses of the military-industrial complex, which got turned against the Americans who paid for it, this time Cap Falcon must go up against the excesses of a President steeped in duplicity and immoral conduct.

Yes, of course it's Trump, or the screenwriters' reframing of Trump into the established character of General Ross. The general was first established in live-action films in the HULK movies and initially portrayed by William Hurt, whose death forced a recasting in the form of Harrison Ford. The writers' fantasy-version of Trump is both emotionally unstable and a practiced criminal conspirator, and these contradictory traits are the characteristics they transplant onto the Ross character to serve a rather formless polemic. In previous appearances Ross was established as being a hardass military-man/politician, though hardly a master planner, but since becoming President of Marvel-Earth, he apparently ups his game. In the comics, Ross' life takes an ironic turn when he, like his perennial hulking nemesis, becomes the recipient of a gamma-curse, becoming "the Red Hulk" in 2008 (oddly, the same year as the second HULK feature film). I know little about the crimson goliath of the comics, but in BRAVE, I suppose Ross "Hulking out" is supposed to signify his temperamental inability to lead the country. 

To be sure, there's a loose explanation as to how Ross became an insidious master planner: he drew upon the talents of the one MCU villain whose evil career never got off the ground. The creation of "The Leader," a perennial Hulk antagonist in the comics, was only suggested at the end of INCREDIBLE HULK. However, at some point Ross got access to the man who would become the Leader, and had him incarcerated in a "black site," just so Ross could use Leader to guide his political career. However, Ross also developed heart failure-- as well as becoming estranged from his daughter, the woman who loved Bruce Banner-- and so The Leader started slipping his jailer medication that would bring out Ross' inner monster. This was really a good enough revenge by itself. But because the writers wanted to emulate WINTER SOLDIER, the Leader is also responsible for an absurd Rube Goldberg scheme that involves mental enslavement and the deaths of many people who never harmed the supervillain.        

Harrison Ford doesn't succeed in making Ross interesting, though I think he tried harder here than he did with his reprise of Han Solo in FORCE AWAKENS. Still, even though the intertwined destinies of Ross and The Leader don't offer much beyond cross-comparisons, that's more than any other character did. My biggest critique of Anthony Mackie's version of Captain America is not that it's bad because Original Cap Was White and Always Should Be. It's that he's not a Black character who has any clue about why he ought to represent America. As far as I can tell from this film and from the miniseries, America is just a big bundle of dirty laundry, and Sam Wilson's gonna be the guy who airs all the nasty odors, like the usual suspect of "systemic racism." Further, all the charm Mackie projected in the role of The Falcon is gone, replaced by a dour Black Captain who makes occasional lame jokes in between big serious speeches. Speechifying, by the way, is the way this Captain "defeats" Red Hulk. He pretty much has to, as the main hero has nothing capable of taking out such a monster. So why oppose the two in the first place? It's like the film's writers never read any of the comic books they're supposedly adapting.

I have no idea what the early script meant to do with the character who was somehow both a former Black Widow AND a Mossad agent, though the filmmakers did elide any Mossad references after certain groups didn't like them. Whatever they meant to do, she's dull, the "Falcon trainee" is dull, and "guy who was the super-soldier guinea-pig" is dull. Tim Blake Nelson, who also played the proto-Leader in INCREDIBLE HULK, does reasonably well projecting an implacable, icy hostility, but I for one didn't care about another story where the US is the bad guy and all the other countries (mostly Japan this time) are square shooters. The "brave new world" championed by these filmmakers seems to be one in which America and its worst representatives are prosecuted for all their crimes, but no one else is. But for such a world, "brave" is not the correct adjective.