Review Roundup: Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World
2021’s Eternals left a huge question mark hanging over the MCU: what’s the deal with that giant Celestial corpse floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean? Subsequent MCU titles just seemed to ignore that situation, but Captain America: Brave New World is finally addressing it head-on.
Captain America — who is now officially Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) following the events of 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — and his allies race to secure the Celestial’s secrets (which include, among other things, adamantium). Oh, and he’ll have to face off against the Red Hulk as well as the mysterious Serpent Society, a long-time Captain America enemy from the comics.
So does the new Captain America prove himself worthy of the shield? Or is Captain America: Brave New World more proof that the MCU’s glory days are in the past? Read on to see what critics are saying about Cap’s latest adventure, which also stars Giancarlo Esposito, Tim Blake Nelson, and Harrison Ford.
The film delivers intense aerial battles, high-speed chases, and shield-throwing action that will have you on the edge of your seat. The fight choreography is top notch and although the CGI at times does look a little less than stellar, it doesn’t take you out of the movie.
Marvel has long been struggling to recapture the monocultural dominance that it enjoyed through the first three phases of its existence as a movie studio, and while the 35th chapter of its signature mega-franchise takes agonizing pains to lay the groundwork for a fresh iteration of the Avengers, the listless and deeply unengaging “Brave New World” is far too preoccupied with its own past to deliver any real excitement in the present — let alone have any real hope of stoking enthusiasm for the future.
While Brave New World is nowhere near as bad as the various MCU low points of the past few years, this attempt at both reestablishing the iconic character and resetting the board is still weak tea.
Brave New World clumsily wraps distant political themes around misshapen action set pieces for a film whose want to entertain overpowers any narrative coherence. These heroes stand for nothing, and as such crumble before our eyes as they try to safeguard a milquetoast future born out of a buried fascist past. Brave New World is the relic of a post-racial dream, built with respectability tools that have been not only ineffectual but self-destructive.
The film, while intricately connected to all that’s come before (epic imprisonments! adamantium! Sebastian Stan!), works well enough as a vigorous, prosaic, more-stand-alone-than-not adventure that balances shield-bashing, sky-zipping action with the elements of a gritty geopolitical thriller. This isn’t one of those Marvel movies that fans had begun to trash for getting swallowed up by CGI and strangled by too many multiverse tentacles to disentangle. It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.
These variously naive, masturbatory, and alarming messages leave at minimum a bad aftertaste and at most a political rage. The earlier thoughtful treatment of Blackness and the solid but not special action thriller elements are worth something, but they don’t outweigh the sense that the film is meant to pacify any potentially galvanizing political feeling in American audiences.
Director Julius Onah, also a credited co-writer, maintains a suspenseful and intriguing tale of political corruption and power-mad politics. And though Marvel’s typical pratfalls end up undermining the third act, the majority of Brave New World hits more often than it misses.
Captain America: Brave New World goes back and forth from long, drawn-out narrative dumps, the occasional exposition dump, and mostly pointless action set pieces that do little to advance the plot. Often they feel added out of obligation, just to fill a few minutes until the characters can overly explain the — ultimately — kind of simple plot for the 20th time.
If some of this hokey and delivered with contrived dialogue? Your mileage will vary, but I certainly loved all the sentiments within, especially in a world where having values of honor dignity, honesty, and standing for something principled seem to be in short supply.
There is no such thing as non-political art. This is especially true for superheroes, a genre in which every issue is a new and thrilling exercise in defining what makes a “hero” and what makes a “villain,” while putting both in unmistakable, brightly colored costumes. Captain America comics have always (always, always) wrestled with the idea of America in one way or another, for better and for worse. There’s a word for a Cap story that refuses that call: Boring.
There’s nothing novel about the franchise attempting to tell a current story while setting up future narrative threads, and despite working from a script credited to five writers (which is rarely a good sign), Onah capably balances his multiple obligations, be it spotlighting previously unknown characters (in this case, Shira Haas’ Black Widow-ish badass Ruth Bat-Seraph), shouting out to big-screen ancestors, or devising ways to let Wilson strut his stuff, the finest of which is an aerial dogfight that threatens to kickstart a global crisis.
This story is too content to repeat the past: half of Brave New World is one half-assed reference to better Captain America movies, namely The Winter Soldier. The other feels like a cruel reminder that we haven’t gotten a Hulk movie in the past two decades, and Marvel has no interest in picking up the slack.
Captain America: Brave New World arrives in theaters on February 14, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
