Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 18) I went to the Bears San Diego movie night at the Mission Valley AMC 20 theatres to see the latest Marvel Comics movie, Captain America: Brave New World. The two big things I knew in advance about this film from the TV ads were that it features a Black Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and a red Incredible Hulk. The Black Captain America apparently took over from the original white one, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), after he was killed in the last Avengers movie (though since I’ve never seen any of the Avengers movies I’m just taking it on faith that that happened). The film starts with the re-inauguration of President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, looking considerably older and more grizzled than he did as the hunky young Prince Charming type in the 1988 film Working Girl), who won re-election despite the big event in the Avengers series in which half the Earth’s human population was wiped out in a catastrophe instigated by the Avengers’ principal villain, Thanos. Since then a mysterious “mass” has arisen out of the Indian Ocean and turns out to be made of adamantium (which I’d previously heard of only as the metal Wolverine’s claws are made of in the X-Men movies), a substance even more powerful than vibranium (the MacGuffin of the Black Panther movies). There’s a passing line of dialogue in this committee-written script (Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman and Dalan Musson get credit for the original story and they along with Peter Glanz and Julius Onah, who also directed, for the screenplay) that at last the world has access to a super-metal that isn’t controlled by an isolationist country like Wakanda.

President Ross has laboriously negotiated an international treaty that gives all countries in the world equal access to the adamantium in this newly formed island – though the only actual world leaders we see are Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki (Takehiro Hira) and the French President (Rick Espaillat), along with a prime minister from one of the Arab countries, Kapur (Harsh Nayyar). Unfortunately, the plans are foiled by the film’s principal villain, Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who was kidnapped by President Ross in his earlier role as a U.S. Army (or was it Air Force?) general, held hostage for 16 years and subjected to experiments that vastly increased his brain capacity but also drove him paranoid. Sterns is determined to break the adamantium treaty and get the nations of the world to fight a war over it. (I wonder if someone on the writing committee had read R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon falls to earth and lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, precipitating a world war over the moon’s resources that ends in the destruction of almost all human and animal life on earth; I’ve long hoped that someone would film Sherriff’s novel even though they’d obviously have to change that dorky title!) To accomplish that he’s developed a system of mind control that he’s able to impose on people by remote control via their smartphones, with the old Fleetwoods doo-wop hit “Mister Blue” serving as the same sort of trigger the queen of diamonds playing card did in The Manchurian Candidate.

Among the people he’s manipulating are President Ross, who has a heart condition and is being kept alive by a medication Sterns has invented – at first I thought they were just nitroglycerine tablets but they contain compounds created by the same gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the original Incredible Hulk in the first place. What’s more, unbeknownst to Ross, Sterns has upped the gamma-ray dosage of his meds so he’s in danger of turning into a new Hulk, this one red instead of green. Sterns also brainwashes five U.S. soldiers, including Captain America’s friend Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), into an assassination attempt against Ross just as he and the assembled world leaders are meeting in the Oval Office to sign the adamantium treaty (ya remember the adamantium treaty?). Bradley had just got out of a 30-year prison sentence and is scared shitless of going back in, and is even more scared when he’s put in solitary confinement after another Sterns-controlled goon squad guns down the other four men who participated in the attack on the President. The woman who orders him placed in solitary is Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), who’s ostensibly head of President Ross’s security detail but is really a secret agent for “The Widows,” an Israeli-based commando team whose representative, Black Widow (who was played by Scarlett Johannson in a 2021 film I saw on a previous Bears San Diego movie night), had an important role in the Avengers cycle and was one of the characters who sacrificed their lives to save humanity from Thanos’s dastardly plot. (I remember being thrown by the post-credits sequence for the 2021 Black Widow featuring people visiting her grave, since she’d survived the events of the 2021 movie.)

Apparently the original (white) Captain America was also one of the people who got killed in that cycle, passing the mantle of Captain Americahood to Sam Wilson – though Wilson, unlike Rogers, declined taking the super-serum that had given the original Captain America his powers in the first place. This Captain America and his partner, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), have whatever powers they have via winged suits made of vibranium and the overall power of Captain America’s shield, which he can hurl like a combination boomerang and Frisbie as well as use as armor against bullets. (I can still remember the opening lines of the song commissioned by Grantray Lawrence Animation for their 1960’s cartoons based on Captain America and other Marvel characters: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield.” I still love the triple internal rhyme there!) Not surprisingly, the above plot, such as it is, is only pretext for some amazing action scenes, including a sequence early on in which Captain America recovers an adamantium sample sent to the U.S. by Japan and which Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki accuses the U.S. of stealing. Later on there’s a fight scene in the Indian Ocean and the skies above it in which Captain America and Joaquin try to stop two rogue U.S. pilots from attacking a Japanese carrier fleet outside the adamantium island, and Joaquin ends up nearly drowning in the ocean and so badly wounded he requires hospitalization. The film’s big action climax occurs when President Ross, goaded by Sterns’s promptings via phone, [spoiler alert!] literally turns into the red Hulk at a public event in the Rose Garden to reaffirm the treaty (once again, folks, ya remember the treaty?) and does a surprisingly good job of wrecking the White House before Captain America is able to subdue him.

The film ends with President Ross resigning, admitting responsibility for his actions, and being incarcerated in a super-secure prison literally built under the ocean floor, while the White House is being rebuilt and the treaty implemented – though there’s no indication of who took over as President. (I was hoping it would be a part-Black, part-Asian woman.) The post-credits sequence consists of Samuel Sterns returned to his own secure prison cell and Ruth Bat-Seraph visiting him there, either because she’s part of his dastardly plots (unlikely) or to keep an eye on him (more likely). I’m a bit surprised that the Right-wing weirdos who attacked the 2017 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as being anti-Trump propaganda (and even claimed that after Donald Trump won the 2016 election the film was withdrawn and reshoots were made to make the film even more anti-Trump) haven’t jumped on this one, because at least to me the relationship between President Ross and Samuel Sterns had a lot of Trump and Elon Musk about it: the hot-headed President and the secret (or not-so-secret) manipulation of him by a reclusive multi-billionaire with huge intellectual capacities and almost no social skills. Aside from that, Captain America: Brave New World is a quite good action movie in the modern manner, with just enough plot to give the sense that this film is about things and isn’t just an excuse for one highly stylized, digitally assisted action sequence after another – though the action scenes are, of course, the reasons anyone goes to see movies like this in the first place. The poor actors are pretty much just along for the ride – though I’d give Anthony Mackie points for being properly heroic and disarmingly charming in the lead, and as his sidekick Danny Ramirez is sexy enough I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.