1 / 10
Official trailer
I watched Captain America: Brave New World in fast forward. The 1 is for a deeply disappointing Phase Five entry and the film that confirmed the Captain America property couldn’t function without Steve Rogers’s moral authority. Anthony Mackie takes the leading role as Sam Wilson’s Captain America. Harrison Ford replaces the late William Hurt as Thaddeus Ross. The film attempts to revive the political-thriller tone that Captain America: The Winter Soldier had established. The attempt fails completely. The narrative is incoherent.
Very little of this feels like a Captain America movie, a damning failure. I kept waiting for the Winter Soldier tension the marketing promised and got a checklist of franchise obligations instead. The 1 is for a film that fails at nearly everything the original Captain America films did well.
The Setup
Sam Wilson has accepted the Captain America identity following Steve Rogers’s retirement in Endgame and the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series. Thaddeus Ross has been elected President of the United States.
Ross invites Wilson and Joaquin Torres (the new Falcon) to a White House event where Wilson encounters Isaiah Bradley, a Black super-soldier who had been imprisoned for decades after his service in the Korean War. Some mechanism Wilson doesn’t understand triggers Bradley into attempting to assassinate Ross.
The investigation reveals that Ross has been deteriorating physically due to the gamma radiation he was exposed to during his pursuit of Bruce Banner across previous decades. The Sterns / Leader character (Tim Blake Nelson reprising his Incredible Hulk role) has been manipulating Ross through psychological conditioning while Sterns himself plans his own revenge against Ross who had imprisoned him. The third act involves the discovery of vibranium-related geopolitical plots involving Japan, the eventual confrontation with the Red Hulk (Ross’s transformation), and Wilson’s defeat of the threat without killing the President.
Anthony Mackie As Captain America
Anthony Mackie plays Sam Wilson’s Captain America in his first solo film as the lead. The performance is professionally committed within the character that previous appearances had established. Mackie brings specific physical capability, tactical competence, and emotional accessibility to the role. The performance isn’t the film’s problem.
The character itself is the film’s central problem. Sam Wilson’s Captain America hasn’t yet established the moral authority that Steve Rogers’s Captain America commanded across nine MCU films from 2011 through 2019. The original Captain America films had built audience investment in Rogers’s judgment through sustained character development. The audience trusted Rogers to make correct decisions because the franchise had built that trust across multiple productions.
Wilson’s Captain America never got comparable foundation work. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series tried to build his move into the role in 2021, with mixed results. Brave New World needs Wilson to arrive as an established Captain America and does nothing to build that. What we get is a competent supporting character promoted to the lead, missing the moral authority the role requires. That’s the studio’s failure, and I’m annoyed on Mackie’s behalf, because he deserved a better script.
The structural problem isn’t Mackie’s responsibility. The franchise had killed Steve Rogers’s specific role through retirement in Endgame and the establishment of Wilson as successor. The succession was conceptually clean but the wider franchise hadn’t yet developed the supporting infrastructure to make Wilson’s Captain America function as the moral compass the original Steve Rogers had provided. The Phase Four collapse compounded the problem. By the time Brave New World released in 2025, Wilson’s Captain America had to work without the audience trust the role required.
For Writers
Brave New World shows the cost of inheriting a character role without inheriting the audience trust the role had accumulated. Steve Rogers had built specific moral authority across nine MCU films. Sam Wilson’s Captain America inherits the title without inheriting the authority. The audience can’t transfer accumulated trust to a new actor in a previously established role through declaration alone. The trust must be earned through additional foundation work that the character hasn’t yet received.
The lesson for writers and franchise developers is that successor characters require their own foundation work instead of expecting inherited authority to transfer automatically.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series had been the suitable venue for this foundation work. The series accomplished some of it but didn’t generate sufficient audience trust to make Wilson’s Captain America function as fully realized lead character in Brave New World. The film attempted to work with assumed trust that hadn’t been earned. The audience response confirmed the assumption was wrong.
Harrison Ford As Thaddeus Ross
Harrison Ford replaces the late William Hurt as Thaddeus Ross. Hurt had played the character across multiple MCU appearances from The Incredible Hulk in 2008 through his final appearances before his death in March 2022. The replacement was structurally required. Ford brings heavy career gravitas to the role and works with specific professional commitment.
The performance is professionally executed within the limits of the material.
The material itself doesn’t give Ford sufficient development to establish the new version of the character. Ross had been a recurring antagonist figure across multiple MCU appearances. The transition to President of the United States and to eventual Red Hulk required real setup that the film provides through compressed exposition instead of through developed character work.
Ford’s professional commitment prevents the limited material from being more visibly problematic. The replacement performance is acceptable.
The replacement doesn’t match the foundation Hurt had established across multiple previous appearances. The pattern is the wider Phase Five issue of recasting established characters without providing the foundation work to make the recasting fully successful. Robert Downey Jr.’s eventual return as Doctor Doom for upcoming productions may face similar structural challenges.
The Red Hulk Reveal
The film’s central spectacle element is the Red Hulk transformation that Ross undergoes during the third act. The character’s accumulated gamma radiation exposure from his decades of pursuing Bruce Banner has been combined with Sterns’s psychological conditioning to produce a Hulk transformation triggered during high-stress events. The Red Hulk appears in the climactic White House confrontation.
The audience response to the Red Hulk reveal was considerably mixed.
The visual effects design depicts Harrison Ford’s facial features on a red-skinned giant Hulk body. The combination produces an uncanny visual effect that some viewers found convincing and other viewers found inadvertently comedic. Social media discussion at release included serious mockery of the Red Hulk’s specific visual design, with comparisons to internet meme imagery.
I didn’t find the Red Hulk convincing for a second. Harrison Ford’s face on a giant red body looks like a gag somebody forgot to take out of the final cut, and it drains the menace out of the one sequence that was supposed to deliver the payoff. When the audience laughs at your climactic monster, the trouble started long before the effects work.
The Red Hulk’s combat sequence is the film’s climactic action setpiece.
Wilson must defeat or contain the Red Hulk without killing the sitting President of the United States. The constraint generates the film’s clearest dramatic stakes. The execution prioritizes spectacle over the political-thriller tone that the film’s marketing had positioned. The audience receives standard superhero combat instead of the institutional-corruption thriller that the Winter Soldier-influenced positioning suggested.
The Decorative Political Content
The film works through extensive decorative political content.
Sam Wilson’s Captain America is positioned as facing specific political challenges related to his Black identity in the role. Isaiah Bradley’s imprisonment-and-experimentation backstory is commentary on historical institutional racism. The White House sequences feature specific political signaling about contemporary geopolitical tensions involving Japan, China, and the wider vibranium-rights situation.
The political content sits on top of the plot and never drives it. Remove the racial framing from Wilson’s Captain America and the story runs exactly the same. Remove the Bradley history and the assassination attempt works the same way mechanically. Remove the Japan and China references and the Ross plot proceeds untouched. That’s the biggest failure here. Isaiah Bradley’s story deserved to matter to the plot, and the film uses it as set dressing.
The pattern is the wider Phase Four-Five issue discussed in the Captain Marvel review and The Marvels review. Decorative political signaling combined with weak storytelling produces audience response that the franchise has consistently underestimated. Brave New World continues the pattern despite the documented commercial damage that similar approaches had caused in previous productions.
The Narrative Incoherence
Multiple plot threads don’t cohere into unified narrative, despite the film’s attempt to integrate them. The Isaiah Bradley assassination attempt thread. The Sterns / Leader manipulation thread. The Ross deterioration thread. The Japan-vibranium geopolitical thread. The Wilson-as-Captain-America establishment thread. Each thread requires considerable screen time and dramatic development.
The execution suffers from severe pacing problems. The middle act feels confused. Multiple plot threads work in parallel without finding the connections that would justify their coexistence. The Sterns plot in particular feels imported from a different film. The seventeen-year-delayed payoff of the Sterns / Leader setup from 2008’s Incredible Hulk had potential. The execution doesn’t deliver the satisfying connection that the long-delayed payoff required.
The audience tracking is considerably compromised. The film moves between Wilson investigating the Bradley situation, Wilson responding to Ross’s political maneuvering, Wilson confronting Sterns, and Wilson handling the Japan geopolitical crisis without establishing clear connections between these threads. The final third-act resolution gestures toward unifying the elements through the Red Hulk transformation but the unification feels imposed instead of emergent.
Craft: The Phase Five Confirmation Of Franchise Crisis
Craft Note
Captain America: Brave New World is the Phase Five film that confirmed the franchise’s ongoing crisis state extended into the Captain America property despite Sam Wilson’s transition into the role. The original Captain America films had worked through specific moral authority that Steve Rogers’s character had built across nine MCU appearances. The franchise had killed Rogers’s specific role in Endgame and established Wilson as successor without providing the additional foundation work that would have made the successor function effectively as the franchise’s moral compass.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier had established a political-thriller tone in 2014, and the film attempts to revive it. The attempt fails because the political content is decorative signaling instead of essential plot. Winter Soldier had succeeded by treating mass surveillance and intelligence-agency corruption as central plot drivers that the genre conventions handled directly. Brave New World treats racial identity, historical institutional racism, and contemporary geopolitical tensions as decorative additions to standard superhero thriller plot. The audience reads the decorative pattern.
The political content doesn’t generate the dramatic engagement that Winter Soldier had achieved. Harrison Ford’s professional execution prevents the William Hurt recasting from being more visibly problematic. The Red Hulk transformation generated audience response that the production didn’t anticipate, with major social media mockery of the visual design. The narrative incoherence across multiple competing plot threads adds to the wider structural problems.
The 1 ratings are for the cumulative failures across structural placement, character development, political-content integration, antagonist quality, and broader franchise integration. The film has individual moments that work.
The film doesn’t. The Sam Wilson Captain America property hasn’t yet established the audience trust the role requires. The franchise’s broader Phase Five problems persist through this release.
For analysis of the wider Phase Five collapse, see How The Multiverse Destroyed The MCU. For analysis of the wider character degradation patterns this film extends, see The Emasculation Of The MCU.
Should you skip Captain America: Brave New World?
A 1. Captain America: Brave New World is a deeply disappointing Phase Five entry and the film that confirmed the Captain America property can’t function without Steve Rogers’s specific moral authority. Anthony Mackie’s professional commitment to the Wilson Captain America role can’t compensate for the absence of the foundation work the character requires. Harrison Ford’s replacement of William Hurt as Thaddeus Ross is acceptable but doesn’t match the foundation Hurt had established. The Red Hulk reveal generated unanticipated audience response.
The decorative political content is signaling instead of essential plot. The narrative incoherence across multiple competing plot threads adds to the structural problems.
I watched it in fast forward, and I don’t plan to watch it again at any speed. The 1 is what it earns. Mackie gives it everything, Ford keeps the Ross recasting from sinking any further, and none of that rescues a script that juggles five plots and lands none of them. Other viewers may find individual pieces they like more than I did. As a complete production, this is Marvel spending a hero’s name it hadn’t earned, a mistake the franchise keeps making.
