THB #674: Captain America: Brave New World

How bad is Captain America: Brave New World?

So bad that one really has to break it down to all of its missteps to really figure out how it all went so wrong.

What struck me first while watching the film was, “Who the hell directed this?” Why? Because the directing was clearly an effort from someone who has no real idea how to shoot a movie like this… a novice. I had no idea who had directed the film and had to wait until the movie was over to turn on my phone and find out it was Julius Onah, whose career is 11 shorts, a music video, The Cloverfield Paradox which is quite bad in spite of its sensational cast, and another amazing cast in a tiny movie not as good as its cast, Luce.

What the everloving fuck?

Kevin Feige very cleverly has brought in arthouse directors to do some Marvel Cinematic Universe titles… with more of these folks leaving projects in the process of development before getting to actually shooting their films. The biggest successes were spin-off titles centered on characters that would come together in the closing Avengers films. Personally, I am not a big of The Russo Brothers as directors… but they really brought it all together in Infinity War and Endgame.

But since Endgame, it has been a very mixed bag. Destin Daniel Cretton did great with Shang-Chi. Chloé Zhao’s vision for Eternals bored audiences. Nia DaCosta couldn’t make The Marvels work at all.

So it’s March 2023. Bob Iger’s been back for 5 months. The Avengers, as they were built so brilliantly, went away almost 4 years before this. Marvel had 3 sequels in 2022, all of which were based on established characters and all of which did fairly well, if not quite as well as hoped. Just before shooting the first film that will be the foundation for building the next Avengers, the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania goes a bit sideways… complaints about the effects quality, the tone, and questions around Jonathan Majors.

I am trying to be sympathetic. Iger was fighting on all fronts. All 3 2022 Marvel films had done over $750 million.

On the other hand, there was clearly an already-known problem with the then-unreleased The Marvels. The film from Nia DiCosta, another indie director with a limited resume, was 8 months from release.

Even more than that, the new Captain America film that was starting production would clearly be the launch towards a new Avengers team-up down the road.

So why would you hire someone with as thin a feature resume’ as Julius Onah? He clearly is great with actors… his two features that got releases in America were both thick with some of the great actors of this era. But one of his films was sold off to Netflix, as Paramount wouldn’t even put the marketing budget towards a release, and the other went to Sundance and ended up getting a NEON release and grossing $2 million.

When Feige rolled the dice in the past, the talent was not necessarily at the heights of their careers, but they had careers… from Jon Favreau to Kenneth Branagh to James Gunn to Peyton Reed to Scott Derrickson to Taika Waititi to Ryan Coogler… and even The Russo Brothers.

Of that group, Gunn was the biggest leap… and he delivered big… well done. But had Guardians of the Galaxy come up short, it wouldn’t have brought the Avengers house of cards down around it. It was the first off-Avengers film from the Disney MCU and it worked… but it was not foundational when it first appeared.

The new Captain America is foundational. Anthony Mackie is great. But his version of Captain America is not the version that made billions. None of the next generation of Avengers will be “the same.” This is not a judgment. It is just a reality. Some may be better. But they have to earn their way to the summit… again.

So what the hell inspired Kevin Feige to roll his very, very big dice on Julius Onah? I’m sure he is great in a room. But I am telling you, within the first 5 minutes of the movie, it was cleat to me that there was a neophyte in the directing chair. The classic first-time directors mistake of single-cut, single-cut, single-cut, two-shot. single (ad nauseum) is evident. He wasn’t getting everything from the performances in the simple dialogue scenes. His camera was so close up on some of the characters that we got nothing from them… from their expressions, from their eyes. The action was jump jump jump, never effectively establishing the space so the audience could, as we do in good action sequences, anticipate the next beat. Likewise, when he gets to the White House, Onah’s staging of groups is muddled, at best. The experience of the overtight frames was magnified by seeing the movie in IMAX. What the frame is too claustrophobic on a normal screen, seeing it bigger is always worse. (Fascinatingly, seeing Darren Aronofsky’s 16mm Pi in IMAX was great as was Fincher’s Se7en… sometimes oversized is beautiful.)

Then there is the casting. Who let them make a movie of this magnitude with 2 famous actors and some wonderful actors, only one of whom has any wide release cache (from a TV series, Breaking Bad). I am a Carl Lumbly fan… but if you are old enough to remember Cagney & Lacey, you are probably too old for MCU movies and even if you remember him from Alias, that also makes you at least 35. I think the world of Tim Blake Nelson, who is as much a braniac as the character he plays here… but he is hidden in the commercials and his costumed look also keeps him from really connecting with the audience. His eyes are literally covered. The rest of the cast is basically unknowns, most problematically of all Shira Haas, who is a really fine actress, but doesn’t belong in the 3rd lead of a Marvel movie as a 5’ 2” ass kicker. That joke was funnier in the room.

Even the presentation of Harrison Ford here… it’s visually inconsistent. Sometimes, he looks great. Sometimes, he looks 80+. What is the camera meant to be telling us about the character? It can’t seem to decide.

And then we get to the story…

I’m not going to say a lot. But I am going to drop a bit of a SPOILER… So duck and cover if you want to avoid this one-line SPOILER!!!

The entire movie is about a guy with a grudge against Thunderbolt Ross spending years and untold millions and comfortably killing as many people as may be in the way to… here it is… the big reveal… to embarrass Ross by turning him into a red hulk and thus, somehow, showing his real spirit to the world.

END SPOILER!!!

Are you freaking kidding me?!?!

The movie has all kinds of correlatives to Trump and I am pretty sure Disney would rather have been releasing this film under President Harris than under Don Don. But the clearest thing is that we all know that no matter what the subtext of becoming a red hulk would be, if Donald Trump became one, his MAGA followers would LOVE every single second of it…. even destroying the White House (as seen in the commercials). “He’s soooo strong!!!” “But he’s killing people and making billions in damages!” “But look how strong he is… that’s leadership!”

“Fire… heh heh… Fire!!!”

The most solid element of this film is now The Red Hulk. And he is in the movie for maybe 10-15 minutes, max. He is the toy in the bottom of the cereal box. But in the meantime, your teeth have been rotted out eating boxes and boxes of that sugary cereal trying to find the premium toy.

But ultimately, Red Hulk is a big, not-fat so what. He’s fun to watch. But there is almost no intentionality to the creature, aside from its rage.

And while I don’t want to spoil the last section of the movie, but the logic of what various characters are punished for or freed by and how this happens is mostly unexplored and from a distance, inconsistent.

Honestly, I am exhausted by film critics who don’t really pay attention to these movies like they are real movies at this point. The guiding idea of many of the reviews is, “You haven’t proven to us that Marvel is worthy of being taken seriously yet.” And I consider that, well, bullshit. Every film has contours and strengths and weaknesses and issues to be discussed, regardless of how you feel about the film or its genre or origins. There re enough good Marvel films that they deserve serious criticism.

That said… this one is really not good.

Some of the effects are really good. Some are really not. Some are wasted by basic bad framing.

The giant brain that Tim Blake Nelson plays, known as The Leader (but not, it seems, in this screenplay) has been done so much better so many times. It’s like when they got to his oversized head, they ran out of money or time or both. Its not that it’s unprofessionally done… it’s just not interesting.

Are the action sequences good? They’re okay. But there ain’t one of them that I found very memorable.

My kid noted, accurately, that Der Captain’s wings are made of Wakandan vibranium for some reason… and in one sequence they took the power exerted against him is then used against the attacker. Cool. But a gimmick one-off that really requires the intense focus of and some knowledge from the viewer.

And the whole movie, in theory, revolves around adamantium, which is primarily known for being the metal that covers/replaces Wolverine’s bones… so is this movie pre-X-Men in this MCU timeline? Everyone talks about adamantium like its brand new and like it is easily duplicated, neither of which makes sense in the timeline.

Also, the site where the adamantium has been found keeps getting called an island… but what it looks like is a giant figure - Galactus-sized or so - in the ocean, with the head being seen as an island, but with fingers coming out of the water as part of what clearly seems to be a hand. Again… no one is noticing this giant hand coming out of the water?

The list of problems is long… longer than I am going to spend time on here today.

But again, I return to the basics. Badly directed. Badly written. Terrible, thin story. And instead of getting a “this is the reason why Captain America is inevitable and his passions should be your passions,” we get a character who is not physical in the way Captain America was and has so many special weapons that any well-trained, strong, agile, fearless person seems like they could wear the suit and wings and super AI sidekick drones, etc.

The assignment of this film was to light a match… to start things moving in the direction of a must-see gathering of heroes. Instead, they offer a movie that the marketing department is going to have to rise above.

And where do they go next? Thunderbolts… with an asterisk. I hope it’s great fun. But if Sam’s Captain America is a B+ Marvel character, these guys are all B- and C characters. Where does that leave Marvel?

Well, with The Fantastic Four… which may be the better firestarter for the next generation of the MCU.

But for the moment, Marvel is still a little lost. I look forward to better.

Until tomorrow…