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What I’m Watching: Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

Quick review: As a strident MCU fan, I’ll say this was good. Not great, but good. No mid-credit scene, and the end-credit scene was a little dissatisfying, but that may just be me.

I think this film suffered from too many re-writes without a fresh approach. By this I mean, the first folks wrote it, then it was handed off for rewrites, and then that was handed of for rewrites. If they had had the luxury of time to set it down and come back to it with fresh eyes, I think they could have fixed the complexity that veered into complication.

Since any good movie worth its popcorn is about more than what it’s about, I’ll throw this subtext out there: An old White guy is elected President and sucks at dealing with other nations before his morally dubious past catches up to him; he flips out, throws a rager of a hissy fit, and becomes MAGA Hulk, destroying the White House and half of DC before the Black hero can get him to calm the hell down.

John Lente

One response to “What I’m Watching: Captain America: Brave New World (2025)”

  1. Carl Salbacka Avatar
    Carl Salbacka

    Just saw the movie, and mostly agree with your thoughts. This was not a bad film, but an average one for the MCU, and largely undeserving of the grossly negative reviews it seems to be getting. I think, first and foremost, that the structure of the film did it no favors: whether intentional or not, the beats of the plot echoed the vastly superior Captain America: the Winter Soldier, which only threw into sharper relief the film’s lack of genuine pathos in comparison to that earlier venture. Furthermore (and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing), the film felt small: this was not a genre-defining spectacle like any of the Avengers films, which hang so pendulously over anything Marvel has made since, but rather a more personal film about the new Captain America finding his (pardon the imagery) wings, and recognizing that he can fill a role without having to repeat everything his predecessor did. Unfortunately, it is a small film that wanted to be BIG, and that left it with a bit of an identity crisis. If the studio had had the faith to allow the film to be small, and to really focus on the relationships between characters instead of grasping at cheap spectacle, then it could have been a truly special film, and helped redefine what is possible in a Marvel movie. As it is, we get the hints of that small story, washed out by broad strokes that never gel into a cohesive work of art, as if somebody plastered a miniature by Van Gogh into the center of a Jackson Pollock canvas (and splattered a bit of random paint across it in a vain effort to unify the two).

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