Amarvelca

The franchise is a foreign country.

Curiosity got me into the theater for Captain America: Brave New World. I didn’t expect excellence (and didn’t get it), but I don’t envy anyone who’s releasing an America-themed movie in 2025. I had to know. How would the movie address today’s America? Spoilers ahead.

It doesn’t.

Superhero universes balance competing goals of relatability and continuity. A series of high-stakes adventures changes the world if it goes long enough; 35 movies is quite enough. Half the Marvel population died and returned to life after five years. In Eternals (which few moviegoers saw), an alien Celestial nearly hatched out of the planet before being turned into metal—a valuable metal, as it turns out. These things affect people!

Most Marvel movies don’t foreground such oddities, but the Captain America films embrace them as an alternative to real issues that could divide the audience. So the current movie addresses mining rights to that Celestial rather than actual resource conflicts. And America goes to the brink of war with the purely-defensive-in-our-world Japanese military, rather than—oh, say—China or Russia.

The weirdest compromise is President Thaddeus Ross. As in Hulk comics, Ross has gone from leading the military against the Hulk to being a variety of Hulk himself.

Yet Ross now resembles his comics self less than what you’d get if you put our last two presidents into a blender. He’s corrupt and conscientious, puppet and would-be peacemaker, half confused rage-monster and half loving father. In the end, the Biden half wins: Ross surrenders power and goes to superprison. Donald Trump, who’s terrified of regular prison, would argue that being a Hulk just made him a better negotiator for his—er, for the nation’s interests.

To his credit, Harrison Ford is not just here for the paycheck: he sells the hell out of President Trumbiden and his scenes. But he can’t change the fact that a president who only turns red and rampages when provoked seems like a step up just now.

Meanwhile, Sabra—an Israeli superhero from older Marvel comics with outdated politics—is so divorced from her source material she might as well have been an original character.

Only Isaiah Bradley approaches real-world relevance. A Black super-soldier of yesteryear whom the government abused, Bradley is framed and jailed once again. His plea to police not to damage his suit is the movie’s hardest-hitting moment. If his prompt release at its end seems a bit implausible, I’m prepared to accept that in exchange for hope.

There’s no COVID in Marvel’s fantasy America; no election interference, no unfettered billionaires now that Tony Stark’s dead. The greatest threat in Brave New World is Samuel Sterns, the Hulk’s comic-book nemesis.

Movie Sterns is comics-accurate in the worst way. Writers often struggle with superintelligent characters, making them smart enough to seem menacing but full of overconfident mistakes when the plot calls for that. Even great comics writers who’ve worked on Sterns have had to concede he’s not as smart as he thinks, just for continuity’s sake. The movie doesn’t buck this trend.

Likewise, in the post-credits scene, the concern isn’t that some demagogue will seize power in the vacuum Ross left or that rising racist tides might engulf Sam Wilson for superheroing while Black. Instead, it’s Sterns’ claim that parallel universes are preparing to invade the United States of Amarvelca. Considering Sterns’ predictive track record, I wouldn’t worry too much about this.

Maybe he’s right this time, though. Given the choice, some of us in this America would move there ourselves.