Kevin Feige’s spent the last few years immersed in nostalgia — that’s what lies at the heart of the MCU’s “Multiverse Saga,” but starting off the post-Endgame phase with Black Widow should have signaled which way the winds were blowing even before Kang the Conquerer came and went — and it’s understandable why. Most of his attempts to move the cinematic universe into a new era haven’t been particularly good or well-received (Eternals), and the ones that have proven to be decent hits have been quickly forgotten (looking at you, Shang-Chi), so doubling down on formulas that worked in the past is, perhaps, the best way to weather the storm until audiences flock to see RDJ ham it up as Doctor Doom. But if you asked me what periods in his tenure I think Feige has the fondest memories of, I’d bypass a lot of the obvious choices (the first Iron Man, The Avengers, Black Panther, 2018-2019 as a whole) and say that he really, really misses the months after Captain America: The Winter Soldier hit theaters, and Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World is a solid bit of evidence towards that conclusion, given how hard it wants to evoke those glory days.
Their stories are absurdly similar, albeit with the emotional core of the film stripped out: you have a superhero with a legacy and ideals to uphold who, after wearing a dumb costume in their last outing, goes up against a government conspiracy that shakes their faith in institutions but re-commits them to their values. The first time around, it was Steve Rogers going up against S.H.I.E.L.D.; this time, it’s Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) taking on the president, the recently-elected “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, taking over for the dearly departed William Hurt). Much like Robert Redford’s Alexander Pierce was a creature of the alphabet agencies and cutthroat espionage, Ross is a man of the military-industrial complex, with plenty of skeletons in his closet (though, unlike Pierce, he had plenty of regrets, mainly around how his relationship with his daughter Betty collapsed after he hunted down her ex-boyfriend, Bruce Banner, and leveled Harlem in the process). For whatever reason, Sam’s forgotten the lessons he should have learned after Winter Soldier and has started working with the government once again as an operative. He and Steve were both military men, and in their aimlessness after their big debuts, they turned to Black Ops work for a purpose, though Rogers didn’t benefit from hindsight.
Brave New World opens with one of those missions, though instead of battling Batroc the Leaper on the high seas, Sam has tracked Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito, a hastily-added third antagonist in the reshoots), leader of the Serpent Society to a convent in Mexico. There’s supposed to be an arms deal going on there, or at least it seems that way, but the buyer never shows. After a short battle, the villain escapes, and Sam’s able to secure the package, which isn’t a weapon at all — it’s a sample of Adamantium, a new metal taken straight from the heart of that big ol’ Celestial corpse in the Pacific (the first time Marvel, to my knowledge, has recognized Eternals in any way in a mainline film). Ross is working with several other countries on a treaty to settle disputes over this mineral’s rights, as it’s open season on the remains. However, interested parties have their reasons for wanting the treaty’s failure, mostly because of how much they personally hate Ross. As you know, it’s a bad thing to piss off nerds when they have the password to your computer, your medical records, access to technology, and plenty of time. So, when the treaty’s announced at a private White House ceremony, a group of mind-controlled men in the room suddenly leap to action and try to assassinate the assembled world leaders (if they really wanted to have this plan succeed, they’d dehydrate all of them like in Batman: The Movie from ’66).
One of these mind-controlled assassins is Isaiah Bradley (the always-delightful Carl Lumbly), the “second” Captain America circa the Korean War, who was imprisoned and experimented on by the government for years and years to see if they could use his blood to duplicate the original Super-Soldier serum that gave Rogers his superhuman abilities. When apprehended, he remembers little from the evening — aside from his phone bugging out before the action went down. He has every reason to want to kill the president, and as Sam’s mentor (and guest to the ceremony), Wilson knows he’s innocent — even if Bradley hated the government, he wouldn’t do something that stupid — but everyone else only sees the likeliest probability. This includes Ross’s chief of security, Ruth (Shira Haas, who had her character’s origins as an Israeli superhero named Sabra stripped out in reshoots), who is in charge of investigating the shooting. Inspired, perhaps, by Steve’s insistence that his memory-wiped friend could be redeemed (at least on the screenwriters’ part), Sam decides to go rogue, looking for answers with the help of his pal Joaquin (Danny Ramirez), the new Falcon after it was decided that Sam would wield the shield, and what they uncover is a plan to start nothing less than World War III. Meanwhile, Ross is feeling a little anxious, paranoid, and weird — it turns out one might not want to make him angry. Thanks to all those doctored pills he’s been taking, you really wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
Anyhow, back to the point: This is a Temu knock-off compared to Winter Soldier. Say what you will about the Russo Brothers, but they cracked the code on how to make a post-Avengers MCU movie flirt with other genres and tones while still captivating the masses, with no Iron Man 3 backlash in sight. The first ingredient was compelling writing and storytelling — rarely has the inter-film evolution of a Marvel protagonist been so competently realized — and the film introduced and complicated things way more than it rehashed them. Chief among them was Mackie, who was smart casting then and remains so today, as his easy charisma and affability give him the charm to go along with his badass action. He was a human element dropped into the world of super soldiers and super-spies, a winged Batman without the money but with the grit. It’s a novel and interesting perspective for a powerless man to take on the role of a superhero (even before you get to what it represents for a Black man to become the face of American super-heroics, at least in the MCU), but there’s a giant sign reading “Watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+!” where all that development should be.
Importantly, he was also the solution to Steve’s man-out-of-time syndrome — a connection across the ages that cemented the immutable, idealized qualities of the average American soldier — hadn’t totally eroded away with the waves of change that swept the globe since Steve went into the ice. There is nothing like that for Sam here, nor is there anything as complex as the Cap/Bucky relationship or as shocking as the S.H.I.E.L.D. betrayal, pushed over the finish line by Redford’s sliminess. Ross just isn’t as compelling of an antagonist (much less the person pulling the strings, who has a Bryan Singer X-Men design because Green Lantern fucked up big-headed brainiacs permanently), though it is fun when Ford hams it up once he starts seeing red. However, the status quo roughly remains the same once the credits roll — you at least felt that things were forever changed in the MCU at the end of Winter Soldier.
So, you’ll be disappointed if you’re watching this as the Next Installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you’ll be even more frustrated if you’re trying to see a semi-decent blockbuster action movie. Onah, a compelling director of drama when not tasked with near-Herculean efforts of franchise restoration, isn’t so much responsible for this, as it’s clear that, as Feige’s grip has firmed on the product line and Disney’s come to expect returns, some corners have been cut. The second unit action directors were left out to dry (part of the reason the film spent so long on the shelf was that the action sequences were a significant issue in test screenings, hence the reshoots), and you can see the stitching on the patchwork of hastily-edited action. There’s nothing here even vaguely as compelling as the elevator fight in Winter Soldier, even when the Red Hulk rears his head and starts wreaking havoc. It’s an unfair comparison, given that that fight (to say nothing of the film itself) was the high watermark for MCU action – three-point landings are just fucking boring compared to a single-location tight-space fight with some excellent DTV action stars participating in the fracas.
So, why Winter Soldier? Sure, it’s the best Captain America movie and probably the best MCU movie not directed by James Gunn or Shane Black, but, more importantly, its release was also the moment that Marvel stumbled into being taken seriously by critics and audiences. It came out less than a year after Edward Snowden’s Big Adventure (in which he went to Russia to find his lost bike after spilling the beans on a massive surveillance program — stay tuned for Big Top Eddie coming soon to a Twitter profile near you), at a point in which cynicism was slowly on the rise after the heady days of the first Obama Administration. Aside from this accidental relevance, it also roughly looked and felt like the paranoid cinema of Alan J. Pakula and his ilk, with its shady government conspiracies (albeit with better hairdos than Warren Beatty’s in The Parallax View) and spycraft intrigue – Three Days of the Condor was a point of comparison, though it was often lumped into the “’70s political thriller” grouping that some critics used to pump up Marvel’s cinematic bona fides.
After a half-decade of floundering, with varying attempts at seriousness failing (Black Widow’s human trafficking opening, Eternals’ attempt at Kubrickian cosmic wonder), is it any wonder that Feige would miss the days in which he could produce a decent movie and have them cited in the same sentences as masterpieces which evoked a national mood? This is a relatable yearning – for the prestige that moment gave him and his work, the period’s relatively uncomplicated semi-stability, and the ease with which things seemed to fall into place – but applied to a blockbuster; it’s both too soon to fondly look back at a film barely a decade old (which barely shows any signs of age) and too late to apply the lessons learned from its success to help Brave New World in any meaningful way.