By Michael Marano

Captain America: Brave New World, which is loaded with potential for drama and commentary, has less weight and punch than a butterfly’s fart.

Captain America: Brave New World, directed by Julius Onah. Screening throughout New England.

Anthony Mackie as Captain America. Photo: Marvel Entertainment

It’s astonishing to think back to just how utterly fantastic the first Iron Man movie was back in 2008.

To me, a lifelong comic book geek, Iron Man felt like an apotheosis — something for me to hold up and say why, as a grown-ass man, I still avidly read the four-color “smash! pow! whammo!” stuff I started collecting when I was six. Iron Man had three Oscar winners in leading roles. A real director. Cinematography that lent an actual sense of place. The best rat-a-tat-tat, snappy dialogue and delivery since Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday. A great screenplay featuring a main character’s redemptive arc that felt like a redemptive arc for star Robert Downey Jr. himself, who’d hit a bunch of rough patches since his triumph in Chaplin in 1992. There’s a goddamn reason why Iron Man was added to the National Film Registry in 2022. Lots of reasons, in fact.

Allow me to paraphrase esteemed stage director Peter Brook, who said that drama works because it’s a concentrate of real life; things that take three hours to play out in real life take three minutes on stage. The first Iron Man was a concentrate of everything that is awesome about comic books (same with other great comic book movies, like 1978’s Superman, Spider-Man 2, and Black Panther). The first Iron Man took decades of Tony Stark lore and mainlined it into two hours, making it palatable for tens of millions of people who’d never picked up a comic book in their lives.

The recent spate of Marvel movies have been dilutions of what makes comic books awesome.

Shit, they’ve been dilutions of what had once made Marvel movies awesome. Quantumania (Arts Fuse review). The Eternals. The Marvels. Dilutions and flops, all. Yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (Arts Fuse review) and Deadpool & Wolverine were hits, but I thought they sucked.

Captain America: Brave New World, which is loaded with potential for drama and commentary, has less weight and punch than a butterfly’s fart. Again, look back to Iron Man. It was a goddamn funny book movie, but it tackled the US occupation of Afghanistan in a way that no other mainstream movie I can think of back then did. Captain America: Brave New World (hereafter, CA:BNW) is about the former Falcon Sam Wilson, a Black man, taking up the mantle of Captain America at a moment when people, in the name of “Liberty,” are trying to ban Black History from being taught in schools. Yeah, that cauldron has been stirred up a lot more in the past three weeks, since a certain mentally ill game show host got the nuclear codes. But these cultural forces have been cooking for ages. That CA:BNW doesn’t bother to tackle them is an abdication not just of political obligation, but obligation to the craft of storytelling itself. Yeah, there’s a subplot that touches on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that used Black men as guinea pigs. But it’s not handled with any bravery or purpose.

Iron Man handled the US occupation of Afghanistan, and that lent it dramatic weight that contributed to the concentration of comic book storytelling it achieved.

CA:BNW chickens out tackling race issues (yeah, there’s lip service, and not much else). And that contributes to the dilution that makes CA:BNW so weak.

Other factors watering down CA:BNW to a flavorless broth are frankly embarrassing patches of Info Dump exposition done via news reports, to the point that events the audience has just seen are regurgitated back to them, in case they missed the point. There’s yet another tired retread of the Manchurian Candidate “programmed killer” MacGuffin that, despite its triteness, comes off as the movie’s least offensive narrative fault. We’re treated to lines of dialogue like, “We got a limo!!” while we can plainly see the characters are in the limo. No drama is allowed to unfold as Sam talks about the ethics of serving a problematic administration as the new Captain America, no conflict. Its characters natter on about obvious issues as if they were presenting high school position papers, though they never rise above grammar school level. Obvious clues to a conspiracy take the best intelligence officers in the world forever to uncover, and they are only revealed because the plot necessitates it. A bad guy leaves all his notes out in the open and his computer up and running without password protections, just so the good guys can get enough information to nudge the movie past the Second Act.

And CA:BNW is also one of the most visually uninteresting and bland-looking movies I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s the cinematic equivalent of eating plain oatmeal in a beige room. For a movie about the Red White and Blue, everything is unaccountably washed out, lacking dynamic imagery or framing. CA:BNW looks like it was shot to look wicked cool on a 2008 iPhone, and the screen of the iPhone we’re watching it on is smeared with pizza-grease thumbprints.

Now, it might seem unfair to critique a storyline shot before the current Trump junta took control. On top of that, I’m gonna go into spoiler territory. But here goes. In CA:BNW, Marvel stand-by Hulk antagonist General Ross not only becomes the US President, he’s tricked into becoming the new Red Hulk by Samuel Sterns, the brainy comic book bad guy called The Leader. Now I ask you: how are we supposed to take seriously the comic book villainy of a weirdly colored, rage-prone US President, manipulated and controlled by a self-styled “genius” basement dweller, who spouts a naked “America First!” policy that antagonizes our allies? When the deconstructive reality of Musk and Trump is a bajillion times worse than anything comic book reality can throw at us?

Isn’t that like trying to take HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds seriously, while trying to not get stomped by real Martian tripods?

If CA:BNW had any substance, it could have overcome these hurdles, but it doesn’t, and it can’t.

Take a look at 2008’s Iron Man.

Savor all those delicious qualities.

Appreciate all the depth, and all the narrative risks that were taken.

Look at all the potential that Marvel movies once had, and that they have squandered and diluted to meaninglessness.

It’s all kind of tragic.

Author, critic, personal trainer, and writing coach Michael Marano had his mind blown as a little kid in 1974, as the “Secret Empire” arc unfolded in the Captain America and the Falcon comics. In “Secret Empire,” a thinly disguised Richard Nixon stages a coup to stay in power. What?! A sitting President? Staging a coup to not give up the Oval Office? That’s crazy comic book stuff! It could never happen….