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Captain America: Brave New World

Directed by Julius Onah ◆ Written by Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Julius Onah, and Peter Glanz ◆ Produced by Marvel Studios ◆ Distributed by Walt Disney Studios

An elderly but aggressive populist politician with anger issues and estranged relatives reaches the pinnacle of political power on a platform of national unity. A quest for a rare resource leads him into ruthless international competition and conflict with America’s allies and a dastardly betrayal of loyal Americans at home, as well as some gratuitous terrorizing of innocent Third Worlders. All the while, he is secretly dependent on a malevolent individual who played a clandestine role in helping him reach the highest office, and who expects payback in nefarious ways that contradict morals and the national interest.

It’s no accident that this plot of the latest Captain America film franchise sounds like a summary of the conspiracy theories advanced to undermine President Donald J. Trump—all of which were debunked after lengthy investigation or simply defy any sane conception of reality. The Nigerian-American director Julius Onah, the auteur of several undistinguished feature films on other topics and the son of a diplomat who, in addition to holding a Washington posting that brought Onah to our shores, served as Nigeria’s ambassador to North Korea, indulges this strange plot in the fourth and long-delayed film in the franchise: Captain America: Brave New World.

Released in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, Brave New World is the first film of Marvel Studios’ comic book superhero to appear in what is now coming to be called “The Age of Trump.” The first three, released between 2011 and 2016, were anodyne affairs, crowd-pleasing works of popular culture. They were apparently so devoid of artistic merit that in 2019 the legendary director Martin Scorsese publicly lamented that Marvel films are “not cinema” because they lack “revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger.” 

“Nothing is at risk,” Scorsese concluded of their predictable plots, in which clearly identifiable good always triumphs over unambiguous evil. He noted with trepidation and “terrible sadness” that we now live in a world that is “brutal and inhospitable to art” because comic book films dominate theatrical marquees at the expense of true cinema.

One might be tempted to dismiss Onah’s first feature film foray into the Marvel Universe as yet another addition to the collection of popular culture artifacts Scorsese derides. But in its desecration of an American superhero icon, his film, which entered development a few weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, does present a mystery rooted in emotional danger, and resolves it with what Onah imagines to be a revelation.

Spinning off from a 2021 six-episode Disney+ streamed series that was itself launched from the earlier Captain America films, Brave New World opens with President Thaddeus Ross’s rise and quick descent into intrigues with America’s enemies. A newly emerged landmass in the Indian Ocean contains a vast supply of a new metal, adamantium, of incredible strength. A refined supply stolen from Japan turns up at a Mexican monastery and is recovered at Ross’s behest by “enhanced individuals” of great strength and skill. The Japanese, however, receive secret intelligence that Ross was behind the original theft and has seized the world’s entire natural supply of adamantium after dissimulating that he wanted to share it for the general benefit of mankind.

As Ross weaves his self-serving plot, the sinister Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), an earlier Captain America villain who is severely deformed but endowed with superhuman intelligence, uses mind control techniques to manipulate people around him in order to move the planet toward a war that will destroy Ross. 

Only Captain America can save the day, but who is he in 2025? The character’s original appearance in the March 1941 first issue of the eponymous comic book introduced a fearless and powerful figure clad in red, white, and blue socking Adolf Hitler in the mouth. America would not be at war with Nazi Germany for another nine months, but comic book heroes of the era—almost entirely created by Jewish illustrators who understandably feared Nazism—mythologized a national spirit that would crush the enemies of righteousness, whether the country was yet at war with them or not.

Like DC Comics’ Superman and similar popular heroes, the trope of an avenger endowed with superhuman powers to keep the country and its people safe readily transferred to the Cold War world, where “truth, justice, and the American way” were at stake and cried out for defenders who always defeated evil, twisted, and vaguely foreign villains.

In recent years, this trope has sat poorly with leftist Hollywood, which routinely—even ritually—demonizes the values, people, institutions, and traditions that made America great. Superheroes held out for some time, but they were not immune to redefinitions that aligned them with modish cultural politics. Already in the early 2000s, the X-Men film franchise, which adapted Stan Lee’s 1960s comic book series, transformed its “mutant” characters from a small ensemble of protagonists born with their superpowers (Lee was by then tired of developing individual origin stories) to a large population of otherwise ordinary people with genetic variations that made them misunderstood and feared. 

Mutants, in other words, became stand-ins for groups like minorities and LGBTQ+ people, which the new X-Men films depicted as victims of a hostile mainstream society. In 2021, DC Comics changed Superman’s slogan from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”—in use since the 1940s—to the more progressive but far less inspiring “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.” By that time, in the post-George Floyd world, leftist politics so despised America that the very concept of an “American way” had come to hold an intrinsically negative valuation. Recall that in 2022, Stanford University included the adjective “American” on a list of terms it considered “harmful.”

The inherent patriotism of the Captain America character resisted these forces longer, but by the time of the 2021 Disney+ series the cracks were starting to show. The franchise’s continuing conceit was that as the original Captain America aged, successors rising among “enhanced individuals” who had received specialized military training would take his place. Sam Wilson, played reasonably well by Anthony Mackie in the Disney+ series and in Brave New World, does not start as a bold superhero but only grows into the role after overcoming crippling self-doubt and moral quandries about his country. Unlike all previous Captain Americas, Mackie—almost predictably—is black. In Brave New World, filmed by a black director and written by a majority-black team, the major villain his character must defeat is a white president who bears an “origin story” that is remarkably similar to Trump’s life, and played with effortless authority by Harrison Ford. 

“Ross is on his own side. He always has been,” we hear of the fictional president, a charge far from unknown in current political life. The final confrontation scene, in which a more traditional Captain America would have battled insidious foreign enemies to patriotic cheers, sees an overmedicated and highly manipulated Ross lose his composure to the point that he morphs into a colossal “red hulk,” a monster ruled by anger who proceeds to toss helicopters, smash up the White House, and tear down its famous Rose Garden. He faces off against Mackie’s skilled and collected Captain America at Washington’s Tidal Basin, where the city’s famous cherry blossoms bloom in the spring. It obvious the filmmaker was thinking of another red-colored force wreaking havoc across the Beltway.

For all the film’s anti-Trump connotations, Onah holds the possibility that the president can be redeemed, if only he gives in to liberal sensibilities. In his red hulk form, a creature of rage, the landing of a gentle cherry blossom in the palm of his hand is enough of a prompt to convince him to embrace empathy, return to his old self as a normal, if frail, human being, and resolve all conflicts through an apologetic humility. Ross ends the film incarcerated, having found within himself, we are told, the courage to “take full responsibility for [his] actions and let the country move on,” two things Trump’s opponents have loudly accused him of not doing. Surrendering in this way nearly makes the president respectable.

“If we can’t see the good in each other, we’ve already lost the fight,” Mackie’s Captain America says, in a way that an uncompromising superhero defending our nation would probably never concede about its worst enemies. Did his comic book ancestor stop to contemplate the signs of goodness in Hitler’s face before he punched it? 

Several aspects of the movie are derivative of other, better films. Harrison Ford aboard the presidential plane recalls Air Force One and the naval and aeronautic conflict with Japan is reminiscent of Midway, while the mind control scenes come more or less straight from the Manchurian Candidate (the poor 2004 remake of the 1962 original also starred Mackie).

The performances of some supporting cast members were more compelling than the lead roles, such as Giancarlo Esposito as a minor villain, which rated more screentime than he received.

Despite its attempts to make an anti-Trump political statement, the film’s plot is too bizarre, its intrigue too scattered, and the supporting cast too unconnected to amount to a coherent message. That was probably to the film’s benefit, given that the majority of Marvel’s demographic of 18-to-29 year-old males voted for Trump. They’ve also made Brave New World the country’s top grossing film of 2025 so far.