The bad thing about the post-Endgame MCU is that the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you need to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier[1] to understand where this new Isaiah supersoldier character came from or why he should matter. On the other hand, that means you will have seen Sam Wilson spend six episodes coming to grips with whether Steve Rogers made the right choice about if he should even have a successor, nevermind if it should have been the Falcon. It’s not that I object to people having more than one crisis of confidence. But if you’re going to do it in the long form exploration of the character first, then it isn’t worth wasting three minutes on a slimmed down conversation covering the same beats during the movie second. At the least, reverse the order so it’s not a recap, it’s an expansion! Either way, don’t pretend like you must cover this ground again in case I didn’t see the TV show you already made it mandatory for me to have watched to understand different ground you’re covering.
But honestly, that was the only thing about the movie that rang hollow. Brave New World is a solidly middle of the road MCU movie, which makes it noticeably above average for what they’ve released in the past six years. The deal is, there’s an enormous statue made out of a new thing that we’ve never heard of before[2] called adamantium, which is kind of a big deal. Might even be better than Wakandan vibranium, once people figure out all the applications. So once general, then later Secretary of Defense, and most recently President Ross[3] is trying to broker a treaty with several other nations to freely share “Celestial Island” and the adamantium, instead of fighting wars over it.
…unless of course he’s the same dick he has always been, and has a whole other agenda. That, ultimately, is the pivot on which the entire movie turns. That, and whether Sam can unravel the truth in time to save his cool elderly mentor and/or the world.
I think I liked it because it was good, but I will admit that I may have liked it because there was basically no noise about a multiverse. I’m not saying multiverse bad, but I am saying Something Else Once in a While good.
[1] One of the first couple of MCU TV shows they made, which also means it’s been a minute, unless you’re the type of person who rewatches everything for the tie-ins, in which case you’d have needed this, the first (or possibly second) Hulk movie, probably Civil War, and Eternals, at the minimum. But I’ll come back to this point.
[2] Well, we the residents of MCU Earth at least. We the viewers just maybe have.
[3] So that thing from footnote 1 where you have to be familiar with an ever-expanding, ever more intricate web of knowledge to even follow what’s going on in these movies? I’m sorry, but I can only say good things about this. I eat that shit up. It is awesome with a capital A++. If you want to say that’s a weakness of the movies, then you do not understand comics in the first place.