Brave New World’ Should Have Been ‘Falcon And The Winter Soldier’

I’m still thinking about Captain America: Brave New World and why it felt so strange to me. It was meant to be an espionage thriller (spoilers follow) in the vein of The Winter Soldier, and yet there was no real conspiracy (no traitors, just a guy randomly mind-controlling people) and a twist that was given away in the first trailer (Ross turning into Red Hulk in the Rose Garden).

Despite some decent action and Anthony Mackie doing pretty well, this didn’t feel like the film it was supposed to be. In fact, it felt like a worse version of something we’d already seen: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

The Disney Plus series was the last time we saw Sam Wilson in live action, and that aired all the way back in 2021. That was also an espionage thriller, it also dealt with Sam struggling with the mantle of being the new Captain America. But despite some issues, it felt like this should have been what Brave New World was instead of what we got. A few things:

• The chemistry between Wilson and Bucky is sorely missed in Brave New World and reduced to a cameo. It also would have been a good set-up for the imminently released Thunderbolts as well.
• Wilson struggling to take the mantle and being replaced by the supposedly Steve Rogers-like John Walker who fails to uphold the values of the shield was a much better way of portraying this transition than Brave New World beginning without any of that, especially given that a fraction of people even watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier compared to this new film, so they missed that entire arc.
• There was at least some level of espionage and conspiracy here with the Power Broker. This part was not well-handled with the reveal of Sharon Carter as the big bad, but with some script modification and most importantly editing this somewhat bloated series to fit into a movie, it could have worked.

A big problem was that Brave New World felt like a sequel to The Incredible Hulk back in 2008, returning to plotlines involving Ross and Samuel Sterns, and Sam’s actual relationships are reduced to training his wise-cracking Falcon replacement. Nothing with Bucky other than that cameo, no significant grappling with taking over the mantle that came off better with the Walker plotline. And no real espionage. Plus very weird asides like making the main conflict about a giant statue in the ocean from a movie that again, was little watched and came out in 2021, Eternals.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a good show that could have been great edited down. Brave New World was an okay movie that I would argue did not really need to exist, and FatWS would have served Sam better. But what’s done is done.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.