Review: ‘Brave New World’ is the Marvel universe at its worst

By Jay Collura     2/18/25 10:40pm

Score: ★½

With each passing year, I have begun to question my undying allegiance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen every single film in theaters since 2011’s “Thor”; I was there at opening night for “Infinity War,” and inevitably, I will be seated front and center for, at the very least, “Fantastic Four” later this year.

However, the chokehold Disney’s flagship franchise has had on me over the years has loosened - it no longer dominates every single conversation I have, I am no longer speculating about the next villains and I have managed only to watch one of the 9,000 Disney+ shows that have been released over the last four years.

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At the same time, escaping from the depths of YouTube theories and Reddit speculation has been bittersweet. There is a reason why I jumped in the pit in the first place. 

MCU movies, even when they aren’t very good, tend to emphasize quality. The highs are wonderful action-adventure movies filled with legitimate comic-book charm, and the lows tend to be boring but solid in their craft. This consistency made the MCU work when so many other extended universes failed.

This is why “Captain America: Brave New World” is baffling. In the MCU’s time of need, in a franchise floundering about in the shadow of the emphatic conclusion that was “Endgame,” “Brave New World” has failed to deliver this bare minimum implied by the Marvel Studios label. 

It feels like a manifestation of my own waning interest in the series. It gave me a glimpse into the minds of the critics who have been skeptical of the franchise since it began.

I knew I was in for a rough time almost immediately. The introductory action sequence that all Marvel movies have tells you almost everything you need to know about the film. Clunky, cliched dialogue is exchanged haphazardly, and exposition is thrown at you almost immediately. 

This kind of opening is nothing new to comic book movie fans, but the way the actors are delivering these lines quickly keys the audience into the fact that this movie will not be very good.

The script’s immediate shoddiness is also complemented by absolutely awful CGI. Captain America’s initial fight looks like a cutscene from a video game that has awkwardly been superimposed into a real location. It’s visually distracting in a way that eliminates any goodwill that the choreography may build. 

As the film continues, neither of these core issues gets any better. The script is laughably on the nose and the performances are awkward. An indiscriminate application of bad CGI may be to blame for this latter issue. 

Oftentimes, characters talk to each other against backgrounds that are entirely computer-animated, giving the impression that nobody was ever in the same room as each other, and the whole film was made on a single soundstage.

All of this could be forgiven if the story was interesting, which, to a certain extent, it is. 

The film is about the new Captain America (formerly The Falcon, Anthony Mackie) solving a conspiracy surrounding the new president, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford). This political intrigue is the film’s strong suit, a choice cribbed from arguably the best MCU movie, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” 

Using that film’s core skeleton to structure the plot is a smart decision, and in a vacuum, each beat of the story was intriguing and kept me watching. 

But the issue is nothing is given the space to develop meaningfully. Things just happen without any sense of pace or reason. Characters are not given the space to develop, cool moments never take the time to develop suspense, and by the end of the film I was left wondering why it had to exist in the first place. 

This all is particularly frustrating because there is potential somewhere in the film. Intriguing internal conflicts for the two leads, Mackie and Ford, are vaguely gestured at, and the film attempts to have an inspired aesthetic that goes beyond the usual Marvel browns and greys. 

But all the film grain can’t save bad computer effects, and being inspired by political thrillers doesn’t make a broken script interesting.

I pity “Brave New World” because it’s clear something went wrong. Mackie and Ford are doing their best in a bad situation, and the film’s failure in fidelity speaks to a clearly troubled production. 

There’s a good movie somewhere buried within this one, but it’s hard not to rip into something that fails to deliver on its franchise’s signature promise. I hope “Brave New World” is taken as a lesson, a moment of clarity that enables a course correction away back toward the solid foundation that the franchise was built on. 

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