deerstalker
https://www.themarysue.com/aubrey-plaza-honored-her-late-husband-with-a-t-shirt-during-snl50/
Saturday Night Live held its 50th anniversary celebrations last night and it was an extremely star-studded affair. Sabrina Carpenter was there, Meryl Streep was there, Tom Hanks was there… the list goes on. But one appearance was deeply poignant. Aubrey Plaza took the stage for the first time since the tragic death of her husband Jeff Baena, and she hid a tribute to him in her chosen outfit.
Baena, a film director, passed away in early January. Suicide was the cause of death. His passing provoked a lot of heartfelt tributes from all across the entertainment industry and a lot of sorrow for Plaza. She and her family released a statement a few days later: “This is an unimaginable tragedy. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has offered support. Please respect our privacy during this time.”
Saturday Night Live held its 50th anniversary celebrations last night and it was an extremely star-studded affair. Sabrina Carpenter was there, Meryl Streep was there, Tom Hanks was there… the list goes on. But one appearance was deeply poignant. Aubrey Plaza took the stage for the first time since the tragic death of her husband Jeff Baena, and she hid a tribute to him in her chosen outfit.
Baena, a film director, passed away in early January. Suicide was the cause of death. His passing provoked a lot of heartfelt tributes from all across the entertainment industry and a lot of sorrow for Plaza. She and her family released a statement a few days later: “This is an unimaginable tragedy. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has offered support. Please respect our privacy during this time.”
President Donald Trump defends the social media platform he tried to “save” from shutdown, “tic-tac.” Despite the clear mispronunciation, Trump was clearly referring to TikTok. It’s ironically the same platform he tried to ban during his first term as president.
At the Oval Office, President Trump held a press conference regarding the reciprocal tariffs he signed against several different countries. Brazil, India, and the EU will have different goods hit with Trump’s new tariffs under his “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” on trade. Trump also talked about a range of issues, including Ukraine and Russia’s ongoing war. An interviewer asked Trump if Ukraine would be involved in peace talks with Russia.
Captain America: Brave New World is out and looking to bring audiences back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Packed with just the right balance of action and story, with a feeling that this phase has a different tone altogether. A movie positioned between two controversies. The fictional “controversy” of featuring a Black Captain America during a legitimized fascist coup. The real controversy of highlighting an Israeli operative during a Palestinian genocide. Does Brave New World bring enough to the table to see past the shadow of its bad press? Let’s get into it.
Red, White, Blue, and Black Too
Anthony Mackie picks up right where he left off after The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, as the newly knighted Captain America. Forced into the spotlight as the iconic hero known as the ‘symbol of the American dream’.
From the final monologue of TF/TWS, Sam Wilson told us exactly what time he’s on. He’s here to do what’s right in defense of human rights – regardless of what any government interest has to say about it. Whether it’s the left or the right. A full three-sixty from his Civil War-era ‘do what they tell us’ stance. He’s a bit of a wildcard for the U.S. government, but they don’t question his allegiance to the country or the power of his symbolism as Captain America.
Mackie leans into his Captain America, and the character is better for it. He’s all of the gravitas, the discipline, and righteousness with none of the ‘Super Soldier Serum.’ Like Jackie Chan or Batman Beyond, this is the hero going into the fight knowing they are skating uphill. But he’s going in anyway, taking his lumps and still coming out on top. There’s a grit to Mackie’s performance of Sam Wilson that was always on the surface. His bravado came across as plucky in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and became more ‘capable but reluctant’ through to Endgame. Brave New World gets to the depth of who he is. Sam Wilson wasn’t even this fleshed out as a character until Rick Remender made him Captain America in the comics in 2014, and now he’s in living color (pun intended) as Cap, onscreen in 2025!
[Blerd note: Mind you, the character’s publication history starts in 1969. By 2014 that’s a whole forty-five years of existence with mild to limited substantial growth before an explosion that takes the character into the strata of pop culture and film. Ten more years after that, a lead role in the MCU.]
Anthony Mackie, in essence, puts his spin on being Cap the way Sam had to in the comics. There’s a nuanced layering: Anthony Mackie is playing Sam Wilson, who was The Falcon and now The Falcon is Captain America. In Brave New World, Sam Wilson finally owns being Captain America, and so does Mackie.
About the Movie…
Brave New World enters the MCU as a political thriller. Director Julius Onah employs the same genre vehicle the Russo brothers designed for Captain America movies from The Winter Soldier. Popping in and out between multiple locations connected by narrative thread, making the world feel smaller and smaller and the threat larger and larger. The action is clean, Sam isn’t Steve Rogers, and it shows in the best ways. Without enhanced strength, the effort and precision skills make fights tighter and more close up. The action pieces move the plot along, but the plot is muddled and a little unclear tonally. Here’s why: we can’t tell whose movie this is.
The Ross Effect
Harrison Ford steps in for William Hurt (who passed from cancer in 2022) as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who becomes President of the United States and is revealed in the trailer to become the red Hulk. Ross is a rare MCU character who elevates the Hulk lore by using military might to measure and showcase Hulk’s strength. Ross also grounds the Avengers’ lore by noting how their actions impact ‘real people’.
Ross was born in the comic pages as a Hulk nemesis and mainstay who matriculated from the page to the screen in the Incredible Hulk movie. The end credit scene for that movie finds Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark walking into a bar to tell Ross he’s ‘putting together a team’. On its own, that scene blurred the line between what we know to be a Hulk movie and what we would come to expect from an Avengers movie. Ross’s presence changes the tone of a Marvel movie. Brave New World can’t decide if it’s a Hulk movie or a Captain America movie. It feels like an Avengers movie shoehorned into a Captain America movie, stuffed into a Hulk movie. Adding Tim Blake Nelson’s reprisal of Samuel Sterns/Leader into the mix so heavily only further muddled things.
Sit-Rep
Brave New World is a high-quality action movie trying to do work on two fronts. It tries to broaden the galactic lore by adding the Eternal in the ocean that no one has referenced since The Eternals. It also tries to broaden the Earth-based lore by reintroducing super soldier espionage, trying to reestablish the gamma wars, and folding the Serpent Society (Sam Wilson’s primary nemesis from the comics) into the MCU.
There are a lot of great performances, but they can’t overshadow the many (obvious) changes, cuts, and reshoots that make the movie feel like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces almost fitting together. There’s also a strange and cringe-inducing, “Can’t we all just get along?” and “Can’t we disagree and still be friends?” vibe that is being echoed throughout media at large.
[Note from the writer: The military takes center stage in this movie in a way that feels more like the closeted ‘support’ messaging in the Transformers franchise and Top Gun movies. It’s not too much, but it is noticeable in the current political climate. I know all of the main characters are military-involved, but there’s something present that wasn’t there before. Just a feeling.]
Performances
Legend of the stage and screen Carl Lumbly was cast perfectly as the surly and (rightfully) untrusting ‘forgotten’ Captain America, Isaiah Bradley. But where there was so much latitude to engage in that painful yet triumphant legacy, he gets used as a pawn for the unclear plot. Another luminary actor, Giancarlo Esposito dropped in and did his thing as lethal assassin and arms dealer Sidewinder. Danny Ramirez returns as Joaquin Torres, the unofficial new Falcon, and does his thing. Ramirez is engaging, funny, and electric. But the comic reader in me knows he’s supposed to be genetically engineered human with bird features who becomes The Falcon. Either way, Ramirez delivers.
Tim Blake Nelson tones down his villainous Dr. Samuel Sterns to spectacular effect. The Leader feels like he’s coming into his own and is scarier and very believable. Harrison Ford has played the President in quite a few movies, but I don’t know that he has ever been pressed to act with this level of dramatic flair in some time. Ford’s Ross is as accurate a comic book portrayal as Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. The nuance of duty, pride, power, and anger of Ross’ character are conveyed convincingly by Ford – that’s just good casting. Also, a Hulk has never looked as good as this. Hats off to the visual teams.
The Elephant in The Room
I will say this as dryly as I can. There was no reason I can fathom for the use of Shira Haas’ turn as Ruth Bat-Seraph in this movie. The blowback and protest facing this movie must’ve made enough impact that the studio just cut her out as often as possible. (They cut so much, I couldn’t even critique her performance accurately.) The move to have the character in the movie has been called ‘insensitive’ by pro-Palestine advocates in media, academia, and political organizations. Marvel Studios’ removal of her history with the Mossad and superhero identity Sabra, a move called anti-Semitic by pro-Israel advocates in the same fields. What stands out is that this character could only serve one purpose for the MCU (spoilers later on). We get glimpses, but not enough to make it make more sense than that someone wanted Israeli representation onscreen in the MCU. There’s so much quietly at play surrounding the choices to include and then amend this character that cast a bad light on Brave New World’s opening week.
Haas portrays the civilian identity of the Israeli superhero Sabra. In the comics, Sabra is an Israeli mutant who comes to work for the Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service. Created in the 1980s, Sabra is another one of the characters designed to be a counterpart to Captain America and the super soldier program like Black Widow’s Red Guardian.
From New World Order to Brave New World
In Brave New World, she’s Ruth Bat-Seraph, former Black Widow assassin and security advisor to President Ross. No shade, but the appointment of a foreign national former assassin to a government agency makes as much sense as Elon Musk’s appointment to DOGE. I say that to say, the unique value this character would have brought to the MCU was the integration of mutants into the lore. Without that, feels kinda flat.
The Marvels brought the X-Men’s Beast to the screen, but this would have brought mutants to the *checks notes* 616 universe proper. What makes this take hot, you ask? The inclusion of Adamantium – in the form of a giant Eternal poking out of the Earth’s core and into the Indian Ocean. Stern’s warning about attacks from other worlds. The movie’s title changing from “New World Order” to “Brave New World”. Which I thought was a clear signal to mutants joining the fold and changing the hierarchy of power in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (lol). None of it makes any clear sense other than a way to inflate her importance by using her to introduce mutants to this part of the MCU.
[Blerd Take: Does Ross step down from the Presidency and get replaced by his running mate, Senator Robert Kelly????]
Add to that a scene where Bat-Seraph is wearing a superhero costume under her coat, never to be seen again and you get a clear picture that the character was also shoehorned into this movie. But it also reminds the world at large that this character was put here intentionally and despite tragic, damning, well-documented, and continued war crimes.
Coulda Been a Contender
To be honest, Brave New World could have been a sleeper hit for the MCU. It will still do good box office numbers. It will still get boosted by Black outlets and publications for Black History Month. The performances are strong, and the world-building is seeding potential for some cool future projects. All of this will obscure that it gets bogged down by choices that make the studio seem out of touch with the grounding that made it a sensation for almost two decades. To anyone paying close attention to world news, it distracts from what could have been a movie about the Black Captain America by ignoring the real-life politics of a world that is neither brave nor new.
Want to get Black Nerd Problems updates sent directly to you? Sign up here! Follow us on BlueSky ,Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram!
The post ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ – Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.