RED GAMMA, WHITE HOUSE BLUES
By:
March 2, 2025
One in a series of occasional detours from Adam McGovern’s irregularly scheduled column OFF-TOPIC.
I saw and am reviewing Captain America: Brave New World more than two weeks after it came out, but that’s OK, it was too late for this movie before it started. It’s a signal of what’s to come when the “Captain America” part is left out of the title at the beginning; it’s there when the end credits roll but as always, Sam Wilson and Anthony Mackie have had to prove themselves all over again. It’s strange to be the main character and then have the movie be built around someone else, but that’s what makes us feel like Sam so I guess he’s our star, for what good that does. The movie is really about Thaddeus Ross, the old and tragic President (admittedly one of Harrison Ford’s best performances), and befitting a warhorse past his prime and desperate to leave a decent legacy, this film is an artifact of a future that already didn’t happen. Serially delayed and with multiple rewrites/reshoots but still wrapping by the end of June 2024, it arrives as likely the only mass-culture epitaph for the Biden era. (Any other metaphor is coincidental, though a major plot-point has the President swallowing literal poison pills that put him in a… red state.)
Ross, previously known in the MCU as the general obsessed with subduing the Hulk and the Secretary of State intent on making all superheroes register or go to prison, is now bent on showing the world (and his estranged daughter) he’s changed, by averting a global resource-war over a miraculous new element the planet should share, while covering up his ill health and his debt to a certain evil benefactor. Wilson navigates his ambivalence about being the national symbol serving this iffy leader, being alternately co-opted and disowned by him anyway, and unraveling the secret agendas behind a spiraling crisis.
For anyone (everyone) who lived through the overdue exit of our previous President, the existential dread of a young and capable hero with formidable abilities and no authority operating under the impulses of a geriatric leader clinging to power does not take an MIT-degreed political analyst to figure out, so instead one of those types is freed up to be the villain. Samuel Sterns (“The Leader” from Hulk comics), who we last saw gaining mutant brainpower from a gamma-radiation accident in The Incredible Hulk (2008), is pulling the strings and keeping Ross compromised from his black-ops prison cell, narrating his master plans by spouting numerical “probabilities.” In real life the consultant class doomed this country through their obsession with statistical intel over human intelligence (those micro-parsed votes that the Democrats just needed to squeeze out of a handful of swing states rather than, y’now, having most of the country even know who their candidate was), and Wilson becomes Sterns’ sworn enemy because Sam acts in ways which “surprise” him.
Wilson’s defiant belief in people and demands of himself (“If we can’t see the good in each other we’ve already lost the fight”) certainly do come as a surprise in the America we’ve ended up with, and he speaks for us all at the end when he thanks Ross for owning his mistakes and stepping down; it fits that the film gives us no idea who was Vice President, because a re-imprisoned Sterns assures Wilson that nothing will make a difference. In the inevitable post-credits teaser, he delivers a brief ad for the upcoming Avengers sequel in which alternate worlds outside the one Sam’s just saved will collide (and I guess he means assorted timelines from the Loki series and the Deadpool franchise, not, y’know, China against Taiwan or Hamas vs. Trump’s Gaza Riviera). We always knew a Harris victory was going to leave us with the same rightwing drain-circling and neoliberal drift, just drawn out for a few more movies we’ve seen before; over the next two years we’re left to find out whether Sam and his team can pull off any more surprises as we sit down to watch in a world without bravery.
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2024 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE