Never trust a president, even if he’s an elderly but still charismatic Harrison Ford. That’s one way to interpret Captain America: Brave New World.
In theory, Brave New World is the fourth movie in the Captain America subfranchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the first to star Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, the not-quite-super-soldier previously known as Falcon, in the title role. But it’s really more of a sequel to an old and better-forgotten Marvel movie, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Except in this case, the hulk is cherry red—and also the president of the United States, played by Ford.
Yes, it’s a superhero movie about a president with rage issues. Billed as a conspiracy thriller, a sort of super-powered riff on Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View, the movie, which reportedly went through multiple significant reshoots, contains only the barest hints of actual, substantive politics. The final film is a muddled, ugly mess.
Even stripped of both narrative coherence and political specificity, it’s hard not to see it as a loose allegory for President Donald Trump. It’s a story about an aging, out-of-control executive who cozies up to a brilliant but disreputable genius—Samuel Sterns, a supervillain known to comics fans as The Leader—who manipulates the president into becoming a red rage monster. The film was shot, scripted, and arduously reshot long before Trump linked arms with Elon Musk, but the parallels are hard to overlook.
In the end, the rage-crazed Ford bulks up both his body and his presidential authority. It’s a warning, however disjointed, about the perils of supercharged executive power run amok.
