The New Captain America Film Has Important Lessons for Trump and Biden Stans
At the time that I write this review, Captain America: Brave New World is one of the least popular Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films of all time. It has a mediocre Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 53 percent and, at the box office, is underperforming last year’s flop from the studio, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Anecdotally—but perhaps more ominously—I’ve seen all four Captain America movies in theaters, but this is the first one I can recall viewing in a nearly empty auditorium.
Personally, I enjoyed the movie—I rank it as better than the first installment, inferior to the second, and on par with the third—but more importantly, it is fascinatingly relevant. When director Julius Onah and his six cowriters crafted this screenplay, they could not have foreseen that a president from one of America’s major parties would drop out of the election in disgrace while the other party’s candidate would prevail only to abuse his power in a spectacle of chaos and retribution.
I refer, of course, to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, respectively. But first, let’s review the actions of President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford), who, despite turning into an angry red monster in the third act, is still a far superior president to either Biden or Trump.
Warning: Spoilers follow!
Captain America: Brave New World tells the story of Captain America/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as he attempts to stop mad scientist Leader/Samuel Stearns (Tim Blake Nelson) from starting an unprovoked war on America’s allies as vengeance against Ross for imprisoning him. In order to achieve this goal, Stearns taints Ross’s heart pills with gamma radiation, which means he can be involuntarily transformed into the Red Hulk during pivotal moments.
A would-be terrorist launching a coup against America by messing with our nation’s foreign policy has some real-world parallels from Trump’s actions in Ukraine that got him impeached the first time to Biden’s messy extraction from Afgha
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