“You’re not Steve Rogers,” growls Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross with signature Harrison Ford crankiness in Captain America: Brave New World, the new Marvel movie coming to theaters next week. It’s a point the man he’s addressing, the man in the stars and stripes, confidently concedes. Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) spent some of his Disney+ vehicle The Falcon and the Winter Soldier doubting his fitness to carry the shield Rogers, the original Captain America, passed down to him. In Brave New World, Sam has fully assumed the mantle of his mentor, and judging from scenes of Mackie swooping through the air on mechanical wings, he’s going to do the whole national superhero thing his own way. He’s not trying to be Steve.
Still, those are big combat boots to fill, aren’t they? The character’s retirement hung heavily over The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and it will almost certainly continue to hang over Brave New World, the same way that other Marvel movies have grappled with the deaths of Tony Stark and T’Challa. At this point in its lifespan, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is almost defined by absence — textually, given the temporary halving of its ranks with The Snap, but also extratextually, given the stars the franchise has lost over the past few years. But if the Avengers are down a few heavy hitters, it might be Steve Rogers whose departure is most keenly felt. He was, after all, the moral and dramatic center of this 17-year-old series.
The First Avenger, so dubbed for his origins as a WWII super soldier, was not the first Avenger Marvel introduced when setting out to engineer an interconnected movie franchise for its various comic-book properties. Smartly, the MCU was built around a big, charismatic personality — the silver-tongued playboy flyboy Robert Downey Jr. brought to life in Iron Man. But it wasn’t until three years later, when they dethawed a living-legend foil for Tony Stark, that Marvel introduced its platonic ideal of timeless superheroism. In nobility, if not power set, Captain America is probably the closest the company has to a Superman: a beacon of essential goodness, a superhero in the traditional sense, classical in his virtue and courage.
But how do you make a square-jawed boy scout interesting? Nobility isn’t the most exciting character trait. In that respect, Marvel hit the jackpot with Chris Evans. The star, who previously played The Human Torch in the Fox-funded Fantastic Four movies of the 2000s (a role he recently, jokingly reprised in Deadpool & Wolverine), had the blonde hair, blue eyes, and classical good looks necessary for the part. But he also brought a winningly light touch to the role of Steve Rogers, an ordinary Brooklyn kid destined — by dint of his empathy and aww-shucks conviction — for greater things. He found the person behind the Greatest Generation icon, making a character out of a symbol of patriotic might and decency.
Downey’s supernova of quick-witted snark might be the glowing power cell of the MCU — the force that propelled it to early success — but Evans arguably had the trickier task. His performance as Steve Rogers is more multifaceted than this blockbuster franchise maybe required or deserved. Walking a tightrope, Evans finds both the comedy and tragedy of a man unstuck in time. He makes Captain America funny without turning him into a walking punchline, a mere winking anachronism of ancient national values. He remained true to the cornball spirit of Steve Rogers (his dorky, unflagging uprightness) while investing it with a soulful sincerity.
Captain America is a fish out of water in multiple respects. The Marvel movies got a lot of comedic and dramatic mileage out of his anachronistic presence in a world (and an era) that’s not his own. But they also fruitfully set him apart from the various quipsters that otherwise make up the extended Avengers family. When everyone is a sarcastic Joss Whedon cut-up, the straight shooter becomes the blessed alternative, the rebel outsider. In that way, Captain America is like an inverted Han Solo: His earnest lack of ironic detachment becomes its own kind of countercultural cool. In a sea of eye-rolling jesters, it’s hip to be square. And by refusing to put Steve in quotation marks, Evans rescued him from sitcom irrelevance.
One reason the Captain America movies look better than the average Marvel product is that they have actual ideological stakes. They’re interested in what it means to be a living embodiment of the American spirit. The first film, that stylish prequel, dealt with Steve’s uneasy feeling about being immortalized as a propaganda tool, Uncle Sam in the rippling, toned flesh. The Winter Soldier, which might still be the spit-shined peak of the whole MCU project, was all about him resisting the values of an America he doesn’t recognize — a surveillance state of indeterminate enemies and corrupt internal forces. And in Civil War, he defies expectations to take a moral stance… even if, to be honest, that stance is kind of horrifying. (If the MCU presented a Captain America far from blindly patriotic or obeying, it also dared to complicate his heroism from time to time, too.)
The ongoing conflict between Steve and Downey’s Tony — yin and yang leaders of the Avengers cavalry — is the closest the MCU ever got to a central interpersonal friction, to real drama underscoring its world-saving spectacle. (It was smart of Civil War to literally divide the superheroes down the battle lines the two draw.) Few of the big effects sequences in the Marvel movies are as exciting as the moment, in the first Avengers, where Steve and Tony verbally square off: In a series sometimes guilty of reducing its entire ensemble to stand-up comics in spandex, here was a genuine clash of personalities and sensibilities. One fault to be found in Avengers: Endgame is that it barely had the time to resolve this essential frenemy relationship, even when devoting much of its last hour to the Steve and Tony Show.
Captain America was the backbone of the whole Marvel saga. It’s his values that get tested, to calamitous ends, in Avengers: Infinity War: You could say that the Avengers fail by following Steve’s lead and refusing to “trade lives” even with the whole universe at stake. Arguably the crowd-pleasing crescendo of the franchise (and maybe of 21st-century cinema!) is the moment when Cap proves himself worthy enough to wield Thor’s hammer in Endgame. And that three-hour blockbuster of falling action reserves its quiet final moment for Rogers, giving him a well-earned happy ending, a peace for the ageless soldier — and in a sense, the only real ending that the MCU has yet dared to offer. There’s a case to be made that the franchise could and maybe should have called it a day with that climactic cheek-to-cheek denouement. That there’s no post-credits scene, no future teased after Steve’s last dance, betrays some kind of understanding that the franchise reached its ideal, well, endgame when Captain America’s story came to a close.
The MCU has felt decentered, even adrift in the years since Evans handed over the shield and hung up the uniform. There’s a lot of fault to be found in the post-Endgame gameplan of this franchise, which has blown past its natural punctuation point and continued into a bumpy limbo state of quantity over quality, diminishing returns (creative and financial), and aborted plotlines. The Marvel movies have lacked a larger sense of purpose in the post-COVID years. But what they’ve maybe most critically lacked is the heart and soul Evans lent the series, to say nothing of the contrast Steve Rogers provided as a superhero a little more old-fashioned and a lot less cynical than the sprawling cast of superheroes he leads into battle.
Of course, it’s smart that Marvel hasn’t tried to simply replicate his retro-cool appeal. The Falcon is a worthy successor, in part because he’s a different character. By allowing Sam to be his own Captain America — and to shift the ideological tension of the material to what it means to be a Black superhero in a racist country — Marvel has acknowledged that it’s better to go in a new direction than to try to retrace its steps. By the looks of it, Brave New World will address the legacy of Captain America without committing to staying forever in the shadow of Steve Rogers. At least until Kevin Feige talks Evans into coming back into the multiversal fold. It would take integrity of a Steve Rogers scale to turn down whatever he’s offering.
Captain America: Brave New World opens in theaters everywhere Friday, February 14. The other Captain America movies are currently streaming on Disney+. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
