SDCC Week: Avengers: Armageddon is the Balm for Captain America: Brave New World’s Ills
SDCC Week: Avengers: Armageddon is the Balm for Captain America: Brave New World’s Ills
Sam Wilson finally gets his due.
Side characters from big franchises have a lot working against them these days. But what constitutes a “side character,” exactly? Well, if you draw a straight line from term to meaning would suggest that a side character is one who stars in a side story. Take Supergirl, for example. Since that character hasn’t had a single consistent story or background for any length of time, Kara Zor-El’s recent solo movie had to simply establish who she is rather than explore how she contributes to the larger DCU narrative. Voila: She’s a side character.
On the other hand, Sam Wilson, the current MCU Captain America, was much more clearly defined by the time he starred in Brave New World, his first movie in the role. Sam had been established as Steve Rogers’s friend and fellow superhero The Falcon before formally becoming the new Cap in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Disney+ series. So, there was absolutely no reason why he should still feel like a side character in his own movie. Somehow, though, he did, and that’s because that line between side character and side movie goes both ways. Brave New World was a film with almost no weight, meaning, or significance.
It’s actually sort of a miracle that Disney managed to produce a film about a Black man taking the role of Captain America, wearing an outfit based on technology from Africa, with a shield patterned after the U.S. flag, while fighting the President of the United… and somehow it offered no symbolic meaning or statement about modern America. It can certainly be tricky to address politics without misspeaking or unfairly maligning anyone, but the efforts (and expensive reshoots) that Disney reportedly went through to make sure they didn’t offend anyone with their movie about America might be the least American thing about the film. Speaking our minds is one of the things we do best!
Even the most generous assessment of Brave New World would call it lukewarm—hardly brave or new. It was a tired retread of a countless other toothless stories about how real heroes forgive everyone for everything, no matter how beat up they get. And, of course, it retread the idea that the best way to stop a problem is to remind the problem (in this case, a Hulk) how much it loves its family in order to turn that problem back into a naked, crying man who just wants to be friends. If it worked against Darth Vader, it should work just as well against a CGI Han Solo head on a monster’s body, right?
Well, no. Or at least, not anymore. Modern audiences aren’t buying that kind of fairytale these days. They need stories that resonate with their own struggles, and life doesn’t feel like a fairytale for most people. That’s why, though it’s only into its second issue, the new Avengers: Armageddon comic mini-series already feels likely to be the modern American superhero story that Captain America: Brave New World should have been.
Avengers: Armageddon almost feels like a direct apology for Brave New World. Both stories concern Captain America fighting the Red Hulk, but the key difference is in how deep they are willing to go with their respective premises. The Red Hulk in Avengers: Armageddon isn’t just a bumbling, over-confident, but ultimately well-meaning leader. He’s a driven, cunning general, always making big swings. More importantly, his vision of America seems self-contradictory: He wants every country in the world to be a democracy (that’s admirable!), even if he has to overthrow that country and become a dictator to force it upon them (that’s not!). Just as the DCU’s Peacemaker wages a never-ending war to end all war, Red Hulk in Armageddon wants to give you the right to choose… whether you want to or not.
So, despite the protests of the U.S. government, the Avengers step up to try and stop him, with Sam Wilson’s Cap leading the team. Red Hulk put Steve Rogers, the symbol of the best that America could be, out of commission, but Sam does a strong job of filling his shoes. The surprise here is that yet another Captain America decides to step in and take the battle straight to Red Hulk. And (spoilers!) he wrecks Hulk and almost kills him without even breaking a sweat.
That almost happened in Brave New World as well. There, the original super soldier, Isaiah Bradley, attacked Red Hulk while he was in his “President Thaddeus Ross” form. He had every reason to hate Ross, since it was his American government that kept him prisoner and experimented on him simply because they could. But nope! Isaiah gets over his anger at Ross almost immediately. According to the movie, it doesn’t matter what past, present, and future inhumanities someone hits you with. Being invited to the White House is still an honor, and even in the mind of someone who suffered life-changing torture at the hands of the government, just plan cool. Once Isaiah gets there, he’s brainwashed to attack Ross by someone who hates Ross for—get this—keeping him prisoner and doing experiments on him. Not the best character work.
In Armageddon, David Colton—the Marvel Universe’s cynical 21st century Captain America—is the one who was tampered with, and he’s decided not to pull any punches in retaliation. At one time, he worked directly under Ross. Like so many young people who enlisted after 9/11 to help protect their country, he truly believed that he was on the side of the good guys. But after being witness to pointless combat, horrendous war crimes, and the callous attitude of Ross and others about the damage they inflict in the name of nation-building, Colton stopped believing in anything. And that’s what makes his fight with Ross so dangerous: A Hulk who wants to reshape the world by force to reflect his values is dangerous, but a nihilistic Captain America who lives only for revenge could quite possibly end humanity.
There are still a few more issues of Avengers: Armageddon to go, so we can’t say for sure how great a story it will be once the story wraps. But suffice to say, it already gives fans more food for thought—and much higher stakes—than many MCU blockbusters. If it keeps up at this pace, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t be the groundwork for a great film down the line… assuming the MCU survives Dr. Doom’s version of Armageddon, in the form of Avengers: Doomsday, later this year.