Captain America: Brave New World

As many of you know, I'm a bit of an MCU apologist around these parts. I grew up reading these comics and have always had a soft spot in my heart for their screen adaptations. I've missed a few of the MCU movies of the past couple years, but I think I've seen like 32/35 of the movies. Brave New World is the worst of them, but it's not because it's bad, it's just as bland as can be. Sure, part of that blandness is from the direction from Julius Onah, where shots are seemingly chosen at random, the fight scenes don't always look to have had a visual continuity or line of thinking behind their framing, and the CGI green screen work is pretty bad in some places (and good in others). Most of all, for me, and maybe it's that I fancy myself a writer and this is something that bothers me, is that we don't know Sam Wilson as a character. I like Anthony Mackie as an actor, but we don't know who Sam Wilson is, really. We don't know what makes him tick, what he's afraid of, what he's striving for. There's no narrative throughline within the character, so it makes the machinations of the plot feel like Sam is just going on the random ride of the plot gods while not effecting it himself. We knew who Steve Rogers' Captain America was as a character. He was a thoroughly good and decent man who was gifted a superheroes body and abilities and doubted whether he was a hero outside of that. Tony Stark even tells him in The Avengers that everything special about him came out of a needle (which is Steve's fear, even though we know it shouldn't be). So, in Avengers Endgame when Steve catches Mjolnir, who can only be held by someone who is "worthy", it's the culmination of Steve character arc while also being a badass moment of action. Similarly, we know Tony Stark, we knew T'Challa, Peter Quill, Thor, Rocket, Bruce Banner, and Peter Parker. We know who they are and what drives them. We don't know that about Sam Wilson, and the movie suffers for it. Harrison Ford is good in his role as President Ross, but it's also not exactly asking a ton of him as an actor. Still, Ford is one of the great movie stars in cinema history and carries his role with ease. Tim Blake Nelson returns after 17 years to the role of Samuel Sterns, who's our "main" antagonist here, but since there are secondary antagonists of Red Hulk and Giancarlo Esposito's Sidewinder (a nothing role wholly beneath the great actor), Sterns doesn't get enough screentime to really let Nelson loose and become a great villain. His look is kind of ridiculous, but it also kind of worked for me. Overall, I would rank this at the bottom of the MCU. Eternals had a similar issue with characters, but it looks amazing. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 has some of the lowest lows of the MCU, but also some of its highest highs. The lows knock it down near the bottom of the MCU as a whole, but its highs keep it well above Brave New World, which is just so bland and forgettable that it has to be at the bottom. 5/10