I enjoyed the hell out of this movie, and I don’t know what people were talking about.

I mean that with respect. The reviewers Mrs. Know-It-All and I watch, we watch because we love them, and we usually agree with them. We really do. So I’m a little shocked at how far apart we are this time around. And that’s okay.

We’d just gotten home from Captain America: Brave New World when we sat down to talk about it. We signed up for the fan event on the 13th and then forgot it was that day. The actual release day is the 14th. We saw it in 3D, which we also forgot we’d booked, and the guy at the door didn’t hand glasses to anybody, so I ran out to get ours and I’m pretty sure the rest of the theater was right behind me. The flying in 3D looked amazing. If you get the opportunity, see it that way.

This one’s a conversation between me and Mrs. Know-It-All, on the new set, which I built so she or Baby Know-It-All or a guest can sit down next to me. There are spoilers all the way through. The step by step breakdown is a separate video.

It Felt Like a Marvel Movie

I asked her what her favorite part was, and she went back to what she’d told me walking out of the theater. It felt like a Marvel movie.

A different type of Marvel movie, though. It’s not your Endgame. It’s not even an Iron Man. We’re in a different generation of Marvel at this point, with new fans coming in, and Baby Know-It-All and kids that age are starting to watch this stuff too. What she said she watched was close to a really good whodunit, where there’s a thing you have to solve and Sam follows the breadcrumbs and figures it out. She saw the connective tissue with Winter Soldier, and so did I.

A lot of people are calling the story disjointed. I don’t understand that. One review I read said you could totally see the reshoots and feel them. I felt a reshoot once, at the very end, when Captain America is confronting Red Hulk Ross and trying to talk him down. The lighting is different. It reminded me of Black Widow, when they had to recut that scene with Yelena and she gets blown back in and it’s clearly a different scene. Other than that one moment I was with them the whole time.

Mrs. Know-It-All noticed a different one. She felt it on the Raft, when Betty comes to talk. That makes sense to me. Liv Tyler’s schedule might not have lined up with when Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford could do it. There’s a difference between something that feels like a pickup and something that feels like it got shot fast because they had to get it in. They probably planned the location work and the sound stage work first, with the smaller sets like the Raft prison held to go back to. The scene with the Leader, Sam and the new Falcon in the bunker could easily have had pickups cut into it too.

You Don’t Have to Do the Homework

Were there places where they overexplained? Maybe. I didn’t have a problem with it, and I’m glad they did a couple of the rehashes they did.

The big plus about the MCU in the early days was that anybody off the street could jump in. You could watch Captain America: The First Avenger, you could watch Iron Man, you could watch any of them without having seen the others and get the gist. Then you shifted into Phase 4, which had a lot of the TV stuff because of the pandemic and everything else, and those felt more and more like you had to do the homework. The shows depended on the movies, then other series depended on those, and other movies depended on those.

Here, yes, there were a few places where it was basically “especially after that one time we did that one thing.” But that’s how they used to do it. You had that so you didn’t have to worry about what people had or hadn’t seen. If that’s where they’re moving, good. I’m glad.

He Was and Is Captain America

The first time somebody just called him Cap, at the bar, “here you go, Cap,” I went oh. Then you see him on that first mission with the SEAL team right there with him, and this is Captain America.

One of the reviewers said there wasn’t a lot of Captain America in it, that Sam wasn’t doing Captain America things. Maybe I can see where they saw that. But the more I watched, the more I was trying to figure out what they meant, because we got to see him fighting in the beginning, the middle and the end. The action looked good. Anthony Mackie clearly took the time to get into the physicality of the role. We saw some of that in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, when he was first practicing with the shield and it was kind of like a frisbee. He has really nailed that whole thing now.

They took everything that made Sam unique and they leaned into it heavy. Aside from one moment, which I’ll get to, he was and is Captain America. I believe that 100 percent. There’s no doubt in my mind.

That first mission mirrors Cap’s first mission in Winter Soldier, too. They’re going somewhere, they’ve got a thing to do, and this time he’s got his man in the chair and a decorated officer all telling him you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that. And Captain America is being Captain America. He’s the one leading the charge.

I love this Falcon. We met him in the series, and he wasn’t a wingman then. Seeing him start out on that opening mission was fun. And Redwing has become Sam’s little dude. You know that’s all Stark tech coming through.

Harrison Ford Did Not Phone This In

He’s played presidents before, and he plays a really good president. He didn’t cheapen this role at all because it was Marvel. He acted his butt off.

It felt like watching old school Harrison Ford. The Fugitive Harrison Ford, the political thrillers, the movies where he’s always brought gravitas. And here he is doing a comic book movie, having fun with all the kids, and doing wonderful. Whenever he’s talking about Betty, you feel that pain. That’s what happens when you get a seasoned actor who’s not afraid to be that vulnerable. So many times with the older actors you feel like they’re phoning it in. He put as much energy into this as he would any other movie.

It was in the trailer, but I love the moment at the very beginning where he tells Sam he wants to talk about restarting the Avengers. Sam asks what happens if there’s something they don’t agree about, and Ross says they’ll figure it out together. Very nonchalant. You felt him.

Then all hell breaks loose with Isaiah, and you get the bunker. Mind you, this is a president who just barely missed being killed, and Sam’s in there being Captain America, and Ross tells him he shouldn’t even be in this position. You’re not Steve Rogers. I wanted to punch him in the face.

That’s the one moment. In the trailers, Sam answers him. You’re right. I’m not. In the movie he doesn’t say it. He gets shut up by Ross, and I thought that was a missed opportunity. Editing wise and story wise, I think it was a bad choice.

I understand why you’d probably do it. It’s the president and it’s Sam. And you want to bait the moment that comes later, with the cameo.

The Movie Keeps Calling Back to The Incredible Hulk

Even though Ross is so clearly trying to do better and be better, he’s still got that shady stuff in the background. He’s the one who dealt with Samuel Sterns, the Leader, the guy with the green head.

This whole movie kept calling back to The Incredible Hulk. The movie, the one that came out right around the same time as the first Iron Man, a little after actually. You have Liv Tyler. You have the Leader, played by the same actor. They show Hulk and Abomination fighting in Harlem, and they didn’t update Hulk. It was the Edward Norton Hulk. I thought that was good. Rather than pretend, it is what it is, because that movie is part of the history.

So you find out Ross still has all that dirt in his past, and the Leader is a result of it. He dangled the carrot. I’ll let you out, you go back to your life, just help me become the president. Somewhere deep inside he wants to manipulate history so his daughter will love him again and see he’s changed. Dude, how much have you changed? You also just turned into a big red Hulk. Which, by the way, I thought looked pretty good.

On Ross, I felt like they gave us a hair too much information every time they gave us information. It wasn’t tell, don’t show. They showed us a lot. But they telegraphed things. And I think the trailers would’ve been better served not revealing that Ross was the Hulk. The trailers and the posters set up Red Hulk as a major part of the story, and frankly he’s a part of it, but not that much of it.

The movie also has two, maybe three endings where Ross is concerned, where you feel like you’ve reached the end and then more happens. I don’t think it went too long. Our showing started at 2 and we left the theater at 4:30, with a half hour of that up front before the movie. And I was engaged the whole way.

You find out the Leader had been poisoning him. The only reason Ross gave the Leader any leeway was that he wanted help with his own heart as well. It wasn’t just the presidency. The gamma is what makes him the Red Hulk. He’s got all these moments where he’s trying to hold it back, and at the end he can’t, and it goes off and he destroys the White House. I didn’t expect that. Then the Washington Monument, and those superhero leaps.

I liked the moment when he finally does turn, and he turns around and sees his reflection. Everything with his daughter is sitting right there. That’s it. It’s over. She’s never going to love me.

And then you get the end, where Cap goes to see Ross and brings Betty with him. We’d heard her on the phone earlier. I thought it was a good use of that cameo.

Congressman Bucky

I was so excited. Soon to be Congressman Bucky.

What I liked is that you don’t have to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for his scene to make sense. Sam always deals with imposter syndrome, with the idea that Steve chose the wrong person. And Bucky tells him Steve didn’t pick him because he was the strongest. He picked him because he knew Sam would never quit. Steve was someone people could look up to. Sam is someone people can aspire to.

Beautiful line. That hit me so hard.

You can assume the two of them kept in touch after the series, because as he’s walking out, Congressman Bucky goes “love you, bro.” That’s his boy. That’s how I talk to my best friend. Love you, bro, done, move on.

I was wondering how much they were going to set up Thunderbolts with him. They didn’t. I was half expecting an end credits scene with Valentina saying she has a problem and needs his help, because we know he goes to Thunderbolts. I’m excited for that one too.

Ruth, Isaiah and the Adamantium

Ruth is a former Widow. She’s Israeli, and she was trained in the Red Room. In the comics the character is former Mossad, and because of everything happening geopolitically in the world today, they leaned away from that. My feeling is, why change something from the comics just because of that, especially when you’ve got the proto Cap who’s Black and all these pieces that are very culturally relevant? At the very least, they didn’t make her former Mossad. They made her a former Red Room Widow, and she was cool.

After Natasha we got Yelena, and we saw the junior ones, the girls in training. Now you get Ruth. I hope we see her again. And she’s got a thing for Bucky, which was adorable. The dude is 110 years old and she’s like, I can work with that. Widows clearly have a sense of humor.

Isaiah was a lot of the heartbreak in this movie for me. Carl Lumbly is back from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and he’s such an interesting character. He’s proto Captain America. Before Steve Rogers there was this guy, and he actually went on missions. I like the conversation he and Sam have at the very beginning, where he says he still has trouble with Captain America being in the belly of the beast, working for President Ross. And Sam says he’s got to believe there’s hope. Captain America was very Captain America in all of this.

Then there’s the big thing they’re all fighting over. That giant thing coming up out of the ocean is from Eternals. We hadn’t forgotten about it. And they discovered adamantium, which I thought was awesome, because we’re going to be getting X-Men. It paves the way.

Mrs. Know-It-All has listened to me watch Comics Explained, so she’s heard Rob talk about how adamantium and all of that derives from the Weapon Plus program. Weapon Plus gave us Isaiah, which eventually gave us Cap, which leads piece by piece to Wolverine, who they call Weapon X when really he’s Weapon Ten. Now that adamantium has arrived, however they got it there, I feel like we’re in a really interesting place. Your average moviegoer knows what adamantium is.

What Were the Critics Expecting?

There are so many people who want to hate on this for no reason. I don’t know what the critics’ problems were. I don’t know what they were expecting.

I think people are expecting an Endgame, and we’re not going to get that for a while. We just started this new part of the MCU. The comic book genre kept growing and building through Infinity War, you had the Snyderverse, and it became spectacle driven. I told Mrs. Know-It-All in the car that Blue Beetle was good. I liked Blue Beetle. It was an excellent superhero movie. The problem was that stacked up next to everything else, it read as average.

Everybody was putting way too much weight on this movie needing to be something bigger. I thought it was exactly where it needed to be. Mrs. Know-It-All said she watched a Marvel movie, a different Marvel movie, and she appreciated the writing. They put so much genuine story into all of this.

For me this was way better than some of the fare we’ve been getting from Marvel in terms of the movies. Way better. And I think it’s the opening. I think things are moving forward at a much better pace now.

The Leader, and the One Complaint

All the actors did what they were supposed to do. We loved the mind control. And this Leader is not a fighter. In the comics he’s always been depicted as a big brain, literally, somebody who can plan and think his way around anything. This went almost to predictive psychohistory, where he’s working off all the numbers and the algorithms.

Mrs. Know-It-All hates movies where nobody listens to the other person. If it’s a two hour movie and an hour and a half of it is somebody trying to be convinced, she’ll stop watching. She was worried about that with Ruth and Sam, because Sam knows better, and they go back and forth not believing each other. But Ruth had to find it out for herself, and it was quick.

The only complaint is the post credits scene. There is one. I won’t spoil it, because it’s going to annoy you. I guess they have to start seeding the path. If you’ve liked everything else the Russos have done, I think you’ll be fine. I believe they’re going to do great.

The Verdict

Captain America: Brave New World lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

A 9 was on the table when we sat down. After talking it through a little more, 8.5 is fair.

It’s a Marvel movie you can walk into off the street. Sam Wilson is Captain America from the first mission to the last. Harrison Ford acts his butt off, and a cameo gives Sam the line he needed to hear. Against that, Ross gets a hair too much explanation, the trailers gave away the Red Hulk, Sam’s answer in the bunker got cut, and the post credits scene is going to annoy you.

Go see it if you haven’t. I don’t know why you’d read this first, because I’ve spoiled it already, but I think you’re going to enjoy it. Your mileage may vary. Have your own opinions about it, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Drop a comment on the video above and tell me what you thought of the movie once you’ve seen it. And tell us what you think of the new set. Mrs. Know-It-All picked out a lot of what’s on it, and she’d like you to know that.