Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

In which Marvel takes some damage as it rights the ship.

Spoiler Warning

I haven’t actually reviewed a Marvel movie since Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), but with the last Marvel movie of this year delivered in fantastic form, it is time to do a round-up of the movies, starting with Captain America: Brave New World, darting to Thunderbolts* and finishing up with The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Captain America: Brave New World

I feel incredibly sorry for everyone involved in the production of this film because the end result feels like a badly stiched patchwork quilt. This is no doubt down to the behind-the-scenes changes which underpin the movie’s development.

It was not a surprise that with the solid success of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), Marvel announced that it would go ahead with a fourth Captain America movie with Anthony Mackie in the lead role having ended his TV show accepting the shield and the mantle of the ‘Captain America’ moniker.

Unfortunately, the initial development was then beset with all of the shifts which happened as Marvel’s direction pivoted from the Kang dynasty to Doomsday, from quantity back to quality, from Disney Plus being the priority to the movies back to prime position, from silliness to substantive storytelling. The impacts of all of these shifts results in Captain America: Brave New World being a substandard movie, despite everyone’s best effort.

There is an effort to stitch together a narrative, but it ends up being a rather thin plot which is more a sequel to The Incredible Hulk (2008) than a Captain America film. The tale of General Ross imprisoning a mentally enhanced Doctor Samuel Sterns post the events of Harlem and using Sterns for his own power grab and run to the White House only to have Sterns turn on him and make him the Red Hulk feels like it could have been a good Hulk story. But weaving it alongside Sam Wilson getting used to being Captain America, Joaquin Torres formally taking over the Falcon mantle, and the complicated situation of Isaiah Bradley (a past black supersoldier treated as a disposable weapon by his government), is a weird choice.

What happens is a mess.

A Captain America story should have had personal meaning to Sam Wilson. Here, Sam the lead is narratively not the protagonist. He is constantly reacting to events rather than creating forward motion himself through his decisions and character. The best scene for him is his single scene with Bucky Barnes where Sam is questioning why he did not take the serum, why he thought he could follow in Steve’s footsteps. That scene highlights Sam as a character more than anything else in the movie, although his short scenes with Isaiah are also moments where he shines.

The scene with Bucky highlights another key issue here. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was successful because of the banter and relationship between Sam and Bucky. Setting Sam into his own movie without that seems an odd choice, especially as the Captain America movies have always centred around Captain America’s relationship with Bucky Barnes. Fair enough, maybe this was an attempt to start afresh, to leave the Captain-Bucky dynamic to the Steve Rogers’ era and try something different, but it feels like the elements which could have been Sam’s story – his new partnership with Torres, his fight to ensure Isaiah gets treated fairly, and his accepting being Captain America as only his human self – are only shown as a thin subplot rather than the main story.

Everyone in this thin subplot definitely gives their all and there are no complaints about the acting. Mackie does his best to anchor the film and gives a solid performance, Danny Ramirez gives a delightful performance as Torres, and Carl Lumbly is as outstanding here as Isaiah as he was in the TV show.

Harrison Ford does a good job too taking on the role of General Ross in the wake of William Hurt’s death. He does not attempt to mimic Hurt’s performance, playing the role in his own quintessential way. It feels like he had a lot of fun with it and it is his performance which ultimately anchors the film. Ford is good at playing emotionally constipated characters who mean well under the surface.

The return of Tim Blake Nelson as Sterns does not work particularly well. Nelson tries his best but the dialogue material he is given is pretty poor and the design of the prosthetics and look is terrible. Similarly, Giancarlo Esposito is wasted as Sidewinder, and Shira Haas as a former Black Widow acting as the President’s security advisor has very little to actually do but turn up for a Black Widow-esque take down of soldiers to save Sam at one point.

The rest of the production is solid. The CGI is not terrible, the set designs are decent, costuming is fine, and the make-up alright. The score does the heavy lifting to underline what the audience should be feeling and when.

Ultimately it is not a terrible movie, enjoyable in parts, but it is not a good movie either. Similarly to Daredevil: Born Again (2025), I can appreciate the business decision to try and save something from what had already been invested, but I think the reputational harm of putting something patchwork back into the movie market was probably underestimated, and the first consequence was probably the box office for the subsequent movie, Thunderbolts*.

Thunderbolts*

This is a good movie.

After the patchwork horror of the first Marvel film of 2025, this does not feel like it suffers from the same issues despite development of each taking place in a similar timeframe. Perhaps it succeeds because there was less to impact in the narrative which is pretty self-contained and is focused primarily on Yelena’s search for purpose during a moment where Valentina Allegra De Fontaine tries to clean-up all of her shadowy and nefarious activity which results in bringing together a group of misfit super-people into a team.

Stories of criminal misfits with hearts of gold coming together is not an unusual narrative. Marvel has done it before to great success with The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. DC tried it twice with its comic book misfit team Suicide Squad. Everyone loves an anti-hero. But the secret to success is not to make the criminals too unsympathetic and coldly criminal. They truly have to have those hearts of gold or be seen to be truly remorseful and capable of being redeemed.

In that sense, Thunderbolts* walks a fine line. There is nothing particularly sympathetic about John Walker who killed a man violently during his tenure as Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. There is also nothing sympathetic about Ava aka Ghost as the beginning of the film shows her brutal dispatch of Taskmaster. Most of the time, Red Guardian is depicted as a deadbeat Dad who only wants to regain his glory days. Yet the movie is helped to rise above these issues with these characters because the film is anchored primarily through three points of view: Yelena played to perfection by Florence Pugh, Bucky Barnes played with deft assuredness by Sebastian Stan, and to a lesser extent, Valentina’s assistant, Mel, who is played delightfully by Geraldine Viswanathan.

Mel is the voice of the normal person who has found themselves joining something to do good, only to find themselves embroiled in not-good things. Her betrayal of Valentina to Bucky is well done, but so is her return to save Valentina and to stop Sentry. Her subplot kind of disappears with the big finale where she is left standing beside Valentina as Valentina reveals the team as the New Avengers.

I’ll come back to that.

Both Bucky and Yelena are sympathetic characters to those who have been watching the MCU for a while. Bucky’s acceptance of his own guilt and tortuous past as The Winter Soldier was one of the elements which made The Falcon and the Winter Soldier a good TV series. Yelena beginning the journey to redemption was part of the main thread and one of the best parts of Black Widow (2021). Even her attempt to kill Clint in Hawkeye (2021) was shown sympathetically as coming from a place of deep grief for Natasha’s sacrifice in Endgame (2019). Moreover, Stan and Pugh are incredibly good actors who just knock it out of the park here. Stan slips back into Bucky like a man wearing a comfortable pair of old jeans. Pugh has the heavy lifting to do. Her depression and ongoing grief, her lack of purpose and loneliness which gives her an empathy for Bob is the spine of the narrative.

They’re also helped by their co-stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, David Harbour, and Lewis Pullman turning in great performances too. Pullman, in particular, is great. He has to play three different versions of himself: Bob, the recovering addict and formerly abused child who is trying to do better; the godlike Sentry who slides into Homelander territory, and Void, his bitter alter-ego who wants to drown the whole world in his bitterness. Pullman is immensely likeable and that is what helps him execute the character well.

His powers also allow for small character vignettes which provide a peek into the characters to show their flaws and moments of trauma. It works particularly well for both Pugh’s Yelena showing her facing her first Red Room test, and for showing something of Valentina’s past and her reason for wanting the power she covets.

Dreyfus does not have to be likeable, makes no attempt to be, and she plays the power- hungry political animal with a lot of verve and enthusiasm. But that peek of the past gives her a more dramatic moment to play and she really delivers with it.

Overall, the entire narrative of this movie is well-constructed until the end. I enjoy it all from the set-up to the team’s acceptance when they help the civilians escape the falling debris after Void takes out a pilot and brings down a crane and the helicopter itself. Even the sightly bizarre ‘void rooms’ section mostly plays well as a device. Everything narratively works until the very end when Valentina announces the team as The New Avengers. (I did say I’d come back to it).

Throughout the movie, Bucky’s mission to see Valentina exposed and imprisoned is highlighted. It is the reason why he gets involved. He wants Valentina’s former agents to give testimony and bring her down. It makes zero sense that he decides to stay silent and just allow her to wriggle out of her comeuppance again. The rest of the team? Yes, absolutely buy that they go along with it. Bucky? Not so much.

The other major flaw with the movie is the feeling that there is just too much backstory that needs to be known. There are three movies and a TV show for Bucky alone – four movies if you want to count his cameo in Captain America: Brave New World. A movie and a TV show for Yelena. Another movie for Ghost. And really Black Widow itself needs knowledge of Captain America: Civil War (2016), and the TV shows need knowledge of the Avenger films. Fair enough, Walker and Red Guardian are both already accounted for in those properties for Bucky and Yelena, but it still feels like there is a lot of homework to understand everything.

While the movie does try to explain the backstories within the narrative itself through the dialogue and character’s interaction, it is not enough. If I wasn’t a Marvel fan, I would be lost. I think this is partially the reason why the film did not do well with the general movie-going audience in addition to the poor quality of the previous Marvel offering. Which is a shame, because everything from the action to the emotion, from the narrative (minus the end) to the acting, from the set-design to the costumes and make-up – everything is done well.

Thunderbolts* is a good movie. It is a good Marvel movie and a neat ending to the problematic transition happening in Phase 5. It ends with a nice post credit scene which nods to the next good Marvel movie.

The Fantastic Four: Next Steps

This movie officially kicks off the next phase of Marvel and it is a very good start. The story wipes the slate clean as it takes place in a completely different universe from the MCU prime timeline. There is no homework for this movie. People can show up and simply enjoy the story.

The film also skips over another origin story for the Fantastic Four. Instead, the audience is dropped into the narrative four years from the moment they got their superpowers. The device of an anniversary TV appearance to celebrate becoming their world’s protectors allows for the story of their origin to be told ‘in-story’ and allows for the audience to get up to speed.

The story itself starts as familiar territory – the Silver Surfer arriving to declare the advent of Galactus. For those of us remember Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), this is not a good thing necessarily. Yet the world-building ensures that this world feels so different to our own Earth that while the story note is the same, the context is wildly different.

It also explains why they went with a female version of the Silver Surfer rather than the more familiar male one. Had they gone with a male Silver Surfer, the story would have been far too same-y, regardless of the world building. Here the relationship between Shalla-Bal and Johnny Storm is well done enough and played well by both Julia Garner and Joseph Quinn that it creates a lovely subplot to the main storyline wherein Reed and Sue face the challenge of parenthood and try to protect their baby son from Galactus’ desire for him, and the world’s demand they give him up.

In the same way that Florence Pugh does the heavy emotional lifting for the previous movie, Vanessa Kirby does it in this one as Sue Storm. Her portrayal is great. She comes across as an intelligent, compassionate woman who is the heart of the family. As much as I love Pugh as Yelena, Kirby’s maturity delivers a weighty presence which feels like she is the true successor to Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanov.

Moreover, the relationship between Kirby’s Sue Storm and Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards feels well done. They come across as a married couple. They argue like a married couple. They interact like a married couple. Both the dialogue, the acting, and the direction here is tremendous.

But if Sue and Reed feel like a married couple, Johnny and Sue feel like an actual brother and sister. Johnny and Reed feel like they have their own relationship and camaraderie, just as Reed and Ben do come across as best friends, and Ben and Johnny tease and poke at each other but not in a way that detracts from the notion that the two men feel a sense of brotherhood. Ebon Moss-Bachrach rounds out the great acting by doing an equally great job as Ben. It feels like a family.    

As a result, the fight to keep Galactus from stealing Franklin works. We get Sue’s fierce protectiveness, Reed’s want to fix it beyond the logical solution of giving up his son, Johnny’s and Ben’s determination. As Sue sacrifices herself for her son, as Johnny attempts to do the same…the breath catches, the heart pounds…it is a truly intense moment.

Indeed, there are a few tense moments throughout the movie. The escape from Galactus, and the chase of the Silver Surfer after them is another successful action sequence. That moment where the Surfer interferes with the first plan to save the Earth is another. But that final sequence of Galactus and the Four fighting, the moment he starts to come back through the portal…it is truly thrilling.

Perhaps the denouement of baby Franklin saving his mother with his cosmic power is not surprising and is what is expected, but it still works. Although I will say that the CGI on the baby is very dodgy at times as is the choice of dye on Quinn’s hair – it does not look at all natural. But these are small flaws in what is an otherwise sterling success.

A lot of that success can be put down to the world building which is truly excellent. The motif of the Sixties’ style combined with a futuristic cartoonish space vibe is wonderful. The set design and the costuming is great. The attention to detail is tremendous.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed this movie. Marvel feels like it is finding its feet again. Two good movies in a row to end 2025. It has got me looking forward to what is next.   

In conclusion

Phase 5 was a transition period for Marvel. It was like watching the Titanic slowly steering away from the iceberg in slow motion but still taking some damage. Captain America: Brave New World was definitely a dent in the hull, but Thunderbolts* saw the ship righting itself just in time for the end of the phase.

Entering Phase 6,The Fantastic Four: First Steps sees Marvel back on the open water with the iceberg behind them and the ship being repaired as they go. Here’s hoping there is a fair wind and following seas.

End Note: Please like, comment or share if you enjoyed this review! If you would like to buy me a coffee in support of my original writing, check out my Ko-fi or my subscription/donation page.