Captain America: Brave New World is a baffling movie. In individual pieces, it’s mostly fine. Anthony Mackie is good as Sam. His action sequences are solid. It’s nice to see Harrison Ford as president again after getting all those terrorists off his plane. But as a whole? It’s just a mess.

I don’t think I have ever seen a movie where the audience knows the answers the characters are seeking more than this one. If you have seen any amount of marketing for Captain America: Brave New World, even just a trailer, you essentially know the entire story before the characters do, and shockingly, what was supposed to be the climax of the film, a twist ending you’re not supposed to see coming as the villain’s master plan comes to a head. You will eventually learn that it was the main point of the marketing. I’d say there are spoilers from here but it was all laid out by the ads before the movie was even out.

The film is based around The Leader, a gamma mutated genius, attempting to ruin President Ross’s legacy, namely by destabilizing a treaty about a giant alien statue in the ocean that I imagine everyone who didn’t see Eternals is confused by.

This all builds to a reveal that The Leader has been giving Ross gamma-infused pills for years, and at the climax, during an important speech, Ross turns into Red Hulk and shocks everyone. Shocks everyone but audiences, of course.

Not only was Red Hulk used as essentially the central marketing point for the film other than Sam, Marvel released this entire “Ross turns into Red Hulk” scene for viewing before the film was even out. It’s like if Infinity War showed the snap and disintegrations in the trailer. Red Hulk is pitched as the main villain and foil to Sam, but he’s literally just in this scene and there is one fight between the two of them.

This is the worst offense, but the entire movie is structured like this. The trailer shows us that Isaiah Bradley is clearly being mind-controlled to attack the president. And there’s no real “conspiracy,” it’s just that this guy they clearly show is locked up by Ross is somehow doing all this from the shadows, mind-controlling random people to do his bidding. A key trailer line from Sam, “your inner circle has been compromised,” is…not true at all. The idea may have been that Ross’s ex-Widow head of security was bad, but she wasn’t, and frankly it was inexplicable that her character was in the movie at all.

I still cannot get over how the entire point of the film was supposed to be building to the reveal that Ross turned into Red Hulk, when that was half the selling point of the movie. Marvel shed the idea of telling a good story for its marketing, pitching Sam against Red Hulk for a single scene that ultimately lasts about five minutes. Yes, comic readers would know that Ross turns into Red Hulk, but you can see a version of this movie where this maybe would have been a genuine surprise to most viewers. But now that’s only true if they never saw a trailer or a poster or even a promotional soft drink cup for the film.

The director has claimed the movie did not undergo radical reshoots as previously reported, but what is clear was that a lot was left on the cutting room floor, and the entire structure of the film makes almost no sense given how the movie was sold to audiences. A total miss in that regard, I’ve never quite seen anything like it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.