Trailer Captain America: Brave New World | Official Teaser

[Staffan]

The second point really crippled the show, and the cowardice went further than just making the antagonists do completely pointless stuff that wasn't even in-line with their ideology, solely for the sake of villainizing them, it also extended to the ham-fisted and clunky-as-hell moralizing that dominated the last couple of episodes, which just mostly seemed stupid and naive in the worst way, and also seemed to have a general "Oh well, water under the bridge, can't complain" attitude to abuses of power by the US government. And the ending oooof. Oh yeah an utterly trite/hackneyed speech from a man dressed as a bird is surely going solve this horrific situation and force these corrupt powers to heel! It won't at all shame them for like half a news cycle and then be immediately forgotten. Written like we lived in the 1970s honestly.

If it hadn't pretended to "social realism" in so many other ways (spending entire chunks of episodes on it, like the whole loan plotline), maybe that would have been a valid approach, but you can't have your cake and eat it.

I would not be surprised if FWS was originally written with a more daring and political plotline, but then had some executive meddling saying "Nah, can't have this sort of anti-establishment stuff, make them more overtly villainous."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I would not be surprised if FWS was originally written with a more daring and political plotline, but then had some executive meddling saying "Nah, can't have this sort of anti-establishment stuff, make them more overtly villainous."

Quite. I would actually be very surprised if that wasn't true, because at the time there were some leaks from the re-shoots and we also have some idea what the re-shoots inserted from leaks of the plot before that - and absolutely the re-shoots inserted stuff like the nonsensical hospital bombing.

What I don't think we know is whether the last couple of episodes were always filled with horrible moralizing and had a completely implausible speech-based ending. I suspect they did, sadly. As such I think the General Maverick twist to the Red Hulk is quite likely, because it means they don't have a US president deciding to become the Red Hulk.

One thing that remains weird is that FatWS has this bit at the end where Sharon Carter goes rogue (rather questionably, though it's not as implausible as some elements), but they really seemed to be implying she's a Skrull, and then that totally wasn't followed up on despite Secret Wars being announced around that time. So perhaps that was planned but then Secret Wars just decided to ditch it. If it was an intentional red herring, it was a bizarre one to waste screen time on at the end of a series, so I rather doubt that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's what the trailer shows. The marketing poster image has the Red Hulk hand gripping the shield and crushing it from the edges. It is the latter that I am reacting to.

This has always been a problem with the Red Hulk. They always introduce him with this over the top and OP nonsense. It happened in the comics too (not the shield thing, but stuff like that). I never liked him either.

 

[Umbran]

What I don't think we know is whether the last couple of episodes were always filled with horrible moralizing and had a completely implausible speech-based ending.

Have you ever read a Captain America comic book?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Have you ever read a Captain America comic book?

That's exactly my point.

Captain America comics don't do social realism. There have been some clumsy attempts at it, but it's always been a sort of unreal, comic-book-y context, with over-the-top villain organisations, robots/clones, Nazis and so on. So it's easy to do moralizing and it seems justified when it's literally Hydra or whatever.

The problem with FatWS is that they tried to make it "more realistic" than a comic book, but in a social ills sense - again the loan example is very easy/obvious here. They tried to bring up a lot of real social ills, they tried to make the Unaccountable Resources Committee (I can't remember their name) realistically fearful, nasty and implied-corrupt, and so on. Then they fail to really address or even truly condemn (imho) any of those social ills, and sort of say "Well, guess there's nothing we can do about it!".

If this was a comic, especially a Steve Rogers Cap one, those Resources guys would ALSO have turned out to be actually-evil, and Cap would have had to punch at least some of them, and others would be going away in handcuffs. Instead they merely were deserving of a harshly-worded NYT-ish "letter to the editor", delivered in the form of a speech. Because "realism" and safe-ness has demanded that these creeps who look and sound a lot like the people who really run our world (as in mainstream politicians, corporate types, etc.) cannot possibly be actually punchable crims. Like how people have these guys killed through starvation and forced population movements and so on? Probably a huge amount more than bad guys blowing up a hospital. That's chump change. But because they did it with laws and rules (however unaccountable - they seem to be true technocrats), Cap is pretending that's okay? Steve would never.

And the speech isn't even terribly convincing or thrilling. It's too moderate, too safe, too normative in a world that is clearly dealing with something huge and were the concerns are far too real and raw to be dismissed in this way. It's too "Well yes they did bad things but you are being kind of naughty" in this sort of way that isn't convincing from someone who isn't literally a relic of the past, and just feels like a let-down/cop-out. I feel like there's no way Steve would have let them off that easy either.

 

[pukunui]

2) General Robert Maverick - i.e. Red Hulk 2 - This would mean that including Ross, i.e. Red Hulk 1 in comics, was something of a fake-out, because presumably he will end up as the Red Hulk, not Ross. I would regard this as a weird choice and a mega-cop-out myself, but that would definitely fit with the big cop-outs in FatWS.

I dunno. This looks to me more like Ford's face/haircut than Esposito's:

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I dunno. This looks to me more like Ford's face/haircut than Esposito's:

Yeah that is true, though we've seen before renders for trailers that were misdirects, so it's not 100%.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's what the trailer shows. The marketing poster image has the Red Hulk hand gripping the shield and crushing it from the edges. It is the latter that I am reacting to.

Unless red hulk is over 24 ft. tall or has a shrink ray, that image is metaphorical.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Quite. I would actually be very surprised if that wasn't true, because at the time there were some leaks from the re-shoots and we also have some idea what the re-shoots inserted from leaks of the plot before that - and absolutely the re-shoots inserted stuff like the nonsensical hospital bombing.

What I don't think we know is whether the last couple of episodes were always filled with horrible moralizing and had a completely implausible speech-based ending. I suspect they did, sadly. As such I think the General Maverick twist to the Red Hulk is quite likely, because it means they don't have a US president deciding to become the Red Hulk.

One thing that remains weird is that FatWS has this bit at the end where Sharon Carter goes rogue (rather questionably, though it's not as implausible as some elements), but they really seemed to be implying she's a Skrull, and then that totally wasn't followed up on despite Secret Wars being announced around that time. So perhaps that was planned but then Secret Wars just decided to ditch it. If it was an intentional red herring, it was a bizarre one to waste screen time on at the end of a series, so I rather doubt that.

Well, he is Captain America, not Captain Yorkshire. He needs to embody American un-cynicism, and the belief that ordinary people are fundamentally good if only they are given the right encouragement.

Compare to Doctor Who. The Doctor sometimes speachifies to appeal to people's better nature, but it sometimes, as in Bubble, turns out they don't have one.

But it makes Cap an uncomfortable choice for a political thriller. The Winter Soldier movie made a virtue of Cap being a fish out of water, but that's really only a trick you can pull once.


PS. I suspect Secret Wars was heavily edited to try and hide the character Major Cockup.