There’s a weird thing about superheroes. They tend to be a little bit more intriguing when they actually have superpowers. Yes, there is the odd exception: Batman has managed to navigate a Gotham City filled with supervillains who vacillate between the distinctly non-magical (Penguin, Carmine Falcone) and the utterly bonkers (Poison Ivy, Clayface), without having any powers of his own – unless you count his uncanny ability to weaponise extreme wealth and a voice like he has been gargling gravel. Iron Man may not be filled with radioactive spider venom or gamma rays, but he does develop technology that would make Elon Musk sweat as if he’s just realised his latest rocket is running on Windows Vista.
Then there’s just about everyone else in the Marvel universe – and they all seem to have some kind of deal going on, whether it be Doctor Strange’s mystical, extra-dimensional shenanigans or Captain Marvel’s cosmic power-ups. Which is why it’s downright weird that the studio has decided to take the new Captain America, Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, right back to the superhero stone age with its latest iteration.
The forthcoming Captain America: Brave New World will see Wilson attempting to discover the truth behind an international conspiracy after Harrison Ford’s Thaddeus Ross is elected as US president. It’s a return to the espionage-themed era of earlier Captain America films such as 2014’s The Winter Soldier, and to a lesser extent, 2016’s Civil War. Asked to explain how he is going to manage fighting the good fight without access to the super serum that Wilson decided not to take during the events of Disney+ spin-off The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Mackie suggested he would use his intellect to make up for any shortfall in firepower.
“It’s very different with the serum – you can fight anybody,” he told Deadline. “When you don’t have the serum, you have to be smart and engineer different ways of defeating [enemies]. With Sam, him being a counsellor, he uses more of his brains than brawn. He uses more of his wit than his fist. He’s more of a friend to everyone.”
All of which is fine, but sounds a bit like Wilson’s superpower will manifest as just being really, really especially careful. There’s a longstanding debate in comic books about the efficacy of constantly increasing superpowers: Superman is so invulnerable to just about anything and anyone that DC Comics had to introduce kryptonite just to give the story guys something to spin off. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is so powerful that she has to be kept off-world most of the time to avoid outshining everyone else on the Avengers team.
But does that mean it’s OK to have superheroes with basically no power at all? There’s nothing wrong with the likes of Hawkeye and Black Widow – both have (or had) something different that made their inability to punch through wallsfine while they were saving the world with grit, guile, and a knack for making impossible odds look like a mildly inconvenient traffic jam. And yet The Falcon and the Winter Soldier almost fetishised Wilson’s reluctance to power up: Wyatt Russell’s US Agent is seen as cheating by imbibing the special sauce and putting himself on par with the original Captain America, all of which creates a weird vibe around the super serum and perhaps even superpowers themselves.
The idea becomes that Chris Evans’ Cap was a true superhero largely for his decency and altruism rather than for his ability to Frisbee a shield so hard it turned Nazis into abstract art. Had anyone else been given the same privileges, they might have used them for selfish purposes rather than the greater good. But this means the serum itself becomes a kind of magical protein shake laced with moral judgment, where the results depend entirely on whether you’re sipping it for justice, or secretly planning to crush your enemies.
The problem is that Wilson, even with those swanky metal wings, is at some point going to come up against bad guys even nastier than the Red Hulk (who we know Ross is going to transform into at some point during the events of Brave New World). There is surely going to be some super serum out there, shining in the sun like a luxury yacht anchored just off the coast of moral bankruptcy, but our hero’s not allowed to take any, because he’ll be letting the side down.
Our new Captain America may be a fiercely principled beacon of unwavering determination. But he’s also showing himself up as the one Avenger who would rather lose a fight than admit they need a little help from science juice. Is that true heroism, or just a very dramatic way to prove you can bench-press your own moral high ground?