Thousands of marvel fans across the nation and across the world eagerly anticipated Captain America: Brave New World’s release on Valentine's Day of this year. No better way to ring in another Valentine’s Day as a lonely, single cinephile than to watch another mediocre, bland marvel movie, am I right?

This movie was underwhelming to say the least. It had all the components to launch Marvel into a new era after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, and yet we’re still stuck in the rut that began with Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022. Almost every movie that Marvel has released since Endgame has been riddled with cringy jokes and boring, repetitive plotlines about the multiverse. Although, I will concede that Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel. That is, until The Marvels was released and that tunnel was sealed back up and flooded with water. 

Regardless of past endeavors to bring Marvel back to its former glory, I truly believed that this movie had a good shot at being the resurgence that Marvel needed. Needless to say, it was not. 

A common issue with many recent Marvel movies is that they seem to have forgotten why people watch them in the first place. People don’t want to see real world problems in our superheroes movies. We want to see aliens fighting for magic stones that turn out to be worthless if you hop dimensions. Or a big, purple giant trying to wipe out half the universe because a couple of kids are hungry. 

We want delusional, whimsical, outlandish plotlines and characters. Instead, we get Harrison Ford on an exercise bike trying to keep his arteries free of cholesterol. 

One of the key reasons that the plot of this movie was so underwhelming is because we as the viewers weren’t emotionally invested in defeating the enemy. It was just another gamma radiated freak who wants vengeance for some vague motives that we couldn’t really pinpoint, which has gotten boring to say the least. 

One thing that makes hero movies so good is the villains they must face. Marvel gave us so many memorable villains: from Thanos and Ultron and Loki. These new villains are a train wreck in comparison. If it is too much to ask for a villain to be a complex, morally-grey character, at least make them plain evil. You never feel like the heroes are in danger at any point in the movie. If there’s no risk of danger, where are we getting our reward? 

This movie was meant to be a clear handoff from old marvel to new marvel. Sam Wilson was supposed to carry Captain America’s shield into a brighter future. Instead, he drops it at the bottom of the arctic ocean where it gets frozen into an icicle. I hope it doesn’t take 70 years for Marvel to thaw back into its golden age like it took Steve Rogers. Maybe it would even be best to set the shield down for good.