CAPTAIN AMERICA : BRAVE NEW WORLD - Tuesday 18th February 2025.

I saw the M Rated 'CAPTAIN AMERICA : BRAVE NEW WORLD' earlier this week, and this American Superhero film is based on the Marvel Comics character Sam Wilson / Captain America, and is the fourth instalment in the 'Captain America' film series, a continuation of the TV miniseries 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' and the 35th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This film is Directed and Co-Written for the screen by Julius Onah in his fourth feature film Directing outing following 'The Girl Is in Trouble' in 2015, 'The Cloverfield Paradox' in 2018, and 'Luce' in 2019. The first three films in the 'Captain America' film franchise - 'Captain America : The First Avenger' in 2011, 'Captain America : The Winter Soldier' in 2014, and 'Captain America : Civil War' in 2016 grossed US$2,238B at the global Box Office from combined production budgets of US$560M, making this fourth offering a no brainer. That latter film ended the 'Captain America' trilogy starring Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, and Sam Wilson becomes the new Captain America in 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier'. This film forms part of Phase Five of the MCU, was released here in Australia and the US last week, has so far grossed US$205M off the back of a US$180M production budget, and has generated mixed or average critical reviews.

The film opens on US Presidential Election night and a triumphant Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) takes the microphone to thank the American people for voting him in, and stating that they can achieve great things 'together'. We then fast track five months and Ross sends Sam Wilson/Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and Joaquin Torres/Falcon (Danny Ramirez) to Oaxaca, Mexico to thwart the illegal sale of classified items stolen by the Serpent Society, a rogue special-ops team led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). The pair successfully recover the items, but Sidewinder escapes. Following the mission and back on home soil, Wilson and Torres both train with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a super soldier who was imprisoned and experimented on by the US government for thirty years, and his existence kept a secret, even from the former Captain America.

Ross invites Wilson and Torres to a summit with world leaders at the White House, and Wilson accepts on the condition that Bradley is also invited. Ross asks Wilson to help him reform the Avengers. During the summit, Ross explains that a new metal, adamantium, has been discovered on 'Celestial Island', which was formed when the Celestial Tiamut partially emerged in the Indian Ocean, and was petrified by the Eternals. The recovered items were the first refined samples of the metal and were stolen from a Japanese mining operation. To avoid an arms race, Ross proposes a treaty to govern adamantium's mining and worldwide distribution. As he is talking, the 1959 song 'Mr. Blue' by The Fleetwoods, plays and causes several men, including Bradley, to begin shooting at Ross and other gathered dignitaries. Apprehended by Ross's Security Advisor and former Black Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), the men come to their senses and deny any knowledge of the attack.

While investigating, Wilson is ambushed by Sidewinder. Wilson over powers and captures him. Torres tracks a call on Sidewinder's phone to a hidden black site in West Virginia called Camp Echo One. Ross tries to keep the treaty alive, but the Prime Minister of Japan Ozaki (Takehiro Hira) blames him for the theft of their adamantium and the subsequent White House attack. Ross realises that the mastermind of these events is Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who gained advanced intelligence after being exposed to Bruce Banner's blood during the Abomination's rampage through Harlem. Ross imprisoned Sterns at Camp Echo One, publicly blamed him for the Abomination's actions, and promised to release him if Sterns helped advance him to the presidency. Wilson and Torres find Sterns and learn how he uses technology and the song 'Mr. Blue' as a mind control tool. He escapes while they are fighting mind-controlled soldiers.

Bat-Seraph investigates Camp Echo One herself and helps Wilson and Torres. They meet with Wilson's military friend Dennis Dunphy (William Mark McCullough), who has Sidewinder in custody. Wilson learns enough from Sidewinder to deduce Sterns's plan to destroy Ross's reputation. Wilson, Torres, and Bat-Seraph go to Celestial Island where Ross and the Prime Minister Ozaki are racing to claim ownership of adamantium. 

Sterns controls the minds of two American pilots who attack the Japanese fleet. Wilson and Torres intercept the fighter jets and convince the Japanese to stand down. Torres is shot out of the air and plunges into the Indian Ocean, critically injured. Ross tells Wilson that he is dying of heart failure and had Sterns develop pills that have prolonged his life. Ross refused to release Sterns for fear that he would no longer make the pills, leading to Sterns seeking revenge.

Sterns kills Dunphy, preventing him from calling Wilson and explaining that the pills, taken one at a time three times a day, have been adding gamma radiation to Ross's body. At the hospital, where Wilson is watching on as surgeons restart Torres heart, he is consoled by his friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Sterns later surrenders himself to Wilson. During a press conference on the White House Rose Garden, Ross loses control of his emotions and transforms into a red Hulk, and destroys part of the White House. Wilson rushes to stop him. 

Unable to overpower Ross, Wilson attempts to calm him down by reminding him of visits to Washington, D.C.'s cherry blossom trees with his estranged daughter Betty, when she was much younger. The two fight until they can fight no more, and Ross reverts to his normal self. Later, Bradley is exonerated, Wilson invites a recovering Torres to join the Avengers, the treaty is ratified, and work has begun on repairing the damaged White House. Ross resigns and has himself incarcerated at the Raft (an underwater maximum security prison located in the Atlantic Ocean), where Wilson and Betty (Liv Tyler) visit him. 

'Captain America : Brave New World' is an OK entry into the MCU canon - it's not great but it's also not that bad either. Anthony Mackie/Sam Wilson is a more than acceptable replacement for Chris Evans/Steve Rogers even though he is a mere mortal and doesn't posses the super powers that the latter had, but he still has the wings, the suit, the shield and that gadgets that help him get by. Harrison Ford chews up the scenery, especially when he transforms into Red Hulk and looks as though he's having a blast, and there are some parallel's to be drawn here with the current presidential administration too. As for the two villains in the piece - Sidewinder and Sterns, they are largely under utilised and really serve as mere McGuffin's to move the story along. Whilst the action set pieces are well choreographed as we have come to expect from the MCU, the CGI at times leaves much to be desired, especially in the case of the cherry blossom scene in which Cap and Red Hulk go head to head and toe and toe in close quarter combat - so obviously computer generated that the techies must have been asleep at the wheel the day they programmed that sequence! 

'Captain America : Brave New World' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

AD ASTRA : Tuesday 24th September 2019.

'AD ASTRA' is an M-Rated American Sci-Fi adventure offering that has so far received universal acclaim following its World Premier screening at the Venice International Film Festival on the 29th August, and which I saw at my local independent movie theatre earlier this week. Directed, Written and Co-Produced by James Gray whose previous film making credits include his 1994 debut 'Little Odessa' and then 'The Yards', 'We Own the Night', 'Two Lovers', 'The Immigrant' and 'The Lost City of Z' most recently, the meaning of the title when interpreted from its Latin phrase means 'to the stars'. To that end, Gray described his desire for the film to be 'the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie', and whether or not he has succeeded in that aim, only you can decide. The movie cost in the region of US$100M to make and has so far grossed US$51M since its worldwide release last week.

Set sometime in the not too distant future, Earth’s solar system is struck by random yet repeated mysterious power surges, potentially threatening all of human life. After surviving an incident caused by once such surge, which sees Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), plummet uncontrollably from miles above the Earth's surface, the son of famed astronaut Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), is advised by U.S. Space Command that the surges have been traced to the 'Lima Project'. The Project was launched to search the far reaches of our Solar System for intelligent life forms, under Clifford's leadership – from whom nothing has been heard of for sixteen years since reaching Neptune.

Informed that Clifford may still be alive, Roy accepts a mission to travel to Mars to try and establish communication with him, joined by his father’s old associate Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland). Roy McBride and Pruitt board a commercial flight bound for the Moon, and upon arrival are escorted by US military personnel to the Space Command base. 

En route in three lunar rovers, accompanied by security officers for their safe passage to another remote base on the dark side of the Moon, they are ambushed by scavenging pirates, who kill most of the group, except for McBride and Pruitt. However, upon reaching the base, a dying Pruitt is placed into intensive care, but not before handing over a Top Secret and highly classified memory stick to McBride which will shed further light on his mission. McBride now has to go it alone onto Mars.

He transfers to the ship 'Cepheus' on a highly confidential nineteen day flight to Mars. En route, the ship receives a May Day signal from a Norwegian biomedical research space station obviously in distress. Despite protests from McBride to maintain their course for Mars, the captain overrules McBride and goes to the aid of the alleged stricken vessel. Initially it seems abandoned as no one is responding to the radio communications, but a rogue baboon test subject has escaped, smashing through the captain's helmet visor and chewing off his hand down to a bloody stump before McBride is able to neutralise it. A second baboon attacks, but Roy locks the door frantically behind him and depressurises the chamber, killing it instantly. He attempts to save the captain and tapes up his badly damaged helmet before carrying him back to the Cepheus but he is declared dead on arrival. A brief service is held where the dead captain's body is ejected into space. The Cepheus lands on Mars just as another surge strikes, forcing manual intervention. The interim captain is overcome by nerves and is unable to fly or take commands, so leaving McBride to land the ship.

McBride is escorted to the underground Space Command base on Mars which is secure from the impacts of the power surges where he meets facility Director Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga). There he is tasked with recording voice messages read from a pre-written script to send to the Lima Project, in the hope of connecting with Clifford, and upon hearing his sons voice will trigger a response. After several seemingly failed attempts, McBride goes off-script during a recording session with an emotional appeal to his father. He is almost instantly removed from the mission, and is led to assume that a response had been forthcoming, but his personal connection now presents a risk to himself and the overall success of the mission.

Whilst being temporarily held in a 'comfort room' awaiting his transportation back to the Moon and then home to Earth, he is visited by Lantos, who advises him that she was born on Mars, has been to Earth only once in her life as a young child, and is the daughter of crew-members aboard the Lima Project. She hands McBride classified footage showing that Clifford's crew mutinied by attempting to return to Earth, resulting in him turning off their life-support systems, and that her parents were among the crew killed. She tells McBride that the crew that brought him to Mars are leaving to destroy the Lima Project base with a nuclear device on board their ship.

The two decide between them that McBride should confront his father himself, and so Lantos sneaks McBride to an underground lake beneath the rocket launch site to give him access to the ship, although the clock is ticking on the countdown. McBride climbs aboard as the rocket takes off, and is discovered by a surprised and startled crew soon afterwards. The crew are instructed to dispense with McBride despite his best attempts to forewarn them all that he is non-hostile. A fight breaks out, and the crew of three all die, leaving McBride to his own devices in complete solitude for the long journey onto Neptune - some two billion miles away. 

The isolation and stress of the mission without any mental or physical stimulation takes its toll as McBride has memories of his relationships with his father and his estranged wife, Eve (Liv Tyler). After several weeks he arrives at the Lima Project. While approaching the Lima Project ship in a small module, another surge damages the module making it impossible to dock securely, forcing McBride to enter the ship via a space-walk. Finding the ship abandoned and its dead crew floating in zero gravity, he lays down the nuclear payload. His father is looking down on him from above as the ship's only survivor. Clifford explains that the surges originate from the ship's malfunctioning anti-matter power source, damaged during a mutiny. Clifford has continued to work alone on the project throughout all the passing years, refusing to lose faith in the possibility of discovering non-human intelligent life.

McBride tries to convince his father to return home with him to Earth, but Clifford dismisses the notion saying that he is already at home, and has been for the past twenty years, and that his relationship with his young son and wife were only ever going to be temporary. Despite his father's protests, McBride arms the nuclear payload with a three hour detonation time, and prepares to return to his ship with Clifford. Once outside the Lima Project ship Clifford uses his spacesuit thrusters to launch himself into deep space, unwilling to return to Earth. Still tethered onto his son, the pair struggle, with Clifford pleading to his son to let him go. Reluctantly, McBride releases his father who drifts off into deep space.

McBride is able to propel himself back onto his own ship, using a dismantled piece of the Lima Project ship's hull the size of a door to shield himself through Neptune's rocky ring. Without enough fuel to return, he uses the shockwave from the nuclear explosion to propel the ship home. Before the Lima Project ship was destroyed McBride downloaded as much data as he could from his fathers findings from all those years of space travel. The data retrieved suggests that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, inspiring McBride to reconnect with those closest to him, and he returns to Earth with a whole new found positive outlook on life.

I have to say that I was somewhat underwhelmed by 'Ad Astra'. Sure Brad Pitt gives another great performance as the stoic, completely focused, deeply committed, utterly dependable and infinitely reliable astronaut treading in his fathers footsteps, and proving himself worthy to his peers, the US Government, the world ultimately and to his own Dad to be called Clifford McBride's son. At its core, this is a film about the impacts of an absentee father, and the lengths one man must go to in order to reconcile that fact and lay that ghost of the past finally to rest. Visually, the film looks great too from the opening sequence, to the Moon Space Command Base, the rover chase scene, and the passing of McBride's ship as it cruises past Saturn, Jupiter and finally reaches Neptune. But for all that visual splendour, it's nothing more than we have come to expect in this day and age of cutting edge technologically advanced CGI that we have seen before in the likes of 'Interstellar', 'Gravity', 'First Man', 'The Martian' and even '2001 : A Space Odyssey'. In the final analysis its a film about a man with daddy issues who has lost his way in the world and who catches a ride from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars and onto Neptune and back again to prove that humans are the only intelligent life form in the infinite universe and finally to say farewell to his old man, interspersed with a few action set pieces to maintain the interest. And there you have it! Also starring LisaGay Hamilton and John Ortiz.

'Ad Astra' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-