Red Hulk/Orange Trump
How Captain America 4 Fails As January 6th Wish Fulfilment
Contains spoilers for Captain America: Brave New World, obviously…
Captain America: Brave New World finally released in cinemas on Valentine’s Day during the chaotic first month of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. Given that it also features a thin-skinned narcisisstic President being puppeteered by a techbro completely devoid of charisma, it’s easy to see why so many people are discussing the movie’s politics. A lot of these discussions centre around whether or not Captain America should have made a bigger deal of the allusions to Trump, as if it’s in the commercial interests of a billion dollar franchise like the Walt Disney Corporation’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to speak truth to power. This is simply an unrealistic expectation, despite how subversive you thought Captain America: The Winter Soldier was. (It wasn’t) Now, I’m not going to go into why some people felt our first Black Captain America should be the one to take on Trump, because Richard Newby does that much better than I ever could over at Hollywood Reporter. What I am going to do is talk about superhero movies as wish fulfilment, and how that plays into the muddled politics of Captain America 4.
So let’s go back to where this all began, with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man from 2002. Famously, the World Trade Center featured prominently in the early promotional materials for Spider-Man, until the devastating attacks on September 11th ensured that those posters and trailers would never see the light of day. Filmed long before 9/11 but released months later, Spider-Man couldn’t escape the long shadow cast across New York and the wider western world by the Twin Towers. Raimi’s Spider-Man is obviously a goofy comic book movie, but the heroism of everyman Peter Parker was given added resonance in the wake of 9/11, as memories of those everyday heroes at Ground Zero was fresh in the minds of the audience.
This everyday heroism becomes even more explicit in Spider-Man 2, when a group of New Yorkers carry Spidey’s battered and bruised body, Christ-like, over their heads, replacing his mask out of respect. Everyone always focuses on the Messianic imagery in this scene, but it has a direct visual link with the footage we see of people pulled out of disaster zones like Ground Zero on 9/11.
The imagery of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror is all over the first decade of comic book movies, right the way up to 2012’s The Avengers. After all, what is Captain America and the gang saving New York from destruction at the hands of aliens but a version of September 11th where the good guys won and nobody died? Hollywood has always done this; think Arnold Schwarzenegger and an alien with a fanny for a face relitigating the Vietnam War in 1987’s Predator. Almost 13 years on from The Avengers and the MCU is still drawing on the traumatic images lodged in America’s psyche.
Instead of 9/11, Captain America: Brave New World appears to draw inspiration from the attempted insurrection of 2021 and the attack on the US Capitol. At the climax of Captain America 4, President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross transforms into the Red Hulk and lays waste to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As the red faced titan roars atop the White House, it’s hard not to think of Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, roaring on the floor of the Capitol, wearing red, white and blue face paint.
This being a Marvel movie, Captain America defeats Red Hulk, who turns back into a battered and regretful President Ross. Ashamed of his actions as Red Hulk and also a little sorry about almost starting a full-on war with Japan, President Ross steps down and hands himself in for this and all the other bad shit he’s been doing on and off-screen for the past 20 years. A President who accepts that he’s done wrong and quietly accepts his punishment, what a concept! So, much like The Avengers did with 9/11 Captain America: Brave New World is a popcorn movie that gives us a happy ending - a just ending - to the whole January 6th debacle. So why does it all feel so unsatisfying? I think the answers may lie in the extensive reshoots that took place last year.
As recently reported in Variety, Captain America: Brave New World had just over three weeks’ worth of reshoots to hammer the movie into something more palatable for test audiences and the head honchos at both Marvel and Disney. One of the most interesting elements from the source’s report pertains to the “political” nature of the movie.
“General Ross reads as an allusion to Trump. He’s this very powerful general who becomes kind of a fascist and turns into a raging Red Hulk. This is my opinion, but I think Disney was realizing, Hey, we’ve been bleeding for a while. Let’s try not to piss off our core base any more than we have been over the last couple of years. They know you’re going to lose a lot of your audience that way.”
It’s unclear exactly what was reshot, but what we do know is that Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito was brought in to do his Gustavo thing in May last year. Was Esposito’s Sidewinder designed to take some of the focus off Harrison Ford’s President Ross as the secondary villain, thereby softening the political edges? Then there’s the final two scenes between Ford and Anthony Mackie which definitely feel like reshoots. The scene where Sam Wilson tries to talk down Red Hulk among the cherry blossoms has that same unvarnished look as a lot of the last minute CGI sequences from recent Marvel movies.
Similarly, there’s a totally different energy in those scenes in The Raft, where Sam visits both Ross and evil genius Samuel Sterns, as if they were shot long after the initial shoot wrapped. The Raft scene with Ross is doubly weird, because Sam references the disgraced President resigning and turning himself in, telling us that it was something to see. Except, we don’t see Ross’ resignation speech, was it one of the sequences that Variety’s source says ended up on the cutting room floor? Or was it never even filmed to begin with?
One reason that the ending of Captain America: Brave New World feels so unsatisfying as a bit of liberal wish fulfilment is because we never actually see President Ross make this profound speech where he does the right thing for his country, instead of himself. For all the comparisons to Trump, Ross has always been presented as someone who acts out of duty to his country, no matter how misguided.
If this version of Captain America: Brave New World had come out in May last year as planned, it might be easier to look at the ending as a well-meaning, if fumbled attempt at liberal wish fulfilment relating to Trump’s accountability for January 6th. It would have been a small crumb of comfort in the face of his re-election attempt and the flagging fortunes of the January 6th case against him.
In 2025, however, Donald Trump is the 47th President of the United States, and unlike Thaddeus Ross, he shows no signs of growing a conscience. In this context, the ending of Captain America: Brave New World is a bit simplistic, a bit too neat and tidy. Despite the deeply flawed, incoherent nature of the movie and its extensive reshoots, it’s not even the fault of Brave New World that it’s ending is so unsatisfying.
The problems facing America and the wider world in Trump’s second term seem so destructive, so insurmountable that relying on just one movie from a billion dollar corporation to make us feel any better about the state of things would be like putting a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. They’re only movies after all, and Disney’s recent capitulation to Trump’s anti-DEI policies is a timely reminder that these movies may not always have our best interests at heart.
So instead of the Avengers might be time for some more everyday heroism, less Captain America, more Spider-Man 2’s subway passengers.
