Captain America Brave New World/ The Palestine Laboratory
Captain America is Black. Is that Woke? Cry me a river and read the source material. Antony Loewenstein and Dan Davies' documentary on Al Jazeera is an essential view.
Captain America Brave New World
The Story
Following Avengers Endgame and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the US has a new Captain America, played by Anthony Mackie, a Captain America who is not a supersoldier, is Black and therefore an eyesore for white supremacists and many others who cannot wait for him to fail.
The new Cap finds quite a challenge on his hands in this movie. After securing a crucial package in Mexico, aided by Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez, now the new Falcon) from mercenaries led by Sidewinder, played by Giancarlo Esposito (who is enjoying playing ruthless villains these days, after his role as Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian), he receives an olive branch in the shape of an invitation to the White House for him, Torres and Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) the second and forgotten US supersoldier, who first appeared in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.
Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (played by Harrison Ford, replacing the late William Hurt) sends an invitation to the new Cap in his role as the new President of the US. When Ross meets Wilson, at the White House he asks him to bring back the Avengers, to deal with the challenges that the world is facing.
Ross, who broke the Avengers in Captain America Civil War and had Wilson arrested wants to change the record as President. At the same he mixes calls for unity and the end of divisions in the global community with Trumpesque outbursts and arrogance, a sort of Biden-Trump mashup.
The aforementioned package retrieved by Wilson and Torres is discussed during Ross’ speech and is connected to the ending of Chloé Zhao's The Eternals. The Celestial corpse in the Indian Ocean, left at the end of that movie, has brought a new resource, Adamantium (can you feel Wolverine’s claws?) to the world.
The celebratory vibe however stops when Bradley attempts to kill Ross, pushing Cap and the new President on a collision course.
Mackie and Ford play well the animosity and distrust between the two, which becomes physical, as the trailer shows a battle between Cap and a particularly a
The Adamantium turns to exacerbate geopolitical tensions and create the international conspiracy (with the villain behind the scenes spreading leaked information and animosity between Washington and its allies) that Wilson and Torres must contend with.
The Leader, Samuel Sterns, played by Tim Blake Nelson is the villain behind the scenes, building a web of intrigue with Ross at its centre, and a brainy opponent who pushes Mackie, and Ford, to the limits.
Sterns sees every move and probability and is always five steps ahead of Wilson in the story, making for a cerebral and memorable villain.
Failure for Mackie’s Cap is a real and concrete possibility; he does not have a magic hammer or a super soldier serum flowing through his veins and this brings his fights more to a street level, as seen in his clashes with Sidewinder.
In a way, when Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, in a cameo, tells Mackie’s Cap that he inspires people (while Chris Evans’ Cap gave them something to believe in) this represents the crucible of the Black male, in the US and beyond, the idea of playing as an example for the future generations and the youth, without any room for failure or missteps, in deeply racist societies that cannot wait to take Black men down.
A difficult genesis
This movie had a difficult genesis; its initial title was Captain America New World Order. The homonymous conspiracy theory is a strongly antisemitic one (a significant problem as the movie’s big bad is played by Jewish American actor Tim Blake Nelson) and then the backstory of a character played by Shira Haas (Unorthodox) also had to be changed.
Haas was initially supposed to play Sabra, an Israeli mutant super-heroine and Mossad agent, who in the comics brutalises Palestinians, not to mention that her very name evokes the massacres of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon.
Such a character would have been highly problematic, to say the least, at any time, even before the beginning of the Palestinian genocide (as international law and genocide experts label it) as Israel’s response after October 7. In the current phase such a character would have been way more problematic than before.
Luckily, Haas’ character has been changed and does not appear as prominent or problematic as it could have been; however this has not stopped the calls for boycott by BDS, and it makes wonder how necessary it was to include the character in any capacity. Back to the story now.
The African American experience
The reflections on the African American experience continue with Bradley the second forgotten Captain America who debuted in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Bradley rebelled against orders and saved his fellow Black soldiers while serving in the Korean war (in the MCU, WWII in the comics) and for disobeying was imprisoned and experimented on for decades, a reference both to the brutalisation of Black men in America, their disproportionate numbers in the prison system as well as to the Tuskegee experiment,
From 1932, in Macon County, Alabama, hundreds of African American men, mainly sharecroppers, were enrolled in an experiment unwillingly, as while they were promised free healthcare, they were effectively being infected with syphilis to track the disease progression; this has left to this day a legitimate distrust in the African American communities and beyond around vaccines.
On the positive side, there is the bromance between Mackie’s Cap and Danny Ramirez’s Joaquin Torres-Falcon who make for a great duo for the MCU future, a Black-Latino alliance at a time when the anti-DEI rhetoric runs rife in the US.
The movie is not perfect and suffers due to the many reshoots. In the the end, however, Onah’s work still turns out to be enjoyable, embracing the Black experience, spy elements seen in Captain America The Winter Soldier, geopolitics, and the dark times; in our world, it feels however that rather than in a Brave New World, we’re stuck in Gramsci’s interregnum between the death of the Old World and the birth of the new one.
Unfortunately, the monsters we are dealing with make Ford’s Red Hulk look reasonable.
Captain America Brave New World is out in UK theatres on February 14.
The Palestine Laboratory
This Monday, I attended the screening, at London’s Frontline Club, of the first part of The Palestine Laboratory, starring Australian German Jewish journalist Antony Loewenstein ( and based on his homonymous book), directed by Dan Davies and produced by Al Jazeera.
The documentary explores the apparatus of spyware, security, weaponry, and AI systems produced by Israeli companies, and how these collectively make Israel one of the greatest exporters of these technologies that are tested on Palestinians.
The first part is an in-depth journey into the security apparatus in Israel, featuring interviews with voices like Yaakov Peri, Shin Bet director between 1988 and 1995, and Meron Rapoport, writer at +972 Magazine, as well as into how such apparatus impacts the daily life of Palestinians.
This Monday at the Frontline Club, Q & A following “The Palestine Laboratory” screening, with Antony Lowenstein, Yasmine Ahmed, U.K. director at Human Rights Watch, Palestinian journalist Haya Abushkaidem, Al Jazeera producer Farid Barsoum and documentary director Dan Davies.
The second part of the documentary looks instead into how Israeli companies export their security apparatus to the world, something with sinister implications as in the Italian case
The revelations that spyware (developed by Israeli company Paragon, which had a contract with Meloni’s government) was used to spy journalists like Fanpage.it editor Francesco Cancellato, or activists like Luca Casarini is a demonstration of the global dimensions of technologies that first infringe the freedom and rights of Palestinians and then the ones of everyone else.
You can watch the second part of the doc on YouTube or attend the second screening at the Frontline Club; you will find the tickets here (there are a few left).
That’s all for today, have a good weekend, the newsletter will return next week!