The New Captain America Has an Odd Message for Our Political Moment

The movie is styled as a paranoid thriller along the lines of its 2014 predecessor Captain America: The Winter Soldier .

The plot even loops in a character from the series’ TV spinoff, Carl Lumbly ’s Isaiah Bradley , the “forgotten Cap ” who was subjected to the same experiments that created Steve Rogers , and then imprisoned for 30 years to hide the evidence of the government's crimes.

In a classic paranoid thriller like They Live or The Parallax View , the hero discovers that the world he thought he knew is rotten to the core.

President Ross claims to be a uniter, not a divider, but that's a little like saying Thanos was an environmentalist.

No matter how grotesque his misdeeds, he's framed as a man struggling to be good, a sympathetic monster.

If anyone in Brave New World has a right to that kind of all-consuming rage, it’s Sam Wilson .