The Captain America: Brave New World trailer dropped this morning, and without spoiling too much right away, let’s just say if you’ve ever wondered what 81-year-old Hollywood legend Harrison Ford would look like big and mad and red, get ready to Hulk-smash that PURCHASE TICKETS button.
I mean, that’s rhetorical: Brave New World doesn't hit theaters until February 14th, 2025, so you have plenty of time. Anyway: Here’s the Brave New World trailer.
OK, so: We’ve got Anthony Mackie’s Captain America getting pressured (at a meeting in the most mood-lit White House put onscreen since Spielberg’s Lincoln) by Ford’s U.S. President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a former U.S. Army general who’s keen to make the Captain America job an official military position. We’ve got the great Carl Lumbly, as super-soldier Isaiah Bradley, trying to kill the President, possibly while mind-controlled. We’ve got the voice (but not the face just yet) of Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns, last seen getting accidentally dosed with gamma-radiated Hulk blood toward the end of the 2008 Edward Norton Incredible Hulk movie. We’ve got Giancarlo Esposito with an AK-47, just because.
And yeah— that’s (presumably) Ford’s Ross as a Hulk there at the end, a red one. In the comics he’s known, memorably, as “Red Hulk.” So it’s a Captain America movie and a Hulk movie, because Marvel's never met a bet it couldn't hedge. Honestly, though, until that three-second shot of the Spicy Hulk there’s a not-unwelcome deep-genre-flick-ish The MCU White House Has Fallen Down vibe to the whole thing. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series has already explored the complexities of what it means for a Black man to put on an American-flag suit and fight for this particular country; this one looks like it's interested chiefly in Mackie’s Cap having a top-five bad day. The President’s inner circle has been compromised, Nelson's Stern is talking about a global power shift; this reportedly has nothing to do with Skrulls, unless it does?
But whatever. Let’s talk about what is most exciting here—namely, the great Harrison Ford joining the MCU and (from the looks of things) doing what Harrison Ford does best: gruffly under-acting while dancing on the knife’s edge of visibly not giving a shit.
Ford is stepping into a role left vacant by the death of William Hurt, who played Ross in five MCU films before he passed in 2022. In MCU continuity, though, Ross has won the White House by unseating the alien-hating President Ritson, played by Dermot Mulroney in TV’s Secret Invasion. Hurt’s Ross had a mustache; in the trailer there’s a winking reference to Ross having shaved in order to win the election.
So there’s an in-story explanation, but the mustache thing also feels like Ford winking at us from inside the noisy context of this movie. It’s like George Lazenby, briefly Sean Connery’s successor as James Bond, quipping “This never happened to the other fellow” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s Ford tapping on the fourth wall to say Look, we all know I’m Harrison Ford, and I’m here because my eight planes run on gas that isn't going to pay for itself.
One rule I try to live by in life is Don’t act like you’re too cool to be there if you’re there. This does not apply to people who are Harrison Ford. He is always going to be a little too cool to be there, by virtue of being Harrison Ford. Coming the man who once busted George Lucas’ balls on set by saying, to Lucas, regarding Lucas’ dialogue, “You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it," anything else would be a disappointment.
A while back, after Ford was photographed on the set of Brave New World wearing a pair of ripped, seemingly Hulked-out-of pants, he was asked during an Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny interview if we’d be seeing the Red Hulk in the Cap film. Ford’s perfectly Fordian response was “What, uh—what is a Red Hulk?” In the wake of the trailer and the simultaneous reveal of a poster featuring a Red Hulk hand crushing Cap's shield, everyone has decided this answer was Ford being coy. But honestly, I like to believe Ford did not and maybe still does not know what a Red Hulk is, and maybe does not care—that he showed up to work, put on the ripped pants that were handed to him, shot his scenes, and clocked out, and whatever the CGI people did after that is none of his business.
Even if he did know, and was winking at the open-secret Red Hulkness of it all—and the rest of the clip, where he jokingly asks Waller-Bridge if she knew, makes it seem like he almost certainly did and was— it’s still a perfect Harrison Ford answer. One of the funniest/saddest things about the superhero-movie boom is the spectacle of gifted (or even kinda-good) actors having to sit in a press-junket chair and pretend, for fear of being wished into the cornfield along with their project, that they’ve always dreamed of playing Laser-Hand Man in a movie, that they in no way take lightly the legacy of Laser-Hand Man, that they want to do justice to this complicated character and the lasers he can shoot from his hands, that they showed up to work every day determined to give the fans of Laser-Hand Man the Laser-Hand Man movie that they deserve, and that all of this is in no way ridiculous or humiliating.
Harrison Ford is not going to give anybody anything like that. Watch that interview clip again. Watch Ford’s face. Ignore the ten-percent-of-a-smile thing he gives his interlocutor when he’s asked the question. Watch the way he looks to his right, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge is sitting, as if to say, Can you believe this? Watch his eyes, which say Oh, Jesus. Here we go. These are the eyes of the man who wanted them to kill off Han Solo as early as The Empire Strikes Back, as it dawns on him that he’s going to spend at least the next year of a life he knows to be finite fending off questions about the Red goddamn Hulk.
Here is another story, from Anthony Mackie, who told Variety last year that on his first day on set with Ford, he was “so fucking nervous I couldn’t remember my lines. He’s Harrison fucking Ford. There is this aura about him. But he dispels that really quickly because he’s such a cool guy. He’s everything a movie star should be. He would say, ‘Let’s shoot this piece of shit.’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah, let’s shoot this shit.’”
I’m in no way suggesting that Mackie is saying that Harrison Ford thought Brave New World was an actual piece of shit or that Mackie and the crew agreed it was. But what Ford understands, what is contained in the imperative “Let’s shoot this piece of shit” is that this kind of work isn’t life and death—that if you’re playing the guy who turns into the Red Hulk, it’s inherently ridiculous. Someone can type this shit, you can say this shit, but only an idiot would take this shit seriously. This is the too-cool-to-be-there-but-also-there Zen of Harrison Ford, who is not going to say “No” to playing President Red Hulk but is also not going to pretend it’s King Lear.
Imagine the forty-minute monologue William Hurt would give you about Alexander Technique-ing his way into the Red Hulk’s physicality. Think about how lucky we are to have Ford on this job instead. Honestly, this is as excited as we’ve been for a Marvel movie in a minute. Captain America: Brave New World! February 14th, 2025! Let’s go see this shit!