Have you used your Disney+ subscription to casually catch up with the three previous Captain America movies ahead of Captain America: Brave New World hitting theaters this weekend? If so, you’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Of course, Brave New World, the first big-screen outing for Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) filling out the Captain America costume, does connect to those films; Sam was introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (you remember: “On your left!”), still one of the best MCU movies after all these years. He also has a prominent role in Captain America: Civil War. But in terms of plot and character, Brave New World has more to do with – as Marvel-heads might expect – the Disney+ TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and – as virtually no one might expect – the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk, sort of the anti-Winter Soldier, in that it’s perhaps the most memory-holed of the MCU movies.
It makes sense that The Incredible Hulk doesn’t get much attention from fans or Marvel itself. Only the second MCU movie, produced by Universal Pictures back when Marvel’s movies were distributed through Paramount, the movie came out around six weeks after Iron Man became a surprise smash. Though it featured a mid-credits cameo from Robert Downey Jr. making it clear that the two movies shared a universe, at the time Incredible Hulk was something of a hedge, coming on the heels of the 2003 Hulk by Ang Lee. That movie opened huge and then fell off hard, giving the distinct impression that a lot of money was left on the table by Lee’s strange, lyrical (and underrated!) take on the character. Yet a lot of people did see it, and the 2008 movie clearly doesn’t want the more casual audience members to get confused about how the two movies relate to each other (even though they don’t). The Incredible Hulk therefore sticks Bruce Banner’s superhero origin in an opening-credits montage, and picks up with Banner hiding in Brazil, approximately where the 2003 one left him. Though there are references to events that didn’t occur in the older film, the newer one remains just vague enough that it could, to those not paying close attention, serve as a recast sequel – even though the tone, style, and performers are all completely different.
That soft-reboot approach reflects the kind of movie Hulk ’08 is: efficient, pragmatic, watchable. That’s how it plays on screen, anyway; behind the scenes, there was conflict between star Edward Norton, who also did heavy uncredited rewrites on the screenplay, and the studios involved, who wanted a leaner, more crowd-pleasing movie. Part of the conflict now seems counterintuitive: Norton was seeking a longer runtime, which later MCU entries have no trouble indulging, and wanted to use that time to more clearly differentiate his story from the Lee film, which the current, brand-confident MCU would be eager to do.
The current MCU is so confident, in fact, that Brave New World reaches back to 2008 in a way that feels like a left-field pull. Granted, Brave New World does feature a well-advertised appearance from Red Hulk who, like this Cap, is a combination of one established character underneath and a different character on the surface. (Red Hulk doesn’t emerge until late in the movie, but nearly every ad has blown this appearance far in advance.) But Red Hulk’s human counterpart, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, isn’t even played by the same actor as in the 2008 film where he debuted. There, and in several subsequent MCU movies, he was played by the late William Hurt; now the character has been recast with the legendary Harrison Ford, just as Norton was recast with Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers (and in every Hulk appearance going forward). Brave New World also features the return of Tim Blake Nelson as The Leader, a character whose very comic-book-y mutation began in The Incredible Hulk after he was exposed to Banner’s blood (which he had hoped to use in medical research, which Banner would not agree to). So a refresher on The Incredible Hulk would prove surprisingly helpful in following Brave New World.
For hardcore fans, it’s sort of neat to see a movie with “Captain America” in the title zig-zag toward a bunch of Hulk lore; ah, the strange whims of the comic-book universe! But it’s also a deeply strange choice, because the MCU of 2025 looks very different from the nascent 2008 version. Hulk ’08, directed by Louis Leterrier, is both a slickly underwhelming comic-book thriller of few ideas, and a vastly more propulsive and better-looking superhero story than much of what the MCU has managed in recent years. For example, it takes far better advantage of Norton’s wiry, testy intelligence than anything Brave New World is able to muster from Mackie’s considerable charisma, and the action sequences have a lot more visual zest than the new movie.
I’m not suggesting that Leterrier is a better director than Julius Onah, who made Brave New World and also a terrific, underseen social drama called Luce. It’s more that Brave New World could use a little bit of what The Incredible Hulk has – not in terms of its actual plotlines, which are almost shockingly negligible, tying up loose ends no one was wondering about, but in its willingness to just make a dumb-fun action-fantasy picture. Marvel movies can be more than that, for sure. But Brave New World sure isn’t, and it isn’t much fun, either, so what are we doing here? The Incredible Hulk isn’t nearly the movie Ang Lee’s Hulk is, nevermind the level of Black Panther or The Avengers. Yet for a longtime go-to choice for the MCU’s worst, it’s looking better all the time.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
