“‘Be angry and do not sin.’ Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the devil an opportunity.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Anger is a challenging emotion. It is also a masking emotion. Anger can serve as an easy emotional substitute for whatever it is we are actually feeling. Often we don’t or can’t put word to what our actual emotional state is, and because anger is easier to both understand and express, we just let that take over. Sometimes anger is the right emotional response to a particular situation. More often it probably is not. But in spite of the good that can come from righteous and proper anger – anger over injustice, for instance – when anger gets in the driver’s seat of our lives, it can cause all sorts of chaos. I’m thinking about anger this morning because that complicated emotion lies at the heart of the newest Marvel offering. Let’s talk about Captain America: Brave New World.

Marvel has been floundering lately. The MCU has been delivering up one bust after another. After the run they had leading up to and including Avengers: Endgame, the initial shock at box office failure was pretty intense (especially in the company boardroom, I imagine). Here, though, six years after Endgame released, everybody’s kind of getting used to it. “Another Marvel bust” is becoming an increasingly familiar headline.

And this is not without due merit. The sequel to Captain Marvel, The Marvels, for instance, wasn’t good. It wasn’t even that much fun beyond Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel, who was a delight, and who I can’t wait to see again in some form or fashion (I think Marvel Zombies coming up this October is her next planned appearance…in animation). Thor: Love and Thunder wasn’t much better. I enjoyed The Eternals, but it was a critical bust, and such a significant departure from what had become the superhero movie formula that it fell pretty flat with audiences too. About their only significant success since Spider Man: No Way Home was this past summer’s Deadpool and Wolverine which succeeded primarily on the popularity of the titular characters and Marvel nostalgia.

On the TV side of things, results have been more mixed. The two seasons of Loki were excellent. The animated The Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which I just finished watching, was tremendous on every front. What If?… was also really good in its first two seasons. The third season, as we talked about a few weeks ago, was a bust. Hawkeye set up Kate Bishop for future projects, and I really enjoyed it, but didn’t generate much love. The same goes with Falcon and The Winter Soldier (which is required watching for Captain America: Brave New World. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was funny, but a mess. Echo (which I still haven’t watched) was a nearly epic failure.

The issue seems to be at least partly one of oversaturation, but in spite of Marvel’s announced intention to address that, their production release schedule for the rest of the year includes one streaming or live screen release each month. They are really hoping The Fantastic Four and the promise of Doctor Doom who will be played by Robert Downey, Jr., will be enough to breathe real life back into the franchise. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, Captain America: Brave New World sits only a little bit above par as far as Marvel’s recent pattern goes. I enjoyed it, but most critics and fans did not. It had a decent opening weekend, but doesn’t look like it’ll ride that to the kind of financial success Marvel certainly wanted it to have. It’ll wind up making money, but not a lot thanks to an inflated budget due to a number of expensive reshoots.

The movie pits the new Captain America, Sam Wilson, who formerly bore the moniker, Falcon (the streaming series, Falcon and the Winter Soldier tells how he went from one to the other), along with a new character bearing the name Falcon (Joaquin Torres, played by Danny Ramirez), face off against the traditional Hulk villain, The Leader (who I’m not sure is ever actually given that title in the film), and Red Hulk…another traditional Hulk villain.

The Leader’s real name…in the comics…is Samuel Sterns. Tim Blake Nelson played him both here and in the Incredible Hulk movie with Edward Norton way back in 2008, before they switched to Mark Ruffalo for the character. He was a nerdy scientist who studied gamma radiation and was allowed/forced to give Hulk powers to Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) by General Thaddeus Ross on his quest to take down the Hulk. At the end of the movie, a bit of Hulk’s blood drips down onto a cut on Sterns’ head which set up the character, but then Marvel never did anything with him until now.

The other villain, Red Hulk, is a Hulk version of General Ross who has now become President Ross, and is now played by Harrison Ford since William Hurt passed away a couple of years ago. Ford brings all the gravitas to the character that you would expect. Playing the President isn’t exactly new territory for him. His transformation into the Red Hulk came via an interesting path, but wasn’t a surprise thanks to a marketing decision to spill all the beans on it in hopes it would lure more viewers into the theater. It seems the gamble paid off. I doubt people would have been nearly as enthused to see the film without it.

I’ll save a whole lot of storytelling here and jump to my thoughts on the whole thing. The movie was pretty good. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great. The story was fun, but felt a bit hollow. The acting was generally very solid. All the major players gave the best performances they could given the constraints of the script and the directing. Marvel still just isn’t very good at creating compelling villains when they aren’t sitting in the fantastical world of a comic book. In the comics villains can just be evil and they don’t need to worry about explaining it. In the real world we want to know why, but the whys typically boil down to just a handful of reasons, so they keep recycling those.

Really, this movie was about fan service in finally giving us the Red Hulk, who I doubt we will ever see again minus a potential cameo in Avengers: Secret Wars. It was about dropping a post-credit scene hint of what’s coming just like Marvel did with the post credits scenes of pretty much all of the films leading up to the Endgame cycle. And it was about firmly establishing Sam Wilson as Captain America. We will see both him and the new Falcon again. I’m excited about that as their chemistry as a duo was really good.

What really caught my attention as I watched the movie this past weekend, though, was the sheer number of Gospel connections it had. They were all over the place. Until the very end of the film, Wilson’s driving motivation was not stopping Sterns. He kept stopping Sterns as a by-product of his real aim, but that wasn’t his primary goal. He was laser focused on getting justice for a friend who could not get it for himself. In order to understand that whole part of the plot, you really need to watch Falcon and The Winter Soldier, but his passion for fighting for justice for the oppressed and abused is absolutely a Gospel-directed passion. The idea of doing something like that didn’t exist before the Gospel.

In another scene, after an epic air battle (which was one of the highlights of the film for me), Falcon is grievously wounded. Wilson takes his injury very seriously as the one who led him into battle in the first place. While watching the surgical team doing their best to save his life, who should enter the room but Bucky Barnes, also known as The Winter Soldier. He and Wilson became close friends over the course of Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and his friendship is a great encouragement to Wilson in that worrisome moment. It was a terrific endorsement of the Gospel virtue of genuine friendship. We weren’t made to face hard times on our own. The love of a brother or sister is a vitally important thing in our lives. This is part of what makes the church so important.

Speaking of justice and friendship, the movie’s villains (although Ross as the Red Hulk wasn’t really very villainous beyond Hulking out; he was really more of a victim) could have used some of those. Sterns (I struggle calling him The Leader even though he is because he’s never called that in the film) was a willing participant in Ross’s efforts to stop the Hulk almost 20 years ago, but he was then victimized by Ross who locked Sterns up for his role in creating the Abomination, but then used his gamma enhanced mental capacity to achieve his personal and policy goals as a General and then as the Secretary of State. Ross did this with the promise of a pardon once he became President, but has reneged since Sterns knows too much and because Sterns produces the medicine that is keeping his heart from quitting on him.

Sterns only real motivation seems to be a totally understandable bitterness and resentment at Ross for failing to deliver on his promises. For Ross’s part, he’s driven by a genuine desire to wash himself clean from his morally checkered past in order to reconcile with his beloved but estranged daughter. Rather than working out his guilt with a trusted friend or counselor, though, he’s swallowed it over and over and over again. For both men, their unaddressed emotions express themselves as uncontrolled anger that cares little for who is hurt in pursuit of appeasement.

The resolution of the whole conflict is particularly unsatisfying as far as superhero movies goes. Once Sterns achieves his aim of ruining Ross’ image and legacy, he quietly turns himself in. Ross, on the other hand, hulks out, but after a super powered sparring match with Wilson, gets talked down from his hulk rage and turns himself in as well. So far, all of Wilson’s major battles as Captain America have ended with him giving a speech to a politician that solves everyone’s problems. We’ll see how well that works against Dr. Doom next year.

The apostle Paul, writing to the Ephesian believers, warned them not to get pulled into sin by their anger. Anger itself is sometimes okay. Depending on the situation, anger can be the right emotional reaction. We see God get angry in the Scriptures more than once. But letting a righteous anger lead us to taking measured steps to address a matter of gross injustice and lashing out wildly in a selfish rage are not the same thing. We cannot let anger lead us into sin. Even when He gets angry, God’s actions are still motivated by His love. Ours cannot land anywhere short of this.

There is an enemy of God’s people who hates God’s righteousness who will be more than happy to lead us in wreaking all kinds of sinful havoc in our anger. This is precisely what Sterns sought to do to Ross – to provoke him to unleash his rage, hulk out, and destroy everything he had ever accomplished because of it. Yet while that may be emotionally cathartic in a given moment, it won’t achieve any net good. Hulk rage never does. In this, while it doesn’t make for quite as an exciting movie as it might otherwise, Wilson as Captain America offers us a better, Gospel-centered picture of how to handle our anger. He fights where he has to fight, but is ultimately motivated by a love for justice and a love for his friends. His is a righteous anger handled properly. May we follow his example well.