I called adamantium a curiosity when I first reviewed Brave New World. Watching it again with December on the calendar, it plays like the most deliberate piece of groundwork the MCU has laid all decade.
Back then I had no reason to think about it as anything other than a plot device. It was the mineral everyone wanted, the thing that gets Thaddeus Ross into trouble with a treaty and gives Samuel Sterns something to manipulate. A metal in the ground that important people care about. Fine, next scene. But Celestial Island sitting on a deposit of adamantium only matters if adamantium matters to something bigger than one president’s legacy project, and in February 2025 nothing in this universe justified that. There were no mutants. There was no Weapon X. There was no reason for an audience to feel the weight of the word at all.
Knowing what’s coming, the film lands completely differently. This was never really Ross’s story. It was the first domino in bringing a metal that only ever meant anything in mutant stories into a universe that had no mutants in it. The treaty, the island, the whole arms-race framing, all of it exists to establish scarcity and stakes around a substance the MCU had no current use for. That’s genuinely well-disguised long-game writing and I didn’t give the film enough credit for it first time round, because my period review focused almost entirely on whether Sam had earned the shield and mostly missed that the movie was quietly doing something else underneath that question. I was right that this is a good filler movie and not one of the series’ best — the pacing still sags through the treaty negotiations, the Red Hulk resolution is still too tidy, and Harrison Ford is still giving a performance the script doesn’t quite deserve. I was wrong to file the adamantium plot as filler alongside all of that. A slow subplot and a seeded subplot look identical in the moment, and only the sequel tells you which one you were sitting through.
Sam, and what he’s actually for
My original doubts about Sam as Captain America haven’t gone away entirely, but they’ve softened, and rewatching is what did it. The throughline is much clearer with distance. Sam was never going to be Steve Rogers with a different face, and the film’s insistence on making him a political operator rather than a soldier looks far more intentional now than it did in 2025. On a first watch that felt like a movie hedging, handing him conspiracies to unravel because it couldn’t give him a fair fight. Now it just looks like the film telling you what kind of Captain America this one is.
He’s earned a seat in December less because he proved he can out-muscle a Hulk and more because he proved he can hold a room full of people trying to manipulate him. Against Doom specifically that might matter considerably more than a straight fight would, because Doom isn’t a problem you punch, he’s a problem you out-think or lose to. The Red Hulk fight still doesn’t land the way the film wants it to and a second viewing didn’t rescue it, though I’ll admit the talk-him-down resolution reads better in hindsight now I can see it establishing Sam’s whole approach rather than being a one-off choice in a set piece. The Isaiah Bradley material has aged particularly well too. Carl Lumbly is doing the heaviest lifting in the picture and it wasn’t obvious on a first pass how much of the story’s moral spine runs through him rather than through Sam. Watch it as Bradley’s story with Sam as the investigator and it holds together a good deal better than it does as a Captain America origin.
Sterns deserved a better film than this one
Here’s the thing the rewatch made me less forgiving about. Bringing the Leader back after seventeen years should have been a marquee event. Tim Blake Nelson plays him as genuinely unsettling, a man whose intellect curdled into patience, and the film keeps cutting away from him to deal with treaty logistics. On a first watch that plays as pacing. On a second it just looks like waste, and the frustration is sharper now because I can see what the film was budgeting its attention for. It spent screen time establishing adamantium and Celestial Island because those needed to exist for later. Sterns didn’t. He was the story this film actually had, and he got squeezed by the story the franchise needed planted.
That’s the recurring cost of these connective-tissue movies and it’s worth naming plainly: a film asked to set up three future things while telling one present story will usually shortchange the present story. The Torres material plays better the second time, mind you. Knowing Sam ends up on an Avengers roster makes every scene of him training a replacement land differently — he isn’t just mentoring, he’s clearing his old position because on some level he already knows he’s being called up to something larger. None of that is stated out loud. It’s just there in how he treats the kid.
So if you’re rewatching it cold, adjust what you’re watching for. Go in tracking whether Sam is convincing as Captain America and you’ll come out roughly where I did in 2025: unconvinced, mildly entertained, aware you’ve seen better. Go in tracking adamantium, Bradley’s history, and the way the film keeps putting Sam in rooms rather than fights, and it becomes a much more interesting watch. Not a better movie exactly. A better-positioned one. Marvel’s own cast announcement confirms Sam is on the roster, which means he walks into December with more to prove than any Captain America has had to prove before an Avengers-scale fight. Steve had three films and a war. Sam has one uneven solo outing and a lot of goodwill he hasn’t fully cashed.
Being good and being necessary are separate things, and this franchise has spent fifteen years teaching people to conflate them. A film can be a chore and still be the reason a later film works; it can also be a delight and lead absolutely nowhere. Brave New World is squarely the first sort, and I suspect that’s how it’ll be remembered: the movie nobody rewatches for fun, that everybody has to account for when they explain how adamantium got into this universe. There are worse legacies, and there are certainly better ones.