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Sam Wilson's first movie as Captain America has finally taken flight into theaters around the world. And while critical reception of Captain America: Brave New World has been lukewarm, one thing is clear about Julius Onah's film: Sam Wilson's fight scenes are a hell of a lot better than Steve Rogers's. As it turns out, you don't need the Super Soldier Serum to give audiences a kinetic spectacle onscreen. Given that Sam has a set of wings and a shield to fight with, he's got a more diverse combat kit to work with than Steve. That said, from a filmmaking point of view, Brave New World commits to showing off Sam Wilson's skills with far more commitment than any of Steve Rogers's Captain America films. In fact, I'm willing to bet that Sam Wilson in the MCU is a better fighter than Steve Rogers.

This revelation for Sam couldn't come at a more crucial time. With Steve Rogers now retired from the role of Captain America, Sam has since taken over the mantle and the franchise as a whole. And while Steve only became Captain America after he was given the Super Soldier Serum during WWII, Sam currently has no plans to transform in the same manner. With Captain America: Brave New World, the MCU must prove to us as the audience that Sam is up to the task as the MCU's new Cap. And the film accomplishes this objective through its focus on Sam's fighting prowess. 

As opposed to other MCU films, which are often heavy on CGI and leave a muddy image of the hero's body in motion as a result, Brave New World goes to great lengths to show us how Sam generates his own power from his otherwise normal body. It's a cinematic language that's rooted in a tradition pioneered by Bruce Lee, who was influenced by how Fred Astaire filmed his dance sequences in wide shots. By filming himself in continuous wide shots with no superfluous cutaways, Bruce Lee formed a mythology onscreen around his own acrobatic fighting skills. As the saying goes, seeing is believing, and Lee's style certainly had all of us believing that Asian men were more than the feeble stereotypes Hollywood was clinging to. 

Brave New World accomplishes something similar with Sam Wilson, although the stakes are different for Sam, as opposed to Bruce Lee in the early '70s. It's hard not to be impressed by the amount of work that Mackie and Brave New World's stunt team put into the meticulous fights in the film. Rather than being heavy on cutaways, like Captain America: Civil War, Brave New World sets the camera up to capture Sam's creativity with his wings and shield in a variety of environments. It demonstrates his competence over and over again. But why? We've known that Sam Wilson is a badass for the past decade. So what does it mean for Brave New World to switch up the cinematic language of the Captain America franchise?

To answer this question, I can't help but be reminded of a sentiment my mother impressed on me from the time I was a child. In order to be taken seriously in this racist country, I needed to be twice as good as my white peers at whatever I decided to do. While Sam's Blackness is not explicitly at the center of what Brave New World is trying to unpack (at least, not as much as it was in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier), the film's commitment to showing how good of a fighter the new Cap is reveals the extra set of demands that Sam, as a Black man, must meet in order to be seen as "worthy" of the mantle. 

This is not to say that I didn't find the kinetic fight scenes of Brave New World heartening to watch - I did. But at the same time, it was a bitter reminder of how much harder BIPOC and especially Black folks must work in order to be seen as heroic. In Brave New World, Sam Wilson may not have been doing Steve Rogers things like busting through walls of an office building like the Kool-Aid Man, but his discipline belies something greater, one that he never needed the Super Soldier Serum to attain. 

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• The MCU needs Anya Taylor-Joy's Magik in it (and not just for the X-Men connection)
• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.