Captain America: Brave New World is one of the most peculiar MCU watches we’ve had in a while. While there are certainly narrative reasons that could be the case–mostly in that it is, bizarrely, more of a sequel to 2008’s Incredible Hulk film much more than it is a fourth Captain America movie–it’s mostly because it feels like the Marvel project where we’ve been able to most keenly feel the stitching together of a movie that lived a million different lives before the one we saw play out in theaters this past weekend. Haircuts changing every few scenes, certain characters only ever being siloed away from the rest of the plot, wild costume changes that never get even remotely addressed. But one of the most peculiar by products of all this apparently not a product of all this… it just happened to look as messy as much of the rest of the film was.
It’s connected to one of those aforementioned choices though. Brave New World‘s emotional arc largely leans upon Harrison Ford’s Thaddeus Ross more than it does Sam Wilson himself, as he struggles with the tension of being a president in diplomatic crisis with also trying to resolve his personal rift with his daughter Betty, estranged from him since he went through that William Hurt phase 17 years prior. Played once again by Liv Tyler, Betty is often talked about in Brave New World, but only appears in two climactic scenes: a brief phone call with her father prior to the climactic battle Ross eventually has with Sam after transforming into the Red Hulk, and then at the very end of the film, when she visits her father when he’s locked up in the super-prison facility known as the Raft.
But both scenes are incredibly weird, for very different reasons. In the phone call scene, Tyler’s dialogue is extremely terse, limited to a handful of brief, couple-word responses while Ford guides the conversation. In the prison visit, Betty is shot and framed in a way that looks almost intentionally as if she’s being obfuscated: she’s lit heavily in shadow, and only ever shown barely out of focus, largely from the chest up, from Ross’ perspective behind the bars of his cell door. They’re brief moments–a supercut of the amount of times a character says “Betty” in the film probably runs longer than the maybe 1-2 minutes Tyler is actually in the film–but they stand out, as much as, if not more than, the rest of the weird artefacts in Brave New World as giving it the feeling of a movie strung together in the edit process. But the way the film makes Tyler’s character so important to its one big emotional beat, and then so bizarrely uses her, makes it feel like Marvel never actually managed to get Tyler in a room with her co-stars despite Betty’s vitality to the narrative.
But a Disney spokesperson speaking to IGN over the weekend insisted that that wasn’t the case with Tyler and Brave New World. Speaking to the outlet, Disney said that Tyler did provide dialogue voice over for the phone scene (rather than her voice being replicated via technology like Respeecher, or the dialogue being spliced from unused scenes in the final cut), and was actually on set filming with Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford in the final scene, rather than being stood in for with a body double. So… those scenes just happened to feel weird for other reasons, other than Marvel having to try and work around the limited capacity they could use Tyler, apparently.
It would hardly be the first time the studio has done similar things. Whether in Brave New World or many other Marvel projects, there’s plenty of shots that you can tell there’s enough lighting and framing changes mid-scene where you can make an educated guess that a particular moment or character was inserted after initial shooting. Actors involved in the MCU have frequently commented about the challenges of production where they’re filming on almost-empty sound stages, unsure of either who or what they’re going to be acting up against in the final product, or even what movie they’re even in at the time.
Time will tell if we’ll ever get to hear more about just what went into making Brave New World behind the cameras, but at least Tyler’s return to the MCU, nearly two decades in the making, was far more innocuous than it seemed.
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