Who will gain the world, and who will lose their soul?
I think it is fair to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been flailing around since Endgame. The decade’s worth of intertwined storytelling across several film series culminated in a bang, and everything since then, entertaining as it may have been, has lacked a spine that made it satisfying, like before the big angry purple guy. In that regard, it’s like the Star Wars sequels in that it has been reasonably entertaining but lacking any real direction, any underlying idea that the whole enterprise was aiming towards, anything that it really wanted to say (the Star Wars prequels, for their myriad sins, certainly were saying something). As of May 2025 I am happy to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly getting back on its feet with Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo.
The film’s cast is primarily the dregs of previous movies and shows, side characters who had chips on their shoulders and had beef with the heroes in one way or another. In that subtle way, this movie flips the script of the previous movies, where the antiheroes are now, for better or worse, the heroes, and have to save the world because nobody with a purer heart is available at the moment. They are a rowdy, cantankerous bunch, most of whom have been working as contract killers on the behest of those with great ambitions and deep pockets. What holds for a lot of them, most cuttingly Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, is a profound sense of moral injury. As defined by the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University:
Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.
Pugh does an admirable job of depicting someone who is haunted by her own livelihood. She has killed, stealed, destroyed, in the name of her own survival. In a pivotal early scene, she asks her handler if, after this last job, she will get a more public-facing role where she gets to do things that are more obviously good. Her handler tells her ‘yes,’ but being in the beginning of the movie, this inevitably does not proceed as she would hope. Instead, she is forced to confront the monster she really served as it threatens, quite literally, to destroy her.
Such is the same with the other reluctant heroes. John Walker has much the same dilemma as Yelena, following from his actions in Captain America and the Winter Soldier, as does the Winter Soldier himself, now elected a member of the House of Representatives for a district in Brooklyn. More generally, these are workers in a bloody, violent line of work who have been alienated from their labor and are now reckoning with how that has ruined them psychologically, spiritually, and all too often physically.
All these characters have their foil in the film’s antagonist, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played with compelling coldness by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has been involved with the same world of espionage, subversion, and bloody murder that our heroes have been in, but unlike them, she has no symptoms of moral injury because she never had any morals to begin with. If there was ever a self in those eyes that cared for the world, for other people, it has long since been crushed under the treads of ambition and American policy.
(De Fontaine, as she quite loudly insists upon being called in a Congressional hearing in the film, is a personality I am far too familiar with. When I was in college, I knew a lot of people like her who have since gone into the Foreign Service or other wings of the American terror state. I used to be one of them; being from the DC area and growing up among its striving middle class, government service was the most admirable thing imaginable, the State Department and the Department of Defense and the armed forces most admirable of them all. They were the great bulwarks against the world’s barbarian hordes, the farmers who tilled the shining city on the hill. But in my reading of history, I read of how the Nixon Administration actively supported genocide in Bangladesh so that the Pakistanis would be an intermediary in the lead-up to his visit to China. I decided my morality would not let me work for such people. Gaza has, to my dismay, only proven me right).
De Fontaine is such a compelling character because she is the sort of person who runs the American terror state, the sort of person who can talk in the abstract morality common in American propaganda, and adept at contorting it to make murder sound respectable. In that regard, she resembles more the lackwits that surrounded Joe Biden as he let Gaza be razed to the ground. She is fluent in doublespeak, and in that regard I think she would be considered too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ‘woke’ for the new Trump administration. She, like Debora Lipstadt, would find surprising agreement with Trump in the abduction and disappearing of pro-Palestinian activists; she just wouldn’t like the fact that he was so gauche about it.
Completing the sturdy triangle of character that holds the movie up is Lewis Pullman, who plays this film’s version of Bob Reynolds, or Sentry. He is a young man with a life lacking much warmth and color, and as such ended up falling in with a government experimental program to produce a super soldier more powerful than even Captain America. He is a character that reminded me very much of Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, particularly one line said by Wally Weaver:
"I never said, 'The superman exists and he’s American.' What I said was 'God exists and he’s American.' If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."
In this regard, Pullman’s Sentry is not in himself breaking new ground. What is new is how he reacts to becoming a godlike being: Doctor Manhattan saw his power, and the strings behind the puppet show of the universe, and saw that all was vanity; in doing so, he still comes off as someone who found a way to reckon with all that. Sentry, on the other hand, could not handle it, and had a psychological break. He is aimless, adrift, and not sure what he should do with his power. This makes him a prime target for radicalization by an unpleasant group, like a terrorist organization or criminal gang.
And, to be provocative, what more is the CIA than a particularly well-funded terrorist organization? Indeed, the entire apparatus of the American security state could be considered a terrorist organization, having been birthed to exterminate the indigenous and terrorize its Black population, and later turned those guns abroad. A good chunk of the movie is De Fontaine grooming Sentry into such a position, offering him compassion and community if he accepts the role of America’s ultimate weapon. As is common in this country, American national interest and common decency are conflated as the same thing, and he is pulled into the vortex where morality is sacrificed because it offers him purpose.
Much has been made of Sentry’s arc as a metaphor for depression or mental health struggles more broadly, and it is right in that regard. However, the criticism I have read has not gone the next logical step down that road, in terms of how those mental health issues can be exploited to advance evil goals. What De Fontaine does to Reynolds is straight out of the radicalization playbook, done by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS and state terrorist organizations like the CIA. She does it because she has the resources to fill a psychological need in Reynolds that broader society cannot; see how common similar messages are in military recruitment ads (such as “be all you can be,” originally from the 80s and recently resurrected) for a display thereof.
Much of the drama of the latter half of the film is on whether Bob Reynolds has enough of his basic human decency to stop what he is doing, placing him in between the namesake team, who have made that realization, and De Fontaine, who has denied it is even a question. There is another character that is interesting in that regard, and that is Mel, De Fontaine’s personal assistant, played with a certain bookish intensity by Geraldine Vinaswathan. She felt like someone who could have been in my very year in college, who grew up in the world I did, and idolized the abstract idea of service that I did, but took far too long to notice the morally compromised nature of the job. As the film goes on, she slowly comes to the realization that she has sold her soul to the devil, and then finds, first with trepidation and later with more intention, a way out of the bargain. She is a relatively minor presence, but the most familiar to me.
This is an aside, but it is interesting that this movie came out so close to another film about the morality of working for the CIA: The Amateur, directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne. Malek plays a CIA operative whose wife is killed by what turns out to be a CIA operation’s collateral damage, and goes against both the killers and foes at the Agency to avenge her. Both films wrangle with how moral it is to work for such an organization; ultimately, The Amateur trusts the process enough to see ‘adults in the room’ set things right (after a lot of violence, of course); in Thunderbolts*, the process is revealed to be untrustworthy, and the adults in the room are the enemy. I am frankly surprised, in a positive way, that the big-budget superhero film is more radical than the smaller spy thriller.
I would go so far as to state that, in the right hands, Thunderbolts* can be as radical as Andor in taking aim at the oppressive structures that envelop us. The film takes time and pains to remind you that there is always a choice to either surrender to tyrants or to fight the evil before us in the name of common human decency. Still being a mainstream film, the ultimate conclusion involves a certain compromise, although a far more justified compromise than many similar films would advocate for. It is a film that is willing to look at what created the whirlwinds of danger that are raging around us, and gives you an honest answer. For that brutal honesty, as much as its thrills, it earns the title of best MCU movie since Endgame.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
