Captain Marvel (2019)

It’s usually impossible for me to discuss a Marvel film without referencing the 20 films that preceded it, but that’s very much intentional. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals (of which I’ve been watching a lot of lately), these films are reliable box office draws that are both helped and hindered by adhering to formulas. There is a comfort in repeating the winning formula, and for the most part all of the films adhere to a similar structure. Usually they open with a bad ass fight scene, often showing the heroes hubris. Then an early conflict arises, usually a pre-lude to a bigger baddy to be fought later, at some point the hero(s) maybe lose their powers or have their raison d’etre questioned. Then they discover the real super power was inside and they emerge more powerful and lots of CGI explosions result in everyone living happily ever after.

Well it only took 11 years and 20 previous films but the good folks at Marvel have at long last decided we’re ready for a film with a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson. Ok maybe that isn’t the highest selling point, there’s also a cat. No I’m talking about Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers who happens to be a super hero and also a female. That part is important, so is the fact that this film is set in the 90s, the filmmakers do not want you to forget either of those facts. So for my first actual film review of 2019, I suppose the question is whether or not this film is any good. Let’s dig in shall we?

The fact that this formula does largely work is what has let Disney and Marvel have a license to print money since 2008. It has also led to the dreaded “super-hero fatigue”. When other people try to make their own super hero films they often miss the mark spectacularly and focus more on the formula than the character building moments that really matter. After all only very simple minded people are still impressed by special effects. Not to downplay the tremendous work that goes into making Carol Danvers flying into space and destroying ballistics look plausible if not realistic, but they are certainly taken for granted. Learning what makes Danvers tick is the important thing. The first Iron Man movie was far more interesting seeing Tony try awkwardly to upgrade his armor and weapons, then actually fighting The Dude at the end. It’s what makes the DC movies so unbearable, because their idea of character development is awkward attempts at jokes and almost that exclusively.

Now that’s where I want to get in the problem of this film and Black Panther. In an attempt to show something besides random super powered white people, Disney is walking on egg shells trying not to offend anyone. They are handling Danvers and T’Challa with kid gloves, bending over backwards trying not to offend the “Minority” group of women or sensitive white crusaders aimed at telling you their depiction of black people is less than dignified. It’s one of the reasons why the only time we see well rounded and flawed black characters it’s usually at the hands of black filmmakers. Black Panther made a point of having a black filmmaker direct it and Captain Marvel hands off the duties to Anna Boden and her partner Ryan Fleck. Disney is trying to cover their bases just as they tried to force feed diversity into an intergalactic soap opera known as Star Wars. At least Lucas understood that the human characters were the most boring part of Star Wars.

The point is in trying to show Danvers as a strong independent woman who don’t need no man she is presented as a largely charisma-less archetype rather than a compelling hero. A similar problem happened in Black Panther where Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger was infinitely more compelling as a villain than anyone else in Wakanda (Shuri the possible exception). That doesn’t mean Jude Law or whoever plays Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) was more interesting it just means that they largely played it too safe with Larson. The best moments of Danvers’ character are relegated to blurry flashbacks that may or may not be real memories for her.

Pictured: A strong independent woman.

Also did you know this movie was set in the 90s? Well you’re about to find out. There’s a Blockbuster, Danvers goes to a Radio Shack, they use pay phones, there’s a cd-rom, even an Alta Vista internet search, and a pager. If that wasn’t obvious enough the soundtrack is loaded with very mid-90s songs and a somewhat out of chronology life-size cut out of True Lies, but I’m nitpicking. I know these moments are meant to be lighthearted, and maybe it’s the opening night crowd effect, but all of these nods to the 90s were received a little too well. I lived in the 90s, it wasn’t that cool, and sure people still played guitars but the music wasn’t that great. Also for the record Blockbuster was horrible and it deserved to go under.

So it might seem at this point that I am that cliched butt-hurt fanboy who doesn’t like a girl in his super-hero movies. Let me squash that right now and say I actually did enjoy this movie. It’s opening fight scene was very Matrix minus the bullet time or Coming to America minus the “hippopotamus shit” lines. The beginning was a little bumpy and made me wonder just what I was into, but I got into it quickly. I appreciated the twists and turns, after a scene or two I stopped worrying about digital de-aging, and the overall structure was something a bit different. This wasn’t a normal super hero origin story, and I also worried it might copy the blueprint of the first Thor movie where Danvers would find herself on Earth, stripped of her power and then learn some claptrap about being a true hero comes from within or some such nonsense. There were a ton of cliches this film could have leaned into, and thankfully it didn’t, guess I shouldn’t be too surprised from the directors of Half Nelson. It even knowingly winked at some of those tropes and then gracefully side-stepped them.

I think to a certain point a good film should be able to side-step the obvious, or make you casually forget flaws. Some films don’t hold up under the micro-scope, whether it be shoddy editing, or unnecessary convoluted schemes, but in the moment they are sins that can be forgiven. Having seen all the Marvel movies more than once (except for Ant Man), I am not at liberty to say how this holds up under repeat viewings, and whether or not I would react differently knowing what I know now.

The pre-mature reports of this film’s disappointing reviews is largely overblown. I have seen a screenshot from my old nemesis imdb listing some 3,000 1 star reviews of the film before it even premiered. Yet another reason why no one should take any ratings from them seriously. Brie Larson herself hasn’t helped things with some of her slightly overblown sound-bytes leading up to this film’s premiere. She has been very anti-patriarchy in the past and with good reason. Good for her using her time in the spotlight to shine a light on some things that desperately need to change. The problem of course is that with any controversial opinion, even a correct one there will be backlash, and for many people this film is the easy target to pin their discontent at.

I could make a case that this film is a potential star turn for her, but lest we forget she did win a best actress Oscar a couple of years ago. Brie Larson is happy to be a super hero, happy to be this super hero, but make no mistake she doesn’t need this shit. This isn’t her big break, simply an awesome opportunity. She’s seen how Scarlet Johansson has had to suffer fools for the past decade in this media circus, and I’m sure Larson is simply trying to get ahead of the curve. Don’t ask her some nonsense about her diet to squeeze into her suit. I will say though Disney dropped the ball on one aspect of this film. Every single super hero has had at least one obligatory topless scene, after all how else can we tell they’re ripped without seeing their abs and pecs. Sadly there is no topless scene of Brie Larson here, double-standards indeed.

It is potentially dicey dealing with a pre-quel of sorts. Captain America’s story is well ingrained and it’s fine to know that he crashed in ice, and was thawed out decades later, that’s comic book lore. For most people the story of Danvers is largely unknown. The movies have made a concerted effort to make her much more powerful than she is in the comics, because they need someone who might actually be able to stand up to Thanos and his six infinity stones in Endgame. If she was just a slightly more powerful Kree soldier, no one would care. We wouldn’t buy Ronan being able to kick Thanos’s ass even before he got an Infinity Stone, so how would Mar-vell be able to? It helps because the history of Danvers and Captain Marvel is not necessarily set in stone. Her origin has shifted at the hands of different writers and the comics have had no less than three different people named Captain Marvel at various points. So her origin suits the MCU and that’s just fine. There isn’t as much nitpicking and like the best of the previous films we don’t need to be familiar with her backstory.

Really happy these guys were actually makeup

We also don’t need to know much about the Kree-Skrull war. We get a little about how Ronan is basically a Kree terrorist that goes rogue by the time Guardians of the Galaxy happens, but he is only partially radicalized here. The Skrulls were rumored to be the space bugs in the first Avengers movie but that has been somewhat cleared up since. All we need to know about their conflict we get from the movie, in very clear shades of gray we learn war is bad. This does somewhat go into the modern Marvel territory of letting our villains be a little less cartoonishly evil and more three dimensional.

There are a number of Easter eggs and clues to future movies. Sure we see a pre-Ronan Korath still on the official side of Kree business, and Agent Coulson is back, but there’s more of course. Maria Rambaeu (Larshana Lynch) is not just Danvers best friend, but also becomes Photon in the comics and for a brief period joins the Avengers as Captain Marvel herself. In a more obvious homage, Goose the cat was clearly named after Top Gun in case it wasn’t obvious enough.

So at the end of the day this film is pretty solid. It’s not going to break box office records, but it’ll make money just like every other Marvel movie does. Hopefully if they ever make a sequel we’ll get more inter-galactic adventures, because frankly Earth is boring. This might very well be seen as a fun appetizer to the Endgame main course, which frankly was how Black Panther was originally conceived but that took on a life of it’s own. Marvel never really had a built in female super hero titan to run her own franchise. Despite many, many compelling and interesting characters, most of the best Marvel women were at best supporting players. In some cases (Phoenix, Sue Storm, Gamora) they were arguably the most powerful members of their groups, but they were still supporting. DC clearly had the jump on this with Wonder Woman, an instantly recognizable female super hero icon. The fact that that movie made a shit load of money was proof that even women wanted to see super heroes on screen. This is long overdue and it is slightly embarrassing that it took until films 20-21 to make this happen (let’s not count Elektra). Now that this is out of the way, we can finally get to that Shang-Chi movie we’ve all been waiting for.