Review: Captain Marvel

I had made plans to watch Captain Marvel in the week before March 15th, and afterwards my friend and I decided to go ahead and see it on the Sunday as we originally intended. If nothing else, it would at least feel like we were doing something normal, and temporarily take our minds off the dark pall hanging over the city.

Which it did, though the downside is that I will probably always subconsciously equate this film with the attack. However, it did make all the wank surrounding its release look even more ridiculous than it already was, so I won't dwell on it except to say Carol is clearly going to have a pivotal role to play in Endgame, and the haters are gonna be so mad about it. 

But as for the movie itself...

As we've seen with Wonder Woman and Black Panther, a superhero film (or indeed, any film) is under heavier scrutiny when it has a non-white, non-male protagonist. Viewers will go the extra mile to pick it apart, regardless of what side of the culture war they're on, and I've already seen the usual loftier-than-thou comments stating that cheering for this movie just because it has a female lead is settling for too little. 

Maybe it is, but the fact remains that for a lot of people, the mere fact that there's a female lead is reason enough to enjoy it. Ghostbusters and Ocean's Eight weren't movies deserving of either effusive praise or excessive hate, but an intrinsic part of the reason people liked them was simply because each had a variety of women interacting with each other in interesting ways. That's the selling point, regardless of the film's quality. 

Of course, there's nothing worse than that weird mentality that believes you can either have a good movie, or a diverse one. That it's perfectly possible for a film to be BOTH is a fact lost on some people, and it's clearly the best of the three possibilities. 

In this case, Captain Marvel is a good movie, though (for comparison's sake) not as revelationary as Wonder Woman or Black Panther. Carol is not as strongly characterized as Diana, and Black Panther had a lot more to offer in its story, setting, villain and aesthetic than just "here's your long-awaited minority superhero."

Amongst the array of Marvel films, Captain Marvel doesn't stand apart in any memorable way. That said, neither did Doctor Strange or Ant-Man, and so we find ourselves looping back to being extra-critical of Carol's first outing and holding it to a higher standard than your average male-led film. Man, trying to review something fairly while questioning whether you're subconsciously judging it more harshly than you otherwise would have can really do your head in.

But here goes: it's a typical Marvel movie. There's an attractive cast, plenty of jokes, fun action sequences, an underlying sense of continuity, at least one "shocking" plot-twist, and a general sense that the filmmakers predominantly wanted the audience to have a good time. 

A few years ago, a major movie cliché was "villain lets himself get captured by the heroes as part of a larger plan to undermine him from within." This has given way to "trusted mentor figure turns out to have been ruthlessly manipulating the protagonist all along." 

In this case, that reveal is so obvious that I've no idea why they tried to conceal it in the first place - in fact, I think Carol's story would have worked better had they let the audience in on the secret from the get-go, and allowed her story to play out chronologically instead of her entire origin being summed up in a quick flashback montage. 

Vers is young woman living and training amongst the Kree, an alien species that has spent decades fighting an intergalactic war against the Skrulls. Though it's clear Vers doesn't quite belong among her Kree cohorts, she's eager to join Starforce and see some action, under the supervision of her mentor Yon-Rogg, who treats her as a valuable addition to his team. 

But when a mission goes south, Vers finds herself crash-landing on a planet known as C-53, better known to us as Earth. It's the nineties, and as Vers begins to hunt down one of the shapeshifting Skrulls, she starts experiencing flashbacks that suggest she once had a life on this planet. But what does that mean for her life as a Kree soldier? 

Unfortunately, this storytelling device means we spend more time with the amnesiac "Vers" than we do with Carol, who is steely, stoic, unflappable and much less interesting than the "real" Captain Marvel. Had things played out linearly we would have understood what she lost, how she was being manipulated, and been rooting throughout for her to break free of her shackles and embrace her true self. 

Because when that time comes, it's great. Everything in the film is building towards the moment in which she learns the truth about herself and unleashes the full extent of her powers, and so it was wise to ensure these abilities were originally acquired as a direct result of her selfless act to save others. From that point, the Kree exploited her by not only kidnapping, brainwashing and recruiting her, but dampening what she can do through implanted technology and a specific kind of psychological training that robs her of the emotion that fuels her power. (I believe the Great Intelligence also insinuated that they were the ones who gave Carol her preternatural strength in the first place). 

So there's something incredibly liberating about the idea that all this time Carol hasn't been developing her powers, but rather had them all along - they'd just been deliberately stifled by others. When she finally unleashes, there's pure joy in knowing she's not only going to wipe the floor with the Kree, but effortlessly take down the massive warships circling Earth as well. It's so unapologetic.

The haters will scream "Mary Sue" till they're blue in the face, and it doesn't matter. In the film's best scene, Yon-Rogg demands that Carol fight him "fairly" - in other words, he attempts to shift the goal-posts, dictate the playing field and drag her down to his level. She merely blasts him out of her way and says: "I have nothing to prove to you," in what seems like a direct analogy to irrelevant, entitled men demanding precious time, attention and energy from women they want to debate on whatever issues they've worked themselves up over.  

On a similar note, I was fascinated throughout the film at the way Carol clearly enjoys her abilities and physicality. Unlike Steve and Tony, who (mostly) takes things deadly seriously, Carol is clearly having the time of her life as she steals motorbikes, infiltrates government bases, and single-handedly fights off an entire fleet of warships. There's a moment when she's searching for the shape-shifting Skrull among the train passengers, and casually blows a strand of hair out of her eyes: it's so indicative of where her mind is at. 

If there was one missed opportunity, it was that Carol just shrugged off the fact that Yon-Rogg and her Kree team had been manipulating her the whole time. Shouldn't there have been a bit of anguish (from BOTH parties) that the people she had trusted and fought beside weren't who she thought they were? And in return, couldn't there have been a bit of reluctance for them to hurt her? 

For the record this is a problem with ALL Marvel films, from all the way back when Tony Stark barely blinked an eye at Obadiah's betrayal (the man who practically RAISED him), to Janet Pym shrugging off thirty-plus years of isolation in the Quantum Realm (seriously guys, get that woman a therapist). Marvel ain't got time for emotional resonance. 

On that note, Jude Law is great. He's a charisma machine whatever role he's playing, and I really wish they had given just a bit more attention to the bond between him and Carol. On his end, there certainly seemed to be a degree of affection and pride, and it's a damn shame it wasn't explored further, as he ended up being one of those rare things in the Marvel universe: an interesting bad guy.

Another unexpectedly great character was Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, and though the true nature of Yon-Rogg was obvious, the fact that Talos was just a weary soldier searching for his family managed to catch me by surprise. It's difficult to emote through prosthetics, but he manages to do so, and is surprisingly funny to boot. 

Miscellaneous Observations:

The film is also smart enough to know that you can't just have one woman in what is ostensibly a "girl power" movie. Even more so than Wonder Woman, Carol is given several other important female characters she can bounce off of, from her Air Force bestie Maria Rambeau (who joins Rhodey, Sam and Heimdell as the Black Best Friend), the renegade Kree scientist Mar-Vell (whose life-choices foreshadow Carol's own), and fellow soldier Min-Erva (though in that last case, there's an actual joke about how the two of them never hung out). 

I've heard it said that this was more of an origin story for Nick Fury than for Carol, and I get that. He's a profoundly different character here, to the point where it's honestly an eye-opener to realize the friendly, helpful, sardonic man of the nineties will eventually become the secretive, underhanded, vaguely threatening man of the Avengers films. 

On that note, a lot of this movie felt like housekeeping: here's the explanation behind Carol's pager, the Tesseract, Fury's missing eye, the Avengers Initiative, and so on. 

Oh, and there are also what can best be described as cameos from Coulson, Ronan and Korath (I had to look up those last two names) which don't really amount to much. 

And the stinger brings us up to speed with Infinity War, and Carol answering the call. I gotta say, I'm looking forward to how she's going to interact with the other characters, and given that Thor is missing from the slo-mo march at the end of the latest Endgame trailer, I wonder if they're teaming up for a mission of the "heavy-hitters distract Thanos while a more covert op is happening elsewhere" variety.