Carol Danvers has had a tumultuous history over her five decades in Marvel Comics, starting as a supporting character to Captain Marvel, becoming Marvel’s first attempt at a feminist icon, the subject of one of the most sexist comics ever written, and then eventually being the seventh character to take on the mantle of Captain Marvel, and is unarguably the most popular of those seven.
Over the past decade or so, she has become one of the major superstars of Marvel’s heroes, her self-titled comic book written by Kelly Sue DeConnick becoming a hugely popular and iconic series in 2012. And in 2019, she became the long-overdue first female hero to headline a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Stan Lee and Gene Colan created Captain Marvel to appear in Marvel Super-Heroes in 1968. A Kree soldier who was on an undercover mission on Earth, Captain Mar-Vell worked in disguise taking the identity of Dr. Walter Lawson, a scientist assigned to a secret missile base in Florida. That base’s chief of security was a former Air Force officer named Carol Danvers. Mar-Vell soon got his own title, Captain Marvel, and in issue #18, in a battle against a Kree terrorist named Yon-Rogg, Danvers was caught in an explosion of a device called the Psyche-Magnitron. Mar-Vell managed to save her life, but she was badly injured.
In 1977, at the height of the “women’s lib” movement, Marvel decided they needed a feminist superhero, so Gerry Conway and John Buscema gave Danvers the new identity of Ms. Marvel, her self-titled series eventually establishing that the Psyche-Magnitron’s explosion merged her DNA with Mar-Vell’s, making her a Kree-human hybrid.
Danvers became a best-selling author after being medical’d out of her security job, and then became the editor-in-chief of Woman Magazine. As Ms. Marvel, she joined the Avengers, and after her book was cancelled following two dozen issues, she became a regular in Avengers, up until the landmark 200th issue.
The despicable nature of that issue is a topic for another time and place (see my own rant on same on my blog), but while it wrote her out of the Marvel Universe, it didn’t take, as she was brought back, albeit without her powers, in Avengers Annual #10 a year later (written by Chris Claremont, who wrote twenty of the 23 issues of her comic, and who was appalled by how she was treated in Avengers). She became a supporting character in the X-Men titles (also written by Claremont), eventually experimented on by the alien Brood, turning her into the very powerful Binary. After being a member of the space-faring Starjammers for a time, she was later depowered and rejoined the Avengers as Warbird during Kurt Busiek & George Pérez’s late 1990s run, where she dealt with alcoholism. Later retaking the Ms. Marvel mantle, and getting her own title again in 2006, she eventually decided to take on the Captain Marvel name (with encouragement from both Captain America and Spider-Man) in the aforementioned 2012 series by DeConnick & Dexter Soy.
That name had been used by several people in the thirty years between Mar-Vell and Danvers. After Mar-Vell died of cancer in the historic 1982 graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin, an African-American woman from New Orleans named Monica Rambeau (created by Roger Stern and John Romita Jr.) took on the name. This Captain Marvel was a mainstay of the Avengers for years, even serving as team leader for a time. Mar-Vell’s son Genis-Vell then took on the mantle, with Rambeau using various new names, including Photon, Spectrum, and Pulsar. Genis’s sister Phyla-Vell later becomes Captain Marvel.
A return of Mar-Vell was teased in 2007 as part of the “Civil War” storyline, but it turned out to be a Skrull sleeper agent named Khn’nr. When Khn’nr died, he passed on the legacy of the name to Noh-Varr, a young Kree who went by Marvel Boy before and after serving as Captain Marvel.
With this complicated a history, it’s not a surprise that it took a while for the Captain Marvel movie to gestate. Originally the character was to be part of Avengers: Age of Ultron back in 2015. Kevin Feige and the gang instead took their time developing the character and her movie, wanting to get it right. This had the unintended consequence of taking forever for Marvel Studios to finally put a female hero front and center. (Why they couldn’t, for example, get a Black Widow movie out sooner than 2020 is left as an exercise for the viewer.) Both Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve wrote pitches for Feige, and he liked them both, and put the two together to write the script. Once the directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck were hired, they along with Geneva Robertson-Dworet did a new pass on the script, which combined elements of 1969’s Captain Marvel #18, the Kree-Skrull War storyline from 1971, and DeConnick’s first story arc in Captain Marvel in 2012.
Having introduced the Ultimate version of the Skrulls, the Chitauri, in Avengers, Marvel gave us the mainline Skrulls for the first time in this film. First appearing in Fantastic Four #2, the shape-changing, lizard-like Skrulls have been major antagonists in the Marvel Universe for about as long as there’s been a Marvel Universe.
It was decided to set the movie in 1995 and have Captain Marvel’s origin not just be another superhero genesis, but also give some background on how S.H.I.E.L.D. got involved in the superhero team business, as seen from the post-credits Iron Man scene all the way to Avengers and beyond.
Brie Larson was cast in the title role, with Jude Law as Yon-Rogg and Annette Bening as a gender-flipped Mar-Vell (disguised on Earth as Dr. Wendy Lawson). Ben Mendelsohn plays a Skrull named Talos, with Sharon Blynn as his wife Soren. Lashana Lynch plays Maria Rambeau, Danvers’s best friend in the Air Force, and the mother of a little girl named Monica (played by Akira and Azari Akbar). Gemma Chan plays Minn-Erva, another soldier under Yon-Rogg’s command. Several cats (as well as CGI) are employed to play the Flerken named Goose, based on the comics character Chewie. (The cat-like alien was renamed to be a tribute to the Top Gun character rather than the Star Wars character, this despite Disney owning both SW and Marvel. It is, however, more fitting for a “cat” that lives on a base dedicated to a secret Air Force project…)
Younger versions of several previous MCU characters appear as well: from Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) and Korath (Djimon Honsou); from Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Avengers, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg); and from tons and tons of previous movies (most recently, as of this film’s theatrical release, in Avengers: Infinity War summoning Danvers to Earth), Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Samuel L. Jackson). In addition, we get appearances by Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner), and Don Cheadle (Jim Rhodes) in a mid-credits scene that bridges Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (which we’ll get to in several weeks).
Larson, Jackson, Evans, Johansson, Ruffalo, and Cheadle will all next appear in Endgame. Mendelsohn and Blynn will next appear in Spider-Man: Far from Home.
“You were smart, and funny, and a huge pain in the ass”
Captain Marvel
Written by Nicole Perlman & Meg LeFauve and Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck & Geneva Robertson-Dworet
Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: March 8, 2019
This was the first Marvel movie after Stan Lee died, so the Marvel Studios logo at the opening is changed entirely to scenes of Stan the Man and then we get the caption “Thank you, Stan.” Your humble rewatcher’s living room got very dusty at that point….
It’s 1995, the planet Hala. Vers, a member of a Kree strike force under the command of Yon-Rogg, has been having strange dreams. They involve two women she doesn’t recognize. When Vers goes to see the Kree Supreme Intelligence—the collective consciousness that runs the Kree Empire—she, like everyone, sees a person she admires. She sees one of the women from her dream, which makes no sense to her, as she doesn’t even know who it is.
Vers has an implant that enables her to fire force blasts from her hands. Yon-Rogg is also her mentor, and he cautions her not to let her emotions get the better of her. Yon-Rogg has trained her since she was found, amnesiac, on Hala six years previous.
The strike force gets a mission to retrieve a Kree covert operative from Torfa. Skrulls are shapechangers who are the enemies of the Kree, and the operative has intel on the Skrulls. But Skrull terrorists have been reported on Torfa, so they must proceed with caution.
The team is ambushed, with Vers captured by a Skrull named Talos, who impersonated the covert operative, even knowing his secret code. They probe Vers’s memories, and what they find are an entire life on Earth as a fighter pilot for Project: Pegasus, working for Dr. Wendy Lawson—the person Vers saw in the Supreme Intelligence. Talos finds lots of other memories, including a deep abiding friendship between Vers and another woman, both of whom are pilots, as well as memories of childhood of her pushing herself to be the best she can, always getting up even when she falls down.
Vers manages to escape the Skrulls’ prison and probe, and destroys Talos’s ship. Most of the Skrulls escape in pods, as does Vers, on planet C53—Earth. She crashes in a Blockbuster Video, while Talos and his people land on a beach.
The Skrulls disguise themselves as humans while Vers gets in touch with Yon-Rogg, using Kree tech to supercharge a pay phone into an interstellar communicator. Yon-Rogg says she’s not cleared to know the entire story, but her priority is to stay put until the strike force can get to C53.
Vers is interrogated by two S.H.I.E.L.D. field agents, Nick Fury and a rookie named Phil Coulson. They are skeptical of Vers’s claims to be an alien soldier fighting a team of alien terrorist shapechangers, right up until they’re ambushed by a Skrull sniper and Vers fires at the Skrull with her force blasts. (“Did you see her weapon?” “I did not.”)
The Skrull runs away, and Vers gives chase. Fury and Coulson follow in a car. The Skrull boards a subway, and Vers gets on, passing by a little old lady who just got off. After looking over the passengers, one of whom looks just like Stan Lee (and is reading over his lines for Mallrats, so probably actually is Stan Lee), she sees the same little old lady she saw on the platform, and starts wailing on her. The Skrull disguised as an old lady fights back, but the passengers take the side of the old lady—despite her very un-old-lady-like acrobatics and strength—and delay Vers enough to escape. However, the Skrull does leave behind a crystal, which contains a recording of the memories Talos scanned.
Meanwhile, Fury is rather shocked to get a call from Coulson, since Coulson is in the car with him. The Skrull disguised as Coulson and Fury get into it, and the car crashes. Fury is wounded, the car is trashed, and the Skrull is killed.
S.H.I.E.L.D. takes the Skrull into custody and performs an autopsy. Keller, the director of the Los Angeles field office, orders Fury to continue the investigation solo, as they can’t trust anyone now, given how perfectly the Skrull impersonated Coulson. However, we soon learn that Keller is also a Skrull…
Vers steals a motorcycle from a jackass who compliments her and then complains that she doesn’t smile enough. She also grabs some clothes that are less obtrusive than a Kree battlesuit. One of her memories was of a place called Pancho’s and she does an Alta Vista search to find the place.
When she arrives, Fury is there—the motorcycle’s owner reported the theft, including the green “scuba suit” she was wearing—and they talk. Vers needs to find Project: Pegasus, and she convinces Fury to take her there. Fury asks about Dr. Wendy Lawson, and in response, Pegasus security lock them in a room, one Fury’s ID can’t even open. He is able to use Scotch tape to lift a fingerprint off his ID from when the guard checked it, and opens the door. Vers then uses a force blast to get another door open, prompting Fury to complain about her letting him play with tape when she could do that. (“I didn’t want to steal your thunder.”)
They also come across Goose, who appears to be a tabby cat, and whom Vers saw in her memories as Lawson’s cat.
In the records room they find that Lawson is dead, having died in a crash of an experimental plane, along with a pilot, who isn’t identified. Lawson’s notebook seems to be in gibberish, but Vers recognizes it as Kree glyphs. Lawson could apparently write in Kree. Vers also sees a picture of herself in the file, wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform.
Fury also calls it in to S.H.I.E.L.D., while Vers calls Yon-Rogg. Yon-Rogg says that Vers isn’t cleared to know the whole truth, and tells her to stay put.
“Keller” informs the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that Fury has turned, and to take him and the alien woman “dead or alive.” This strikes Coulson as odd.
Fury figures out that “Keller” is really a Skrull, and tricks him to another floor while he and Vers try to escape. They get away in a fighter jet, partly due to Coulson trusting Fury over the dead-or-alive order that seemed extreme.
According to the file, the last person to see Lawson and the pilot alive is Maria Rambeau, who now lives in Louisiana with her daughter Monica. Goose has stowed away on the jet with them.
When they arrive, both Rambeaus recognize Vers instantly as Carol Danvers. Danvers has no recollection of either of them, but Monica saved a box of her stuff. The pictures and items combine with Talos’s probes to prompt more memories, and Danvers is now convinced that she’s a human who was taken in by the Kree for some reason. The only thing they had left of her was a part of her dogtags, which just reads “CAROL DAN,” with the rest sliced away.
Talos arrives, now in his true form. Thanks to posing as Keller, he has the black box recording (which Rambeau had been told was lost) of Lawson’s last flight. They play it, and it jogs Danvers’s entire memory:
Lawson orders Danvers to fly them into space, where they’re attacked by Kree fighters. They crash, and Lawson bleeds blue blood. Lawson explains that her real name is Mar-Vell, and she’s a Kree. Danvers would think she’s delusional, but for her bleeding blue and them just being shot down by spaceships. Mar-Vell needs to destroy the engine before the Kree get their hands on it, but Yon-Rogg and Minn-Erva show up and kill her and threaten Danvers. Danvers instead does what Mar-Vell intended and shoots the engine, which blows up and infuses her with exotic energies. Finding the remainder of her dogtag, which just says, “VERS,” Yon-Rogg decides to take her back to Hala, since the engine itself is lost.
Danvers is devastated. Her entire life is a lie. And not just her life: it turns out the Skrulls aren’t aggressive terrorists. They refused to submit to the Kree, so they were systematically wiped out by the Accusers, their homeworld destroyed. The Skrulls on Torfa weren’t a terrorist cell, they were refugees, and the destruction on Torfa wasn’t committed by Skrulls, but by the Accusers.
Mar-Vell, realizing she was fighting on the wrong side, was trying to build a lightspeed engine that could take the Skrulls far away from the Kree. She came to Earth to use an infinity stone—the space stone, encased in the Tesseract—to build it. (The story of how she got Howard Stark to part with the Tesseract is one that needs to be told some day…)
What Talos needs is the location of Mar-Vell’s lab. They can’t find it on Earth, and he needs to figure out what the coordinates Mar-Vell gave Danvers are. It turns out they aren’t coordinates, they’re an orbital position, and Danvers and Rambeau can figure out its new position six years later. Talos’s science officer modifies the jet to be spaceworthy (which makes up for him not knowing their destination was in orbit, for which Talos castigates him), while Danvers and Monica have to convince Rambeau to go as co-pilot. Rambeau’s lack of desire to go, as she needs to be with Monica, is refuted by Monica herself, who says it’s the coolest mission ever, and yes, it’s dangerous, but so is being a test pilot. Monica shames her mother into going along.
Now that she’s rebelling against the Kree, Danvers also needs to change the colors of her battlesuit—which she does with Monica’s help, going for colors that match the reds and blues of Monica’s U.S. Air Force shirt. Danvers, Rambeau, Fury, and Talos then take off, along with Goose—whom Talos insists isn’t a cat, but rather a Flerken and extremely dangerous.
A Skrull is left behind disguised as Danvers to meet with and distract Yon-Rogg. This is less than successful, and Yon-Rogg kills him and quickly follows the jet into orbit.
In orbit, they find a cloaked Kree ship, which has Mar-Vell’s laboratory—and also a lot of kinds stuff, including a Fonzie lunchbox and a pinball machine. There’s also a steaming mug of liquid—someone’s still there.
Turns out the lab was also where Mar-Vell was hiding the Skrull refugees—including Talos’s wife Soren and their daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in six years. Also in the lab is the Tesseract, which they put in the Fonzie lunchbox.
Yon-Rogg and the rest of the star force arrive. They capture Danvers, Fury, Rambeau, and the Skrulls. The Skrulls are placed in a cell, and they bond Danvers with the Supreme Intelligence to punish her. But Danvers now knows that she didn’t get her powers from the implant in her neck—that implant is what’s holding her back. While the Supreme Intelligence tries to convince her that she’s a weak human who always fell down, Danvers remembers also that every time she fell down—when she crashed a go-cart or fell over on a beach or got a brushback pitch in baseball or fell off the climbing ropes at the Air Force Academy or fell to Earth when Mar-Vell’s plane crashed—she always got back up.
Removing the implant, she proves to be way more powerful, and blasts all the Kree aside. She tells Fury and Rambeau to take the Tesseract back to Earth in the jet, while she hangs onto the lunchbox and will distract the star force.
Goose lets loose the huge tentacles from his mouth and swallows the Tesseract. They then head for the jet. However, the Skrulls escaped when Danvers powered up, which messed with the ship’s power. Talos is disguised as a Kree and leads them to the loading bay as fake prisoners in order to fool the remaining Kree. They board the jet, though Talos is shot, and Rambeau flies them into the atmosphere.
Minn-Erva goes after the jet. So does Yon-Rogg once he realizes that Danvers doesn’t actually have the Tesseract. Danvers chases Yon-Rogg, but he knocks her off his ship as it flies into the atmosphere.
Only then does she realize that she can fly. Surprise, surprise.
Rambeau manages to take out Minn-Erva with some very nifty flight maneuvers, while Danvers makes Yon-Rogg’s ship crash as well.
However, the Accusers have arrived. Ronan the Accuser orders Earth bombarded—but Danvers destroys all the warheads before they can reach Earth. She then attacks Ronan’s support ships, and he orders a retreat, promising to come back for the weapon—by which he means Danvers, not the Tesseract.
Danvers then confronts Yon-Rogg, who says he’s thrilled by what she’s become, and challenges her to fight him hand-to-hand with no powers to prove to him that she’s the great warrior he always knew she could be.
She blasts him across the canyon, telling him she doesn’t have a damn thing to prove to his gaslighting ass.
Placing him in the ship, she programs it to take him back to Hala in disgrace.
Danvers agrees to escort the Skrulls to their new home in Mar-Vell’s ship. She also modifies Fury’s pager so that he can contact her in case of a dire emergency. Fury’s left eye has been scratched by Goose, and Talos’s devastated look indicate that it’s not a scratch that will heal on its own.
Fury, now sporting an eyepatch, starts a file on the Protector Initiative, a program to use special beings like Danvers to help defend Earth against big threats. He notices the pictures from “Lawson’s” file, including Danvers with her plane.
Her call sign is “Avenger.” He changes the name of the initiative.
Some time later, Goose horks up the Tesseract onto Fury’s desk.
In the present day (following Fury’s use of the pager in the post-credits scene in Avengers: Infinity War), we see Captain America, the Black Widow, Bruce Banner, and James Rhodes noting that the pager stopped sending its signal, even though they’ve hooked it to a power source. Then Danvers arrives out of nowhere and asks, “Where’s Fury?”
“And you were the most powerful person I knew, way before you could shoot fire from your fists”
This is a truly magnificent movie, an absolute delight from beginning to end. Great performances, great writing, great directing, plus a nice inversion of the origin formula that Marvel has used a bit too often. It took fourteen years for there to be a Marvel movie that starred a woman by herself as the solo lead, and indeed it was the failure of Elektra (a bad spinoff of a bad movie) and Catwoman the same year that was often cited as “proof” that women can’t lead superhero films. Strangely, the failures of Hulk and Daredevil two years earlier didn’t lead to similar complaints about men leading superhero films. Wonder why…
Many of the dopey complaints that have been made about this movie (I hasten to add, not all the complaints—there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the film) are pretty much just code for “I don’t wanna watch a movie with a girl.”
“It’s too much like Wonder Woman.” It’s nothing like Wonder Woman except insofar as it has a female lead and takes place in the past. It has more in common with Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, and Doctor Strange—extraordinary person has to overcome something to become a proper hero, whether it’s their arrogance (Stark, Thor, Strange), their physical infirmities (Rogers), or sexism and gaslighting (Danvers).
“Brie Larson is stiff and boring, and can’t act.” Larson’s acting is subtle—her facial expressions only change a little bit, and it’s brilliant. It’s also easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, have trouble reading facial expressions, or just don’t pay attention to women beyond their surface good looks. (I heard similar complaints about Gillian Anderson’s acting ability when she was on The X-Files, almost always from men, and it was bullshit then, too.)
“Fury doesn’t have enough of a character arc.” Perhaps not, but the movie’s not called Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and funny how these people didn’t complain about how little of a character arc Pepper Potts had in Iron Man or Maria Hill had in Avengers or Jane Foster had in either of the first two Thor movies.
“Captain Marvel isn’t relatable.” Congratulations, you’ve proven yourself ignorant of how half the world feels every day. Every woman I know who has seen this film (not a statistically relevant number for a billion-dollar movie, but still) has related to everything Danvers goes through, from Yon-Rogg’s urging not to be so emotional to the motorcycle guy’s importuning to smile more after being obnoxious to her to the institutionalized sexism of the Air Force in the latter part of the 20th century (“There’s a reason why they call it the cockpit…”). The manners in which she is belittled, both in flashback and in the present-day of the film, are incredibly relatable to many women, and to anyone who actually cares about the mistreatment of women.
So much of this movie is a delight, starting with the sheer joy that Brie Larson’s Danvers takes in life. She’s always having fun, even in the early parts of the film where she’s the amnesiac Vers. (“I slipped.” “Right, you slipped—as a result of me punching you in the face.” “I was already slipping when you happened to punch me in the face. The two of those are not related.”) The best, though, is her perfect best-friend chemistry with Lashana Lynch’s Rambeau. In fact, my biggest complaint about this movie is that we don’t see nearly enough of the friendship between these two. It’s hinted at in flashes in Danvers’s memories, both when Talos is probing her and when Monica shows her the box of stuff she saved, and also in Rambeau’s this-is-who-you-really-are speech after Danvers’s memories come back, but it’s not enough. Female friendships are rare enough in popular dramatic fiction, and this one deserved more screen time.
However, that particular lack is partly an artifact of the way the various screenwriters twisted the at-this-point-very-tried-and-true-and-also-tired Marvel Origin Formula by telling it backwards. When we first see “Vers,” she’s already had her origin, but she herself doesn’t remember it, and we don’t get to see it until the movie’s three-quarters done. It’s a nice change from the formula, at least, which is a blessing, given the aforementioned similarities to four previous MCU origin films, even if it does shortchange the Danvers-Rambeau friendship.
I mentioned Larson’s subtle acting above, and she’s matched by Jude Law in that. Yon-Rogg is at once Danvers’s jailer, mentor, and handler. Beneath his smarmy smile and easy banter is tremendous fear. It only pokes out occasionally, and only for a second, but Law plays it beautifully, starting in the sparring scene at the very beginning when her fist starts to glow, and Yon-Rogg looks at the fist with total fear for about half a second before going right into his usual gaslighting routine about how she shouldn’t feel emotion.
The bit at the end when Yon-Rogg tries to get her to fight him hand to hand without powers is a brilliant refutation of the usual macho tropes. Yon-Rogg is still acting like her mentor and commanding officer, as if he’s someone she has to impress, and still feeding her the bullshit line about how she needs to control her emotions. And then she blasts him, because why shouldn’t she? It’s a crowning moment of awesome both as a fuck-you to Yon-Rogg’s gaslighting, and also just as a humorous end to a tiresome buildup to a predictable fight in the same vein as Indiana Jones shooting the sword wielder in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
One thing that doesn’t get talked about in this movie is how brilliantly it adapts various comics stories over five decades. The gender-flipped Mar-Vell is doing exactly what her comics counterpart did in 1968: working undercover on Earth as an astrophysicist at a secret military base. Danvers’ acquisition of powers is structurally very similar to the way it was done in the comics, with the lightspeed engine subbing in for the Psyche-Magnitron (and with the infinity stones being involved because heaven for-bloody-fend we have an MCU character who isn’t connected to the infinity stones somehow…). Danvers having amnesia is a callback to the earliest days of the Ms. Marvel comic. The Kree and the Skrulls have been mortal enemies in the comics for ages—one of Marvel’s first “event comics” was the nine-issue 1971 Kree-Skrull War story arc in Avengers written by Roy Thomas. And by having Mar-Vell and Monica Rambeau, we see the first two people in Marvel Comics who were called Captain Marvel, as well as the current one. (And there’s nothing in this version of Mar-Vell that precludes her having kids, so we could see Genis and/or Phyla in a future movie. And in this movie, Rambeau’s call sign is “Photon,” one of Monica’s codenames in the comics, a nice tribute.)
Of course, following the comics that closely means that it’s not exactly a surprise that Yon-Rogg turns out to be a bad guy. To ameliorate this particular bit of predictability, they pull a fast one on us by making the Skrulls—who have been antagonistic from the moment they first appeared in the second issue of Fantastic Four—into tragic victims. It’s a brilliant reveal, defying expectations and turning some of Marvel’s oldest villains into something more tragic and interesting.
Speaking of the Skrulls, I can’t say enough good things about Ben Mendelsohn’s performance as Talos. The MCU is, it’s true, littered with smartasses, but Mendelsohn’s laconic snottiness is beautifully played, and makes him a much more compelling character, especially since we learn that his obnoxious veneer hides the tremendous pain of a person who hasn’t seen his family in six years. The character’s reappearance in Far from Home leads me to hope that we’ll be seeing more of him in future films, and that’s only a good thing, as he’s fantastic.
I haven’t even gotten to the joy of seeing the 1990s versions of Fury and Coulson or the great double performance by Annette Bening as both Mar-Vell and the Supreme Intelligence. The CGI work to de-age Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg is seamless (though it helps that neither of those two has physically aged much in the last 25 years). The best prequels are the ones that retroactively sow the seeds of future behavior that we’ve already seen, and while we see it writ large with Fury—who finds purpose in trying to use S.H.I.E.L.D. to recruit superheroes—we also see it with Coulson. We get the genesis of his relationship with Fury (which provided the backbone of many Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes) and also see his willingness to trust his gut over orders (as we saw in Thor). It’s also nice to see Gregg back in an MCU movie after being exiled to the TV end of things, especially since AoS has become less connected to the cinematic side over the years.
As for Bening, I think it’s for the best that they didn’t give us the Supreme Intelligence of the comics, which is a big green head with tentacles sticking out of it. Having it be different for each person is a nice touch, and it adds an interesting layer to the mystery of who Lawson is throughout the film. (Though again, familiarity with the comics blunts the mystery some, once you hear the name “Dr. Lawson.”) Still, Bening creates a smart, noble, heroic character, one worthy of the Mar-Vell of the comics, in only a tiny amount of screen time.
There are tons more stories to tell with this character, both in the two-and-a-half decades between her appearances in this film and Endgame and in the present: Getting the Skrulls to safety. Fighting the Kree in general (Guardians of the Galaxy already established that in the present day of the MCU, the Kree are weakened considerably) and Ronan the Accuser in particular (Lee Pace deserves another shot at being a major bad guy). And just her general being a hero for the galaxy at large, as she hinted at in Endgame. Plus, of course, she’s an Avenger now…
Carol Danvers has had a complicated, fascinating legacy in the comics, coming out the other side as one of the greatest heroes in the Marvel pantheon, and I look forward to seeing how that develops for the screen version.
Next week, we keep the cosmic theme going, albeit back in the twenty-first century, as we look at Volume 2 of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is not at a convention this weekend for the first time in a month. He is looking forward to not riding in a plane, train, or car to travel a long distance and instead, possibly, maybe, getting some sleep.
I’m afraid this is near the bottom tier of the MCU for me. Not because it’s awful, it’s just so bland and underwhelming. Part of it seems to be directors who have no feel for the material, so action sequences are lifeless with comedy scenes like Goose the Cat overstaying their welcome combined with cinematography that is spectacularly bland in comparison to the visual style of preceding MCU movies. As well, due to the structure of the movie being a mystery over Carol Danvers’ identity, including to herself, Brie Larson doesn’t really get a chance to give a compelling performance. It’s a shame, the Carol Danvers in the old photographs that Monica Rambeau had shows a hard-partying’ fun-loving jet pilot that seemed a lot more of an interesting character than what we’ve seen so far.
I did like Ben Mendelsohn’s role and the scene with the Supreme Intelligence speaking through Annette Benning was good, but the 90s musical choices were such an obvious attempt by Disney/Marvel to repeat the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy mixtapes without quite understanding why those were successes in the first place.
(Also, it annoyed me since the 90s songs would have no resonance with her. Going by those photographs, ripped jeans and leather-jacketed Carol Danvers would be responding to or enjoying 70s & 80s hard rock of the 80s like Guns n Roses, Motley Crue and Van Halen).
It’s possible now that the origin is out of the way, a new Captain Marvel movie could be a significant improvement. I do think some fresh blood behind the scenes would help a lot.
I am sure this has been talked over ad nauseum on the internet, but having not seen all that – was anyone else extremely disturbed by Danvers’ reaction to the biker? I get it, he’s a bit of a creep and an asshole, but she physically assaults and robs him. I feel like any scene in which a gender-flip would be considered as awful as this would should be considered on that merit.
If a woman had come up to a male superhero and made a creepy verbal pass, and his reaction was to assault her, both physically and sexually, there would outrage, and deservedly so. I feel like there are a lot of ways to have Carol tell this guy to f**k off without, you know…. violently mugging a guy. There is such a thing as proportional response.
I really liked this one, and appreciate your takedown of some of the criticisms. The funny thing to me about the whole ‘she’s so bland!’ thing is that for the whole movie she’s constantly told to stop being ‘so emotional’ so it all seemed like that was the point – of course she was a bit subdued, becuase that’s how she’s been trained to act.
I had never really heard of Ben Mendelsohn until he was in Rogue One (although I had seen him in Dark Knight Rises before that, and just not realized it) but I really, really liked him in that movie. And since then I’ve seen him pop up in several movies I’ve happened to watch and it’s always a delight. I really loved him in this one, as well as him getting to be a good guy :) The autopsy scene is one of my favorites.
As for “relatable” – what, Iron Man is relatable? Doctor Strange? Thor? Are you a rich playboy insuffrable genius? A Norse God?
Had to go and read your blog post first – despite the X-Men being nearly the only book I read consistently in those days, I’d forgotten the use of Danvers in them. Thank you for the reminder.
As for this, in my book it’s in the top 5 of the MCU and I’ll only say that since I don’t want to try and comparatively rate it and the other 4 :)
One thing I’ve enjoyed watching, first when WW climbs out of the trench and then when Danvers disses Yon-Rogg at the end of the movie is the look of utter and sheer disbeliving joy on the faces of the women I’ve watched them with. The only superhero moment that comes close is Spider-Gwen’s entrance in Into the Spiderverse. For some this is the first time that they can see themselves as that kind of hero. Not a support. Not an accessory.
The. Big. Damn. Hero.
Even with it’s real flaws, this could be considered the most important MCU movie yet.
@2 / andrewrm: I don’t believe she physically assaults the biker. She ignores him until he goes inside, then steals the clothes off a convenient nearby mannequin (there’s a shot of several clothed mannequins and one without), and steals his bike. She was going to steal a vehicle of some sort as her next step; that’s pretty much standard procedure in a story like this. It only makes sense she would steal one that doesn’t require breaking a window.
One thing I’ve come to particularly like about the Marvel films is when they wrong-foot comics readers’ expectations, but in a clever way that serves the plot. The identity of the Vulture in Far From Home is probably the best example, but here, figuring out who Mar-Vell was (since I had forgotten the “Lawson” alias) and the Skrulls turning out to be sympathetic are two similar moments.
I will wholeheartedly support an adult Monica Rambeau turning up in the MCU. She’s always been a favorite of mine.
@2: It was an homage to Terminator 2. She wasn’t a superhero at that point; she was a programmed supersoldier who learns to be a hero over the course of the movie.
Stan Lee and Gene Colan created Captain Marvel to appear in Marvel Super-Heroes in 1968.
Except that Captain Marvel first appeared in the early 1950’s. Young Billy Batson would say the magic word “Shazam!” and turn into Captain Marvel. There was a lawsuit in 1953 by DC comics claiming that Captain Marvel was a rip-off of Superman (which it was) and Fawcett Comics stopped publishing the title. Marvel acquired the trademark in the late 1960’s and has been publishing various versions of the character ever since.
That’s why it was so ironic that the movie Shazam! came out at almost the same time as the Captain Marvel movie, and that the superhero character in that film was never named.
I saw both films and enjoyed each of them in their own way. But let’s not erase history in the name of the Marvel Cinematic Universe…
Thanks for this post, Keith. I agree with you that the hate for this movie was largely undeserved. Some parts were a bit meh for me, but the same can be said of most of the MCU movies. It is funny because I feel like this movie gets undeserved criticism due to it being a female-led/centric story, but Black Panther (in my opinion) gets undeserved praise due to it being a PoC-led/centric story. Both are good movies.
@2 I am possibly remembering incorrectly but I believe she only steals his motorcycle and helmet in the theatrical release. She steals the clothing from a nearby mannequin. I believe there is a deleted scene on the Blu-Ray that depicts her being more violent with the biker guy. Or am I just completely misremembering?
andrewrm: There is no assault. The biker goes into a store and she steals the bike and the clothes off a mannequin. Yes, there’s a deleted scene where she does assault the guy, but that was re-cut and re-edited to change the smile request to him still sitting on the bike, rather than walking up to her. I no more hold a movie to its deleted scenes than I would a novel to a scene cut in first-draft edits.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
One problem the deaging tech doesn’t solve, when Fury has to run he looks every bit Samuel L. Jackson’s age. Also, I maintain that they just had Clark Gregg wear a hairpiece and called it a day. That guy hasn’t aged at all.
I admit, I haven’t watched this movie yet. I want to get around to it eventually, but for all the people saying the film is bland and boring . . . that’s the impression I got from the trailers, the impression I got from Brie in Endgame and the word of mouth review I got from every human I personally know that watched it. I almost wonder if the only reason there’s any positive buzz is because, despite being bland and boring, it’s also an film about a woman empowering herself. That’s a great theme! I just don’t accept boring films just because there’s a good theme behind it.
I’ll try to keep an open mind whenever I watch it, but every time I even think about this film or see shots from it my brain just kind of recoils. It just looks aggressively uninteresting, and Brie herself I think is probably the biggest reason for that.
Dr. Thanatos: I’m not erasing history. Billy Batson is a completely different character. I’ll get into the weirdnesses involving the original Captain Marvel when I do Shazam! down the line.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
@1 – I’m pretty sure that you didn’t watch the movie, since there is literally a scene of her wearing a GnR shirt and singing karaoke. She’s also wearing a Heart t-shirt near the end of the movie.
@5 – there’s a deleted scene where she bends his finger all the way back and takes his jacket, but it’s not in the theatrical release.
Completely agree with your review Krad. I admit I only watched the film at the cinema as I knew she was connected with Endgame but I loved how the initial villains were actual the victims and proved my expectations wrong (2019 MOVIE SPOILER (in white text)… The opposite done with the latest Spiderman movie which still got me.
Still even though I have never read a Marvel comic, I knew that Kree wasn’t synonymous with good and despite my previous comment I always felt something was off when anything Kree related was mentioned impacting how I viewed all the Kree characters.
Not sure how this movie’s plot works with Guardians of the Galaxy – afterwards did Ronan approach Thanos because of his defeat or was Thanos always in the background here?
Final point – love these reviews Krad! As a Brit these review are the start to the weekend :)
@13 krad
Didn’t mean to be disrespectful.
Let’s say that Stan Lee and company created the MARVEL VERSION of Captain Marvel in 1968 and I can live with it.
I also noted after watching the Marvel movie that whoever the plastic surgeon is who turned Billy Batson into Brie Larson did a commendable job
@14 – I was referring to the music selections played front and center which are a lot more memorable to me, than items of clothing shown in passing in a movie I saw once back in March.
@2 The real gender switch is just a male hero, not a male hero and female biker. The trope employed by the movie requires the biker to be a certain type of guy, changing the biker to a woman completely changes the meaning of the interaction.
@12 IRRC, Brie was ill-served in Endgame and not representative of her acting in this movie. Vers/Carol is more understated than the typical MCU hero but that doesn’t mean she’s bland or uninteresting.
@15 I found the Kree/Skrulls thing delightfully ambiguous until the reveal. GotG makes it clear that Kree are generally bad guys and I knew Skrulls were bad guys in the comics, it was fun trying to figure out who was who.
To save me typing, here’s the link to my blog review:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/finally-my-thoughts-on-captain-marvel-spoilers/
In short, I liked the film a lot, I thought its story structure was terrific and its characterizations effective, but I’ve just never found Brie Larson a compelling actor on the level of someone like ScarJo or Gal Gadot or Hayley Atwell or Krysten Ritter or Caity Lotz. That’s not because of her character here, which I liked just fine; I found Larson just as bland in Kong: Skull Island, and she didn’t leave much of an impression on me in Scott Pilgrim. She’s perfectly adequate, just not captivating.
I wonder if changing Walter Larson to Wendy Larson was a reference to composer Wendy Carlos (nee Walter Carlos). Although I’m not sure what other name you might pick as a female equivalent of Walter. Wanda’s already taken in the MCU. Wallis seems to be a common female given name in the UK, but not so much in the US.
The music choices clearly walk a line. In the flashback, she’s wearing a G’n’R shirt while singing “Kiss Me Deadly” by Lita Ford, released in 1988, so that’s fine. The NIN t-shirt, she stole off the mannequin, likely without knowing what it means. But when she goes to see the Intelligence for the second time, Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” is playing in her mindscape, and the Intelligence even comments on liking it. The only way I can think that Carol could know a Nirvana song from 1991 is if she heard it in Fury’s car or at the Rambeaus’ house.
I also think that Brie Larson is terrific in this, but even for those who disagree, people who slam the performance by saying she can’t act are showing the tunnel-vision that results from only seeing comic-book movies. It is a little like the guy I knew who was only familiar with Marlon Brando through his Jor-El, who didn’t know anything else of worth that titanic figure had done. The lady was terrific in THE ROOM, and if you reduce distaste for her performance here to a “can’t,” you know nothing.
I thought it was as good as the average MCU movie, certainly not as bad as all the whiners made it out to be, but also not as good as some people claim it is. It has a lot of great stuff in it, but the one thing I REALLY didn’t like was the thing about how Nick Fury lost his eye. It was dumb af.
@2. andrewrm: “If a woman had come up to a male superhero and made a creepy verbal pass, and his reaction was to assault her, both physically and sexually, there would outrage”
The problem with this statement is you casually adding “sexually” in a hypothetical gender-flipped encounter. It’s like a vinyl record scratch. The biker isn’t necessarily creepy, just sexist. And there’s no hint of any sexual subtext. At all.
@krad: nice rundown and counters of the objections to this movie. Fully agree with this one: “Female friendships are rare enough in popular dramatic fiction, and this one deserved more screen time.” Some viewers have already inferred a romantic relationship between them based on what’s already there. I almost wish it had been made more explicit if that was the intent and maybe it will be developed further in CM2. Of course, there has been/will be more complaining about that from some quarters.
I echo @22 jmhaces.
I thought it was a solid, pretty fun movie. Not great. Not terrible. And yeah, Nick Fury’s eye was lame.
My main complaint about Captain Marvel as a superhero right now is the lack of rules/understanding given so far of her powers. How does she punch through metal, but not through people? She has the ability to destroy a huge ship in one scene, but fully blasts a person and does nothing but throw them several feet. I’m just confused. My head cannon is that for some reason her blasts only really affect metal. To everything else, it just exerts the force of a “super” (Iron Man, Thor) punch. So I hope that is clarified in her next film. Also, very small thing, how does her power give her the ability to breathe in space? Earlier in the movie she had the face mask part of her helmet that turned on in space and under water, but it isn’t seen in the final battle. Again, just confused. Anyone have insight? Does her power increase w/o the inhibitor make something new happen or was it just “rule of cool” and they didn’t want that to impede the look of the final fight?
As someone who barely follows MCU and has only seen some of the movies, I enjoyed it and would watch it again. I vividly recall walking into a comic shop in 1977 and being surprised to see a female superhero that wasn’t Wonder Woman in her own book and picked up a couple issues. (Red Sonja was also on the shelf IIRC, but my mom wouldn’t let me buy that.) Soon after I lost interest in reading comics entirely, but was thrilled to hear that Marvel had brought back both Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel books. Hopefully they will continue the movies as well.
And that’s how MCU got not only two Sherlock Holmeses, but two Dr. Watsons as well …
I absolutely loved the movie (especially how much fun Carol seemed to have all the time, like also said in the article, enjoying life), and I couldn’t agree with the article more. Thank you, Keith!
@11 You are correct about Samuel L Jackson and his movements. The de-aging was excellent, but I really wished they had used a double for things like getting out of the car, his fight and any time he ran. CGI can’t really make a senior citizen move like a much younger man (no offense to senior citizens).
Also, I wanted more Coulson.
@24. whitespine: “She has the ability to destroy a huge ship in one scene, but fully blasts a person and does nothing but throw them several feet”
This one’s easy. Just as you can control the force of a punch, she controls the force of her blast. I imagine charging it up to a certain level, then release/unload. Otherwise, she’d be Cyclops or Black Bolt.
@26/Celebrinnen: The MCU (TV shows included) has at least three Holmeses (Robert Downey Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, and James D’Arcy from Agent Carter/Avengers: Endgame) and five Watsons (Martin Freeman, Jude Law, Ben Kingsley, John C. Reilly, and Agents of SHIELD‘s Ian Hart). It’s also had an Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) and a Moriarty (Vincent D’Onofrio). Granted, they have only two complete Holmes/Watson pairs (and one Holmes/Watson/Adler trio), but also one Holmes/Moriarty pair, D’Arcy and D’Onofrio from 2002’s Sherlock: Case of Evil.
I thought it was pretty good. Very surprised that they actually did the Flerken bit. I really loved the end fight where she just blasts Yon-Rogg, primarily as a great character moment and as an homage to Indy. Changing the Skrulls from the comic version is a little questionable since they had been a Big Bad for Marvel for many years, but I thought it worked well. They acknowledged it with Mendelsohn’s line about doing terrible things during the war.
As for Fury’s eye… I didn’t mind it. One Christmas morning, I gashed my hand open with a new knife while opening a package. At the ER the doctor told me I needed to come up with a better story to tell people what happened, because that was lame. I thought it might be funny to go with, “I got it in the ‘Nam” because that would have been impossible (born 1973), but I never really came up with anything. So Fury not wanting to relate how it happened makes sense.
I have one friend that hated everything about this movie, as he did with Infinity War & the two GotGs. He got especially hung up on Goose being able to devour several Kree warriors while Fury was holding him in the air, as the physics of that should have meant that Fury is incredibly strong to hold all that weight – the Flerken have interdimensional pockets in their mouths where the tentacles come from, so none of the weight was transferring through to Fury. And that’s pure canon, right from Marvel. He fell into the camp of “Brie Larson had no expression or emotions, saying things just because this is the cool moment to say them”, completely ignoring the fact that she’d been trained for multiple years to not show emotions. Sometimes I don’t understand his taste in movies.
Re: MCU Watson’s– Lucy Liu directed an episode of Luke Cage. Does that count?
KRAD, you mentioned the possibility of Mar-vell having kids, but I think you missed the most obvious choice. With Disney plus seemingly setting up a run at the Young Avengers, the child of Mar-vell most likely to be developed in my opinion will be Teddy Altman, AKA Hulkling. Having a half Skrull son would go a long way to explaining marvelous interest in protecting the Skrulls.
Someone mentioned the possibility of seeing a adult Monica Rambeau in the future and the character has been confirmed for WandaVision on Disney plus.
I thought this was a mid-level movie for the MCU. Not the greatest, but far, far from its worst. If I had anyone complained, it would be far too little of Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson.
Legit plot question, though: What was the purpose of the Skrull ambush on Torfa? They were clearly trying to capture somebody, but they also clearly didn’t realize who/what Carol was. They were looking for information related to Mar-Vell and the FTL engine, but how did they know that the task force sent to get them would include anyone with such information?
@33 I suppose they actually had 3 chances there as both Minerva(probably) and Yon-Rogg(definitely) had the needed memories. Maybe they got intel from the Kree they were impersonating about other Kree soldiers and figured out who had been on a mission to C53? Seems like very specific knowledge for the guy to have, but it’s at least plausible.
Really dug this film. So much to love, and it’s flaws are few and far between.
And you know what I REALLY liked about that reveal of Talos and his band of Skrulls as refugees? That Talos himself did not try to sugarcoat his peoples and his own part in the Kree-Skrull War, and how when we were still on Hala we got to see regular Kree citizenry, not just Star Force’s super-soldiers or Ronan’s fanatical Accusers. It works quite nicely painting the whole thing in shades of grey, that leave things open for heroes & villains to come from both races (come on, I DARE you lot to tell me you don’t want to see an MCU take on K’Lrt, the Super-Skrull himself…).
@33 I’m guessing that the Skrulls noted that the energy signature of Vers power set matched the energy signature of the tesseract. They didn’t know how they got that power, or that she was human, but the energy signature would connect her to Mar-Vell in some way.
Would have loved to have seen Katee Sackhoff in the title role. Brie just felt like the week link in the movie for me.
I’ve been waiting for the Captain Marvel retrospective for some time since it’s among my very favorites of the MCU and now that it’s here it’s definitely one of my favorites of the rewatch series. Everything I love about it is articulated and I’m especially pleased by the acknowledgement of how it adapts the comic storylines. The rebuttals to the whining are welcome too, although it’s unfortunate you needed to address them at all. I’m eager to see what they have in store for Monica in WandaVision and I look forward to Carol’s next major appearance.
How did Korath survive the destruction of the Space Station? Or was that left as an exercise for the viewer?
I liked this movie. People complaining about her lack of characterization in Endgame need to remember that Endgame was shot before this movie.
I didn’t see any of Larson’s subtle expressions at all. For me, this super hero origin was rather paint by numbers and Danvers was not engaging or charismatic until she loses the restraining thingum; but that’s fairly late in the movie. Overall, it’s a perfectly acceptable mid-level Marvel movie to me.
Not only is this an awesome movie, try seeing it with several women of a, shall we say, certain age.
Carol is not just a female super-hero, she’s a GEN-X superhero. She’s a little cynical and snarky, but she really bonds with her actual friends, and when you get inside her borders you finds all kinds of emotion (watch the movie and how she acts with Maria all the time, and with Fury increasingly over the course of the movie).
My wife went into this movie to humor me as a MCU completest. She fully expected to barely tolerate it. She now has a Captain Marvel phone cover, t-shirt, and POP! figure and is EAGERLY awaiting any movie with Carol in it. This movie is so “bland and boring” a generation of women identify with it STRONGLY (my wife is not the only one of my acquaintance, one of whom had tears by the end of the movie, to clearly love this movie). My daughter and her friends (two of them new to the MCU) became instant MCU fans by the end of this movie.
If you think this was bland and boring it simply says something profound, and something half the planet has been dealing with in entertainment for a LONG time…guy, this movie isn’t FOR you. It was never MEANT for you. Move along.
For people with more comics knowledge than me: Two young women who fly around in red and blue costumes firing energy blasts out of their bodies are named “Kara Danvers” and “Carol Danvers”. Are the names just a coincidence?
Calling this movie bland and boring isn’t necessarily sexist or a case of men not getting it. It could be because it’s another product cranked out by the Disney assembly line. Hey, Solo was bland and boring too.
It’s okay. They’re all pretty bad.
@42/Gareth Wilson: In the original DC comics, Supergirl was named Kara Zor-El, took the name Linda Lee on Earth, and then was adopted by the Danvers family, becoming Linda Lee Danvers. For some reason, the makers of the Supergirl TV series chose to have her go by Kara Danvers instead.
Carol Danvers probably wasn’t named after Linda Danvers, since she didn’t acquire superpowers until 8 or 9 years after her debut. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-a-coincidence-that-Captain-Marvel-and-Supergirl-have-the-same-last-name
@41 THANK YOU! That’s a much nicer way of saying everything I was thinking.
I think I need to go home and re-watch Captain Marvel…again.
I was disappointed with this review. Not because I disagree with some of the critiques, although I do. But I’ve disagreed with different things the author has said in different reviews and not had a problem. Disagreement is healthy. Actually some of these reviews have made me take a second look at a movie from a different perspective. But the (in my opinion) over-the-top excitement and praise for almost everything in the movie seems undeserved. Also, saying that if anyone is of the opinion that “Brie Larson is stiff and boring, and can’t act” is either not paying attention, has some problem being able to pick up on subtle facial expressions, or doesn’t pay attention to women outside of their physical appearance is, well… dumb. You can disagree with someone on the quality of something without either of these three things being true.
And yes, she was bland. I don’t know that she can’t act, but my personal view is she just didn’t fit the role well. And for those that think any criticism of the movie is an attack on women everywhere, it’s not wrong to want what should be a milestone movie to be better cast. It’s not that she wasn’t “girly” enough or “sexy” enough, it’s that (again my opinion) it often seemed like it was just Brie Lawson in a Captain Marvel suit, instead of Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel suit. If subtle acting is your thing, fine, but I like my acting to be in full view. Why hide your acting, let us all see it (isn’t that the point?). If you disagree with my opinion, fine, but don’t attribute motives to someone because of your perspective alone.
And just to be clear, women ABSOLUTELY deserve better representation in super hero movies and I love seeing it. Wonder Woman was awesome (even though I’m a Marvel fanboy), I’m looking forward to Black Widow, and hell, Elektra had some really good moments. But the movie was actually a solid flick, and I’m really excited to see more of Photon and more Cosmic Marvel Heroes. But it could have been better with a better lead. Sorry to rant, I don’t post comments often and this is probably much too long.
Thanks. Over the decades “Kara” has gone from an exotic, alien-sounding name to totally mundane, which is probably why the TV show uses it for her human identity.
@39/Lazer Wulf:
ITYM “Danver’s beat-down of her former team on Lawson’s so-called lab, a Kree imperial cruiser”. The ship was not destroyed; at the end of the film, Danvers boosts it and her Skrull friends to lightspeed (presumably, since it doesn’t exit with the same “jump-point” hexagonal effect as every other ship during the movie).
Several of the nameless Kree soldiers are eaten by Goose. Yon-Rogg is dispatched to Hala in a one-seat dropship. Minn-Erva is shot down in the canyon by Monica, who also destroys Starforce’s ship to escape Lawson’s ship’s hanger. But the remaining members of Starforce? Korath, Att-Lass, and the bearded Bron-Char. Yeah … that’s not addressed. They’re left alone after all the above flee for the climactic battle in the desert, so … maybe the trio are sufficiently incapacitated that Danvers is later able to stuff them in the brig, then returns them to Hala?
Somehow Korath is motivated to join Ronan the Accuser by the time of “Guardians of the Galaxy”. Maybe he’s disgraced by the events of this movie. Maybe the peace treaty with Xandar, against which Ronan was rebelling, is a result of Danvers’ crusade against the Supreme Intelligence.
My hypothesis re: Brie Larson’s subdued performance as Vers/Danvers, and the divided audience reaction to it — it’s not just her. In this movie, everyone is a professional, unlike the megalomaniacs, egoists and goofballs elsewhere in the MCU, so there’s less opportunity for hijinks, broad emotional displays, and reactions to them.
Fury is a professional; so are the Skrulls; so are the Starforce, who are moreover trained to limit their emotions (per Yon-Rogg’s lecture and as seen when Vers’s joke about Korath’s looks falls flat). The most emotional displays are from Maria (who’s conflicted that her best friend has returned from the dead), her daughter Monica (who’s a kid), Dr. Lawson (who has achieved technical success and then, oops, they’ve found me), and the Supreme Intelligence smugly wearing Lawson’s image.
I don’t know if there is a connection between DC and Marvel Danverses, but I think the original Carol Danvers character was basically Marvel’s knockoff on ’60s and ’70s Diana Prince: in the ’60s a non-powered Air Force officer, in the ’70s an editor of a feminist magazine with a super alter-ego. And now the Captain Marvel movie follows the great Wonder Woman movie, which seems fitting, though there should have already been a movie for Black Widow (cold war spy thriller, I mean how hard is that, Marvel).
I thought Captain Marvel was a really good superhero movie, but its reception suffered from the great expectations laid upon the first MCU female lead, and from the legion of sexist idiots running it down because internet sexism.
Brie Larson is an excellent actor. In Room she has a chance to do serious work, and in CM her performance is true to the character and to the meta-level, where she embodies an empowered woman who is not there for male viewers. However, in Infinity War, like many of the actors in the finale, she had to say her lines alone in front of a green screen with zero idea of the context — just her lines only. And they filmed that before filming the Captain Marvel movie, so yeah. Not Larson’s fault.
As a kid I only knew the Carol Danvers character from her appearances in the X-Men. The main thing I remember was that she lost her powers and memory in an encounter with Rogue, which was mainly a way to give Rogue permanent superpowers. And then she got new powers as Binary. How many times has she been powered and depowered, mind-controlled and memory-erased? The ups and downs of the character mirror the battle of sexism vs. gender equality in the real world. Somehow this makes her an icon of feminism in a different way than Wonder Woman, who she started as a knockoff of.
DeConnick’s reinvention of the character is brilliant. She even revisits the origin story to suggest that Carol used the Psycho-whatever to give herself those powers, even if she didn’t quite admit that to herself. But now she’s owning it and ready to punch holes in the sky. The movie is almost as good as those DeConnick stories, and I have high hopes for the sequel.
@50/rm: “I think the original Carol Danvers character was basically Marvel’s knockoff on ’60s and ’70s Diana Prince: in the ’60s a non-powered Air Force officer, in the ’70s an editor of a feminist magazine with a super alter-ego.”
That seems unlikely, since Diana was always a superhero from the start, whereas Carol was created just to be a member of a superhero’s supporting cast, and the decision to turn her into a superhero was made nearly a decade later. As the article I linked to earlier points out, Carol’s original role was more along the lines of the Lois Lane to Mar-Vell’s Superman.
@51 CLB — I was going off the existence of these stories, where Diana Prince becomes a secret agent without superpowers. I haven’t read them — I learned of them in Jill Lepore’s great book on WW’s creators. So I may not have the timeline right, but it seems to me Marvel and DC have a lot of knockoff versions of the other’s characters, and in giving Captain Marvel (who was only created to keep copyright on the name) a girlfriend they took their template from Diana Prince, super spy. Wasn’t she an Air Force officer in many of the earliest stories?
“It’s nothing like Wonder Woman“
No kidding. Whatever it’s flaws, Wonder Woman was enjoyable. This is just another product of the Mighty Marvel Mediocrity Machine, which has learned the unfortunate lesson that you can dish out slop and still get people to pay top dollar for it.
Good movie all around. Larson was a good lead, there was a solid cast of supporting characters, and the movie did a good job giving us the origins of the character without it feeling like just another origin story. It was well rooted in the MCU chronology, and set up a lot of good stuff for future movies. It streamlined the origin story that we suffered through in the comics, where all sorts of people took the character in all sorts of directions, often unsuccessfully. I loved the twist of Skrulls being refugees. The movie gave us more SHIELD stuff, and more Fury and Coulson, which always makes me happy. And the friendship between Carol and Maria was something we don’t see enough of in superhero movies; interaction with normal humans always makes the superheroes more interesting, and gives their characters more depth.
insert machismo comment that tries to demonstrate my actually very valid complaint about an insignificant detail as a way to try validating my intense dislike for a woman in a powerful role
Y’all — you weren’t the target market apparently. Can’t wait for the Black Panther comments …
on topic this movie was great. Brie Larson was phenomenal.
@52/rm: Yes, there was a time when Wonder Woman lost her powers, but she was still operating as a superhero, and it was after more than a quarter-century of being a superpowered lead character of her own book. Carol Danvers was created to be a supporting character in another hero’s book. There is absolutely no similarity there. After all, there were plenty of other women without superpowers in comics. The creators of Carol Danvers had no intention of ever giving her superpowers, so it makes no sense to think she was based on Wonder Woman.
When she was given powers in the ’70s, she became a female counterpart of Captain Marvel — around the same time that the Hulk and Spider-Man were also given female counterparts. So that puts her more in the category of DC characters like Supergirl (with whom she shares a surname) and Batgirl, or Fawcett/DC’s Mary Marvel, the distaff counterpart of the first Captain Marvel. Wonder Woman isn’t analogous at all, because she’s the most prominent DC heroine who isn’t a knockoff of a male hero.
@55. What can I say? I liked their movies better when their success wasn’t a sure thing. They put some effort into them. Increasingly, they’re coasting.
@44. It gets better. In Marvel’s latest pointless retcon of Carol Danver’s origins, she’s revealed as being half-Kree. Her Kree name? Car-Ell. I kid you not.
Definitely not the worst MCU movie, but I don’t believe it deserves the gushing review given here either. Didn’t really care for its pacing, and didn’t find Larson compelling as a protaganist at all. That said, there were some excellent set pieces and humor, and Akira Akbar stole every scene she was in. Overall, it’s middling: far better than the second Thor or the second Iron Man or GotG2, but certainly nothing to put it anywhere above the midpoint and possibly slightly below. It’s fine if you want to give it points for an empowered female character or being an IMPORTANT movie, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good; by that standard, it’s far outperformed in every possible way by Black Panther.
I agree 100%. One result of having grown up reading DC comics before Marvel even did superheroes is that I wax impatient with extraordinary characters who regard their powers/skilz/whatever as a burden. One of the best things about this movie is the sheer joy Carol takes in her powers. If I hadn’t been in a theater, I’d have exclaimed: “Yeah. That’s how it’s done, whiners!”
I had been very strongly rooting for Katheryn Winnick to get the role. I’d been a fan of her since an excellent acting job she did as guest star in a 3rd season episode of House MD. And then with Vikings, I was convinced that she could carry it off. And I’d never seen Larson in anything. But within 5 minutes, Larson had me won over. I am very much a fan of interior acting, without a lot of histrionics. My favorite actor for many years has been Juliette Binoche, and in Blue, after a huge tragedy, we really have to watch her face carefully and pick out fine muscle movements to see how anguished she is.
This is actually may be my favorite MCU movie, and it belongs in the pantheon of great superhero movies along with Superman (1978) & Wonder Woman.
@44 In 1959, “Kara” was an exotic name and “Linda” was in the midst of a very long run as a highly popular girl’s name, so it made some sense (especially in the 50s) for Kara Zor-El to take a “normal” name to blend in.
In 1988 (the year Melissa Benoist was born, and so for girls approximately TV Kara’s age), “Kara” was in the top 100 names while “Linda” is around 80 places further down.
(Both names have taken a serious slide in recent decades– for next generation’s Supergirl both Kara and Linda may seem as musty as some other supers’ first names already do.)
So Kara doesn’t have any reason to change her given name not to seem like an outsider, and teenage Kara doesn’t have a public Kara Zor-El persona that she’s trying to maintain a separate secret identity from the way cousin Kal does. (And isn’t being given advice by him on how to stay a below-the-radar “secret weapon” as in the original comics, nor is she subject to his tropism for LL initials.)
If they’d wanted to, a handwave to adopt Linda as a name wouldn’t have been hard to handwave. But this Kara doesn’t have a lot in common with Linda Lee (no orphanage stint, an unprecedented adopted sister, adoptive parents named Jeremiah and Eliza rather than Fred and Edna with very different professions, etc.), so a departure on the name is consistent with the generally revamped upbringing.
I’m just adding this comment to the chorus of “this was a great review”, and thank you for putting into words everything this movie made me feel. And thank you for “getting it”. This movie came out at a time where I was recovering from being gaslit by “well-meaning” male “mentors” in my heavily male-dominated workplace. That moment of having her blast Yon-Rogg while saying she has nothing to prove to him was massively cathartic, and probably fulfilled a deeply buried fantasy.
I also thought that the use of Ben Mendelsohn as a fake-out villain was fantastically meta in a subversive way. We’ve been conditioned to see him as the bad guy in his recent roles where he pretty much played the same guy ( as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the recent unfortunate Robin Hood and as Director Orson Krennic in Rogue One), so having it flipped around was pretty brilliant imho.
trying to watch this weekend![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@61/mschiffe: Those are all good points, and you’re right that it makes sense for the character to keep her name, because the fact that she retains a Kryptonian identity and heritage has always been what’s set Kara Danvers apart from Clark Kent.
But it does put a limitation on the show’s writers and main character. I mean, Superman can give an interview and reveal that his given name is Kal-El from the planet Krypton and it won’t endanger his secret identity as Clark Kent. If anything, it helps protect that identity, because if he’s telling people his real name, they’re less likely to think he’s hiding another identity on top of that. If Supergirl were Linda Danvers, she could tell people she was born Kara Zor-El and it would be fine. But as Kara Danvers, she has to go strictly by Supergirl in her public superhero identity, and that can be a bit awkward at times.
It sucks real bad for the same reasons as MOS. Basic storytelling mistakes flat out boring lead actor and eye rolling action.
Outside of it being its own narrative lol Carol’s lore afterwards brings in giant ass retcons that ignore established conuity
I’m just amused that disliking a Marvel movie is somehow an “edge” opinion. Some of their films are among the best of the superhero genre. Some are good. An increasing number are mediocre. I don’t think I’m really alone in thinking this either.
One of my favorite movies!
I really enjoyed the movie overall with just a few minor niggles… which I will mention here because that’s just the done thing right?
I agree with the people that have brought up the music choices, mostly being songs from the decade the movie is set in than songs that have meaning to the character’s former life on Earth. Sure you can use both types in a movie like this but there is no good reason for a 90’s song to be used in a scene set inside Carol’s head, that should be a song that she knew.
I also did not like how they did the scene where she blasts Ju-Dlaw, not because she did it but because is was painfully obvious that it was about to happen. I just rewatched Stardust the other day and there is a scene where Tristan is running to catch a coach that is speeding by, he leaps onto it’s side and grabs the top edge… before immediately bouncing off again. The scene was excellently staged so that you don’t realise that the drama was about to be suddenly and comically subverted. In CM however from the way he was acting you could see a mile away that this was not going to be taken seriously. So I’m kinda with some of the folks that talk about how cookie-cutter and uninspired the MCU movies can become, it’s little scenes like this that need to be less obvious in how they are directed.
With my niggling aside I’ll just mention one detail that I appreciated once I thought on it. Ju-Dlaw’s (what? Don’t you know that the actor is really a Kree?) constant ‘keep your emotions in check’ spiel is very appropriate because she is amnesiac. He is telling her not to trust her instincts and use her intelligence but her intelligence is based entirely on facts that they are feeding her. When you have no memories then instincts and emotions are the only thing that you have to trust. I do want to know if her memory loss is a result of the crash/explosion/trauma or something that the Kree did to her deliberately as a means of control. Did she even need a transfusion in the first place?
I am going to perch out here on a lonely limb with scant company and say that I thought this movie was a terrible disappointment. It just wasn’t really that enjoyable, even if I was totally digging on the mid-90’s setting and soundtrack (but “I’m Just a Girl” by No Doubt was a tad too on the nose). I was really disappointed by the take on the Kree empire and all its trappings, and I really didn’t enjoy Brie Larson’s performance at all.
In fact, I dare say that I enjoyed watching the Rambeau family much more did I did watching the rest of the film. It did have some positives – the digital de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson was seamless, the production values were top notch, and I even thought they did a good job of translating the Skrulls to the big screen, which, lets face it, could have gown horribly wrong with big rubbery faces and chins and large flapping ears that boing boing when they walk. The luminous Gemma Chan was underused, as was the redoubtable Annette Benning.
In short, I thought this movie was a big splashy dud. With all apologies to Carol Danvers.
I did like this one a lot. And the opening sequence (the Skrull ambush) is probably the closest thing we’re going to get to a Mass Effect film …
@69. Lady: “The luminous Gemma Chan was underused”
Agree with this. The good news is we’ll see more of her in The Eternals. Gemma Chan that is, not her character here.
@69: You’re not alone by any means.
This is the downside to treating movies like protest signs. It feels great at the time to march around and hold the thing up high, but eventually your arms get tired and you have to lower it and maybe then realize the artwork doesn’t look as great as when the paint was fresh. Perhaps you’ll even notice a spelling error or two. But hey, it still looks nice if you hold it at the right angle. The effort still counts.
@73/Casey: Don’t mock protest signs. Every right that you take for granted is the result of a lot of people protesting and fighting for it in the past. And nobody cares about the spelling or workmanship of the signs when they’re fighting for infinitely more important things.
A movie like this or Black Panther is an indication that generations of protests are finally being heard and making a difference, and that is a profound feeling to the ones who’ve been doing the protesting all along. These films aren’t protests, they’re victories.
@74: How is making terrible movies in response to identity politics a victory?
#75: That question is only relevant if one can objectively classify Captain Marvel as a terrible movie, and nothing in the conment-stream to this point approaches that threshold. The fact that not everyone who watched it enjoyed the movie does not make the movie terrible; it merely makes the audience human.
Most of the negative responses I’ve seen to Brie Larson’s performance commit the same fallacy, equating the viewer’s response to the performance with a failure of craft. By contrast, many of the positive responses – specifically including Keith’s here – call out nuances of craft and technique as key components of their appreciation.
It’s absolutely OK not to have liked the movie. But let’s not confuse emotional engagement (or the lack thereof) with objective quality.
@75. “How is making terrible movies in response to identity politics a victory?”
It is indeed a fallacy, as John C said, to infer objectivity to what is a completely subjective judgment on your part. You are entitled to dislike something, even intensely, but not to assuming a work of art (commercial art in this case) is terrible just because you say so.
Plus there’s the backwardness of the whole “identity politics” catchphrase. There is nothing more “identity politics” than the historic practice of ensuring that the white male heterosexual identity was exclusively favored in all facets of society for generations on end. If other identities are finally coming closer to participating equally, that’s lessening the identity politics, not increasing it.
I’ve never even gotten a straight answer on what “Identity politics” even means in this context. How is having a female main character “politics”. Are you saying there’s no reason to ever have a female character unless there’s an agenda? That in itself is part of the problem, I guess.
It doesn’t make it a perfect movie or above criticism, and of course the movie or acting style can also be not to your taste. But this particular criticism always seems like it means something else to me.
@80/Lisamarie: Yeah, that’s basically it. A lot of white hetero men are so used to being the automatic default that everything revolves around that they assume that’s the natural, fair status quo and that any attempt to include other people is a biased agenda. They don’t realize that it’s the other way around — the population is naturally diverse, so the only way you get a culture that centers white hetero men is by having an agenda to exclude everyone else.
To paraphrase a line I’ve seen bouncing around on Facebook lately, if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
#74. Not a mockery of protests in general. But the level of protests and counter protests involving popular culture is deserving, I think, of some mockery and skepticism. This is, in the end, about buying or not buying a product, and whether the company will make more of said product if it earns enough votes at the ballot box — I mean millions at the box office. So, yes, the reactions to fictional people who shoot beams from their fingers with all the seriousness and righteousness of the march on Selma is approaching the realm of the absurd.
But, Marvel, just make a better movie next time. That’s the greatest victory you can have over the online idiots, and then you won’t have to rely on these protests and effusive displays from the fan faithful.
Thought exercise: let’s say it was a younger Clint Eastwood playing the original Mar-Vell, with just a squint and occasional scowl, Man with No Name style. Pure minimalist acting. I imagine there wouldn’t be the same objections. Because there haven’t been such objections in the past. It would be an acting choice that fit the character and the context.
A viewer throwing out a bad acting accusation in a context where the character is constantly told not be emotional, “gaslighting” her, as Keith said, is simply behaving like the biker in that scene: “Just smile more and you’ll be prettier.”
@82: Captain Marvel made over a billion dollars, after being forecast to make about 70% that. It seems rather more likely to me that people just liked it, as I did; fan drama has very little effect on a movie’s bottom line.
#83.
I think it’s more about charisma — that certain ‘it’ quality — than looking pretty. Some actors, like Gal Godot, have ‘it’ right from the start and others don’t as much. That’s not to say Larson can’t grow and improve. Actors often do.
Look how much the cast of The Next Generation improved over the course of that series. Saying they were bad to mediocre in the beginning (well, besides Patrick Stewart) doesn’t make anyone a mean-spirited Star Trek fan. It’s just an honest opinion about a performance.
@85: Yes, let’s all hope Oscar-winning Best Actress Brie Larson develops some charisma and acting chops.
@85. Casey: Sure, performances improve, especially as an actor lives with the role for awhile. But in this case, it’s specifically sexist (and targeted by a few at someone getting her girl cooties all over their power fantasy) and deserves to be called as such.
#84.
That’s fine, but that wasn’t the issue.
By the way, I wouldn’t always go on ticket sales being a factor concerning overall quality. Avatar was a highly profitable spectacle, many people saw it, and yet it features one of the blandest lead performances in memory.
#86. Charisma concerning this specific role. Acting in a drama and acting in a superhero movie are quite different.
#87. Yes, but insinuating that every single criticism directed at her performance must be due to cootie fears is also unfair.
@88: Your premise seemed to be that people didn’t really enjoy Captain Marvel, they just went as a form of protest. Movies only make a billion dollars if people actually enjoy them; 90% of the audience had no idea about the fan drama and just went to see a superhero movie. If you didn’t like it, that’s fine, but don’t invent a narrative that it only succeeded because activists supported it when it clearly resonated with audiences. Their opinions are as valid as your own; don’t discount them by attaching political motives.
To put it another way, they didn’t “rely on fan protests,” they made a movie a lot of people liked. Suggesting it only succeeded due to activism is erasing the legitimate opinions of people who like things you don’t.
@88. Sam Worthington was bland!? Them’s fightin’ words!
Yeah, I don’t remember anyone faulting that movie because the lead performance was bland. That may have been the point, a generic PoV character. Cameron’s not known for great characters. This is the movie that called its MacGuffin “unobtanium.” It’s practically meta blandness.
@Carlo Henden: “insinuating that every single criticism directed at her performance must be due to cootie fears is also unfair.”
Nope. I said “a few.” (check non-edited comment)
@75 You (and an apparent minority) think they are terrible. By all other metrics Captain Marvel & Black Panther were resounding successes, to the extent that the Russos had to tweak bits of Infinity War & Endgame once the impact of Black Panther became clear. And perhaps you just didn’t like either film? That’s FINE. Not every film is for everyone. But for some very specific, criminally underserved audiences, these films showcase characters and themes that resonate with them, and that is something to be embraced, not derided.
As far as MCU movies go, This one’s just All right. The big twist doesn’t really land, Brie Larson isn’t given much to work with, and the 90s setting doesn’t really amount to anything besides nostalgia. The revelation on how Nick Fury lost his eye was also super-underwhelming.
Wonder Woman did it better
I really liked this movie. A lot. The review covers so much of what I enjoyed about the Captain Marvel movie. Thank you for the thoughtful review.
I wish I’d been able to see this in a theater. This movie now sits on my bookshelf right next to my Captain America blurays. I am so happy to have a new favorite superhero to enjoy in phase 4 onwards. :)
While I don’t think the film was horrible, nor am I particularly concerned with cooties, I still think this film is far from one of the MCU’s best, and I also feel like Keith brought a few straw men to his rebuttal of those who were more critical.
I agree that Larson was doing a lot of subtle facial acting in many of her scenes. I also felt (especially early in the movie) that the “wooden” feel to many of her scenes was actually good deliberate acting of a character who has been brainwashed into “not letting her emotions control her”. However, the logical arc for such a character discovering who she was would be to re-connect to her emotions, and realize that they don’t hold her back and are actually valuable. I expected Danvers to act in the climax more like she appeared in her flashback with Rambeau, and yet for the most part even in the climax she remained very understated – the biggest revelation of emotion in the climax was an obviously ADR’d whoop (not reflected at all in the face of the character) as she took on the ships in orbit with her full power. This left the (perhaps mistaken) impression that maybe her character really was more wooden and uninteresting than it should have been, and what’s worse, made her character arc a lot less satisfying to me – it became purely about her discovering that she had been brainwashed and controlled. For instance, as she’s fighting all of her ex-comrades, now revealed to have been her enemies, in the climactic fight, we see no intense emotions at all – not anger, not betrayal, not vengeance, not trepidation, not sorrow, not hurt, not satisfaction – just the same dry wit and just slightly smug snark that she displayed all along from the beginning of the film. For me this was deeply unsatisfying and struck me as wasted potential in the movie, especially since as Keith mentions, there were a few points where Larson gave beautiful impressions of fighting back emotions, promising much that I felt was never delivered. Personally, I would probably chalk it up more to the directing than anything, although the same thing happened in Endgame, where Larson had a couple of shots of great facial acting that were never really backed up in her scenes later in the movie.
Larson seemed to be at her best playing off of Jackson, and was clearly enjoying that part of the movie (so much so that she immediately did another team-up project with him, right?). That was the part of the movie I enjoyed the most – as well as the parts with Rambeau, who showed more pathos in her monolog than all of Larson’s scenes combined.
As to being relatable, while I’m sure that Danvers’ predicament is extremely relatable to many women, is her arc in dealing with it, and her character as she does it, relatable? Without the aforementioned pathos, Danvers’ reaction to her discoveries, and her manner in the final act, leave me less certain about that. Though the actual events could certainly be considered cathartic to many people who identify with the predicament itself.
Keith also didn’t address the many ways this film retcons several things established in the MCU, usually for the worse. Are the Kree, and Ronan specifically, religious fanatics like in GotG, or cold, cruel totalitarians driven by a cold, cruel, AI? By the way, Ronan here is set up as having a beef with Danvers which we already know won’t pay off because of the Guardians. I personally felt disappointed that we didn’t have a shot in Endgame of Ronan on Thanos’ ship ordering the guns to fire on her and then watch in disbelief as she knocks him out of the sky – it would have been another simple yet great payoff among the many in that battle. What about SHIELD and Fury being aware of interstellar risks way, way before Thor and Loki arrived in New Mexico? While Keith mentions the mystery of how Mar-Vell got the Tesseract, I could actually suggest that this may have happened right after the Starks were assassinated (that would have been 1990 or so, right?), and maybe that’s how she got access. That too could easily have been mentioned in passing.
Also, the internal inconsistencies, which Keith usually leaves “as exercises for the viewer”: how do all the Skrulls scattered by the exploding ship in orbit (and how did nobody in SHIELD notice that, btw?) happen to all land on a beach together? Why, if their goal on Earth is to contact Vers and convince her to help them, do they first open fire on her from a concealed spot with a deadly weapon? Why would they infiltrate SHIELD in a manner that is downright insidious, rather than trying to contact Fury once they get an idea of what he’s about? And so on.
All in all, to me it was a lot less than it could have been, though IMO this was a lot more on the writing and directing than on Larson herself as an actor. I don’t think she was used properly in Endgame, either, and as that was shot first, I suspect that might have somewhat colored how they did this as well. I hope in future appearances they do Danvers and her story more justice.
@82/Casey: “So, yes, the reactions to fictional people who shoot beams from their fingers with all the seriousness and righteousness of the march on Selma is approaching the realm of the absurd.”
Not at all. Countless humans throughout history have based their ideologies and ways of life on belief systems conveyed through myths and legends about supernatural beings with magical powers. Those stories are allegories for the beliefs and concerns that guide our lives, a way of communicating abstract ideas and aspirations through entertaining symbols.
Heck, most fiction throughout history has been what we now consider fantasy, heavily populated with gods and fae folk and ghosts and demons, with curses and prophecies and divinely guided destiny. True, people back then believed such things were literally real, but this was the default way of telling stories until a mere few centuries ago, so it’s a failure of cultural literacy to dismiss stories with fantastic subject matter as lacking in artistic merit. (There are ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth — does that make them frivolous trash?)
Heroes inspire people. It doesn’t matter whether those heroes carry swords or ray guns or magic wands; it matters whether audiences can see themselves and their lives and their aspirations reflected in them.
Turns out I’m not even alone in this comment section.
@96. Shloz: “we see no intense emotions at all – not anger, not betrayal, not vengeance, not trepidation, not sorrow, not hurt, not satisfaction – just the same dry wit and just slightly smug snark that she displayed all along from the beginning of the film”
I’d be curious if any analogous complaints have ever been logged against a male actor doing a minimalist performance. The highly restrained performances of Eastwood were seen as a feature, not a bug. Perhaps a cathartic release of emotion would have been more satisfying, but consider this: how many people, women especially, get to do that in daily life, especially if they are forced by circumstances to repress their emotions? Are we not all bottled-up to one degree or another and actively suppress our emotions?
Another tack: was not that release conveyed visually with the power flareups? Do you really need it verbalized for it to satisfy? I’m actually interested for myself now. Only rewatched the first half, so I’ll be looking for that.
Nother nother tack: what if we’re throwing cultural expectations at this, aside from the sexist ones of expecting certain female emotional expression (dam biker is turning out to be more significant than it seemed). Would say a Japanese viewer (or any other culture that values decorum) see any of the performance issues brought up here or would micro-expressions be writ far more largely?
#42: Well, golly. I think DC should just sue Marvel and have their Captain Marvel character destroyed. They did it before, after all. And how about all the superheroes for the past several decades that have been flying around and/or superstrong and wearing capes. Why hasn’t DC destroyed all of them? Fact is, the original Cap was plenty different enough in appearance and personality and his entire comic style not to be confused with Superman. They just took him out because he was a very successful rival.
@99/Sunspear: “Nother nother tack: what if we’re throwing cultural expectations at this, aside from the sexist ones of expecting certain female emotional expression (dam biker is turning out to be more significant than it seemed). Would say a Japanese viewer (or any other culture that values decorum) see any of the performance issues brought up here or would micro-expressions be writ far more largely?”
I think you have it backward. In the Japanese TV and movies I’ve seen (which are mostly tokusatsu and anime, admittedly), the acting is really broad and melodramatic, every emotion amped up to 11. I think the Japanese tend to embrace things in fiction that they repress in real life, using it as a release of sorts, which may be why Japanese film and TV are so often ultraviolent as well as hyperemotional.
Anyway, for me, it’s not about expressiveness. There are actors of both sexes that I’ve found compelling when giving subdued and restrained performances, like Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager or Sarah Shahi as Shaw on Person of Interest. I don’t even question Larson’s talent. She’s won awards, she gets major roles, so obviously she’s doing something right, objectively speaking. It’s just that I don’t personally find her performance style or her personality engaging. Different people look for different things in actors’ performances, and other people are probably seeing something in her I don’t. To me it’s just a matter of taste.
@100/Lisa Conner: If it were possible for DC to take legal action to eliminate Marvel’s Captain Marvel, they would’ve done so decades ago. After all, as you say, they sued the hell out of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and eventually ended up owning the character. But Marvel created their CM at a time when nobody was publishing stories about a character of that name, so the trademark was up for grabs and they got it. As long as they keep publishing books about characters named Captain Marvel, they keep the trademark (which is why there have been so many different holders of the name over the decades). Which is why, when DC ended up owning Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, they had to title his book Shazam! instead (because Marvel’s trademark meant that only they could use that name in a title), and they more recently ended up renaming the character Shazam as well.
Oh, I was mostly being sarcastic and annoyed. I love original Cap.
@CLB: Guess I should’ve made it clearer i was thinking of daily life, as I mentioned earlier in my post, not media representation. I’m well aware Japanese pop culture can be extreme. Take Takashi Miike films, like Audition. I’d venture almost no one can watch Visitor Q without being creeped out or even outright horrified. Maybe Freud was right about that “return of the repressed” thing.
If anything, a closer representation of a restrained milieu would be something like The Makioka Sisters, released in 1983, only a few years before the era CM is set.
@103/Sunspear: But you were wondering how Japanese audiences would respond to the performance of an actress in a work of fiction, not to a person in everyday life. So I was talking about what kind of performances Japanese viewers would probably expect to see in a movie, particularly a fantasy/superhero film.
@CLB: I shouldn’t have muddled it. Maybe sub in another culture which wouldn’t have any expectations of highly expressive, maybe even exaggerated, facial movements in an acting performance. There must be audiences outside the US, or even the West in general, (given the film’s worldwide success) who didn’t expect charisma or emotiveness from what’s essentially a stoic soldier role.
Someone upthread complained about why she didn’t emote more during the fight with her former squad. She’s not Spider-Man, quipping out of a sense of insecurity. She’s a woman grown to full possession of her faculties and powers. Don’t know what could be more assertive, affirmative, and aspirational than that.
And no, you’re not in the group I’m pushing back against. they know who they are.
It is at this point in reviews that I always feel like asking the reviewer what they think Yon-Rogg should have done instead to try to win.
@106/ad: Wha? Yon-Rogg isn’t the character whose decision matters in that scene. He’s behaving in exactly the way that makes him an obstacle and challenge for the movie’s hero to overcome. Keith isn’t saying that portrayal of Yon-Rogg was a mistake and that he should’ve done something differently. Because it’s not his movie, it’s Carol’s. The whole point of the scene is that he’s trying to control and manipulate her as he always has, and this is the moment when she finally transcends it.
Really enjoyed this movie and it rewarded rewatching unlike some of the other MCU movies. I feel like the characters, their relationships, and the majority of the performances were top-notch. I don’t have decades worth of investment in the comics version of the character, but I was still able to follow and enjoy the plot. So I guess it did a good job of adding nods to the existing fans without alienating anyone else.
As far as criticisms of Larson’s role, I feel like that had very little to do with her performance and a great deal to do with the structure and pacing of the movie.
We start out with an Act I character with amnesia and a history of being told that her past doesn’t matter and she shouldn’t be “overly emotional”. I don’t know how else that character could be played other than being slightly distant and almost alien (with some personality leaking out).
Also, unlike Spiderman FFH or Thor 3, there were very few moments where they sat Carol down and gave her a chance to breathe as she the plot keeps moving at a rapid pace. There was one scene at the very beginning, and all the rest of those scenes were in Act III. And they were all very effective.
The biggest downside to me were the music cues, which were good but seemed a little pushy in places. But that sort of thing is very difficult to do perfectly and maybe GotG is the only MCU movie that manages it to date.
I enjoyed the film, and yes it was a necessary change from the formula that we’d seen in Marvel particularly the hero not having to face a villain she created.
Krad, in regards to your list of sexist criticisms above I can feel your exhaustion. The fact you feel the need to fire off that list suggests a history of some very unpleasant time spent on social media. I’m guessing you feel compelled to spend sometime on it because of your job. My sympathies. You seem like you could use a break from the twitter basement dwellers.
One thing I would have liked is a little more history of the Skrull/Kree conflict nearer the start of the film. I kinda felt like we’d just been dropped in it without much emotional investment in the conflict. Even a Black Panther/Vibranium style exposition sequence would have been nice here because I didn’t actually care who is winning out of the Skrulls/Kree until near the end of the film. I kinda felt like the film expected me to be familiar with the comic book history, where as most Marvel films give the casual audience a gentle start.
Also one thing that bugs me still, What’s the supreme intelligence’s deal? What are its motivations, why does it have a sense of humour? Is it actually a Kree? If not why does it care about the Kree more than any other race? What does it actually want?
@109. Line: the Supreme Intelligence is a sentient artificial intelligence based on the uploaded consciousnesses of prior Kree. Don’t remember how they are selected, perhaps leaders or significant historical figures. It’s one reason why the film’s innovation of showing different avatars of itself works very well. It also serves as foreshadowing that Mar-Vell is already dead.
I utterly enjoyed this one, and so did my friends at the time. Especially the very clear addressing of so many different ways that women can be belittled. And Brie Larsen was a perfectly good lead for us. There’s plenty of subtle expressions going on that I know I’ve seen aimed in my direction in the past.
One other point that doesn’t get enough attention – at no point whatsoever in this entire film is any woman sexualised. Not even the surfer girl. Danver’s uniform is form fitting but clearly a uniform, and little different to the men’s version. The rest of the time everyone is in comfortable clothes. It’s a real difference to say Wonder Woman’s careful pan up the legs on a regular basis.
I do however think that both Larsen and Danvers was criminally mistreated in the Infinity War films, especially with the abrupt haircut. But apparently all those scenes were filmed long in advance of this film, so they hadn’t quite worked out where they were going with the character yet.
@96 how did nobody in SHIELD notice that, btw
In my head, an unexpected explosion in space is how Shield knew to go looking for her in the first place. I mean, it’s not like you’d deploy Nick Fury for a random mall breakin by someone odd in a wetsuit, that’s a standard police matter.
I liked this movie quite a bit as a standalone but IMHO in terms of MCU continuity late Phase 3 was the wrong place for it. If they had managed to squeeze it into Phase 2 as they were supposed to it would have been great. Having failed that I think that a character with such difference-making powers should have been pushed to Phase 4.
I too found this film utterly underwhelming. I didn’t think it was bad, just profoundly average and a big part of that for me was Brie Larson’s performance. She just came across as bland and uncharasmatic in the role. She can be a fantastic actress (see Room), but also extremely grating (see Kong). A huge part of an actor’s performance comes from the direction, so maybe have to chalk this one up to the directors. Just because an actor has an Oscar doesn’t mean they can’t give also awful performances.
I also found all the “witty banter” to be annoying, it was like someone had watched one too many Joss Whedon projects and thought “Hey! I can write snarky banter like that!”, it got old in Whedon productions and it started out old in this film.
I really don’t understand why Marvel/Disney didn’t go with Blackwidow for their first female lead superhero role. A big mistep by them I feel. Hopefully her film will be excellent.
Overall a lower tier MCU film, not Ironman 2 bad, but probably around Avengers 2 level. I’m hoping Captain Marvel 2 will be an improvement.
Here’s a question coming from someone who grew up reading DC comics in the 60’s:
When did Kara, daughter of Zor-El (brother of Jor-El) become Kara Zor-El? I do not remember that name ever being used in the comics I knew…
@115/Dr. Thanatos: That Kryptonian naming convention was established no later than the ’80s, I’m pretty sure — women used their father’s full name as their surname, like Lara Lor-Van or Alura In-Ze. It was only more recently that certain reboots started changing that and sometimes referring to Lara as “Lara-El.”
Chalk me up as not a fan of Brie Larson. It’s not a question of acting skill for me. There’s just something about her personality that doesn’t translate well for me. I can’t really put my finger on it, but she just seems bland and lifeless to me as an actor. Consequently, I didn’t really enjoy this movie that much. Plus, I really didn’t care for the cinematography. Bland is pretty much the perfect word for this entire movie, IMO.
@96, as someone who suppressed a lot of emotions in my life, I can say that it really isn’t so easy to just let them all out. It’s tremendously scary to do so, and the saying “old habits die hard” truly applies here. Even after counseling & medication, I still find it extremely uncomfortable and difficult. My reasons for suppressing things are different than Carol’s here, but the end result is similar.
A good example of Captain Marvel’s visual blandness is the image KRAD posted. It’s the hero, glowing with energy, ready for action and . . . it’s dull. Maybe it’s the combo of the hazy golden CGI light and the nearly-the-same-shade metal corridor. It just doesn’t convey any sort of power. It might as well be a novelty full-size Captain Marvel lamp in the corner of the living room.
@119 – It’s weird, because the MCU is known for films bursting with color (as compared to the DCEU, which receives many complaints of darkness). I’m not sure if it has to do with setting the film back in the 90s, but the film was largely bland.
@120. Even bright colors become boring if you don’t use them right.
@120,121 – This is why it is subjective, because I didn’t find that dull at all, nor lacking in power. I found it quite visually stunning and a potent moment.
Had the MCU released this movie in 2008 instead of 2018, I think it would have been just as much a watershed as Iron Man was. Alas, we had to wait ten years, and so I think the main knock against this film is that so much of this ground has already been tread by Superhero movies. When stacked up against either the splendor of Black Panther, the zaniness of the Guardians or Thor Ragnarok, or at the opposite end the almost down-to-earth sensibilities of the Spider-Man movies, this looks a bit too conventional. I think that’s why they chose to invert the plot chrnology via amnesia, and I think that’s the movie’s biggest weakness.
Who in 2018 walks into a movie called Captain Marvel and doesn’t figure out right away that ‘Veers’ is not an alien but a human, and that there is something the Kree aren’t telling her? There is nothing surprising about that aspect of her personal story, and by inverting it we’re robbed of Carol Danvers’ history as much as she is. Like her, we have to accept scraps of memory and flashbacks instead of getting to experience her friendship with the Rambeaus as a living thing.
I think if the story had been told chronologically, the loss of that relationship would have hit a lot harder than it did, at the expense of a surprise that was never surprising. The only good twist to the story is that the Skrulls aren’t villains, but I think they could have still kept that secret without twisting the chronology around. It’s still a good movie, just not as good as it could have been.
@123/Colin R: I doubt anyone walking into a movie called Iron Man in 2008 was surprised that Tony Stark became Iron Man. There are many stories where you know what’s going to happen. But what matters is that the characters don’t know, and if the story is well-told, we identify with the characters’ reactions and feel their surprise or uncertainty along with them. What matters here isn’t merely the cold fact of what Carol Danvers becomes — it’s the emotion of her journey to discover who she really is and embrace a new purpose. A linear presentation would’ve robbed us of that.
@111 said: One other point that doesn’t get enough attention – at no point whatsoever in this entire film is any woman sexualised. Not even the surfer girl. Danver’s uniform is form fitting but clearly a uniform, and little different to the men’s version. The rest of the time everyone is in comfortable clothes. It’s a real difference to say Wonder Woman’s careful pan up the legs on a regular basis.
I saw this movie with my 11-year-old daughter on its opening weekend and she noted the very same thing – which was just one of the reasons she liked it a lot better than Wonder Woman.
From the surprise reveal that the Skrulls were not evil to the ways in which Carol rediscovered her identity, the film is quite well-crafted. Also, both she and I felt that Wonder Woman was too dependent on Steve Trevor as a viewpoint character.
I really liked this movie and felt like it really represented the character’s past and present pretty darn well. The tag at the end with her call sign being “Avenger” was an especially fun bit in terms of setting up the end of the first Iron Man. My minor quibble was that the soundtrack went a little too much toward the era’s “greatest hits.” “Just a Girl” during the big fight scene at the end and “Only Happy When it Rains” during the motorcycle scene are the two most glaring examples
@111, 125 – Wonder Woman was directed by a woman; I never really thought that any shots were sexualized in a male-gaze manner. Snyder, though, did the typical male-gaze panning up shot in Justice League. So much so that you even saw a flash of the bottom of the butt cheek.
@126. That could have easily been Whedon, depending on the scene. 60% of JL was his material.
I remember seeing it in an early trailer. That’s why I went with Synder.
I see that several month’s time hasn’t helped the discussion about this movie get any smarter.
I’m going to second Keith on Larson; the complaints that she was flat are groundless: the character she is protraying is *supposed* to be a controlled one after, you know, years of brainwashing. Notice how different she acts in flashbacks? And yet, despite that, there’s very rarely any confusion as to what emotions the character’s feeling; expression, posture, etc all communicate it clearly.
That’s a very hard line to walk and Larson nailed it. Frankly I think all the actors did; I don’t think there’s a major role in the film I can point to and say ‘I didn’t like that’.
The motorcycle scene that so many people are so choked about is straight up Terminator 2’s, except not as extreme. Arnold fights an entire bar in the course of taking someone’s clothes literally off their back, and then swipes their motorcycle to boot alongside the bartender’s gun and glasses. Danvers just ignores an asshole and then steals his ride, whoop-te-do.
Insofar as Marvel movies being formulaic goes, that’s true enough, but this is actually a nice twist on it, and my best comparison is to the first Iron Man movie, which is the holotype for basically all the ones they’ve made since. And I loved them both. Anybody complaining about ‘identity politics’ can just go away, in my books; a good movie remains a good movie, even if you didn’t like it ’cause it starred someone from the half of humanity you don’t belong to.
(PS: I do have one gripe, which is about the completely pointless attempt to delay Yon-Mogg that wound up with a random dead Skrull. What was the *upside* to that plan exactly? Why risk a Skrull, of whom there are a very limited number right now, when you could — even if you can’t call in human authorities for whatever reason — plant explosives or send Yonnie-boy to the far side of the planet or something?)
@128. I’ll have a look at some point. Snyder is equal-opportunity on the eye candy, at least, as shirtless Clark, Bruce and Arthur can attest.
@69 “(but “I’m Just a Girl” by No Doubt was a tad too on the nose)”
Yes, I was disappointed in the lack of imagination with this choice too.
@128. Nope, if it’s the shot I’m thinking of, definitely Snyder. But personally, having grown up on Conan comics, the human figure doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
@110 Sunspear…cheers
Re the choice of Just a Girl by no doubt, while it is very “obvious” it does have the redeeming qualities of being a 90s song and being a pretty decent pop song.
Re the male gaze discussion (we could get really sidetracked here – lets tread carefully) its not absent from the film (that biker obviously has it) but its purposed for different reasons. Its good to make a film absent any sexualising imagery because not all entertainment has to be about that, and this is really a film without not just sex, but no romance either. The theme is friendship (Danvers/Fury, Danvers/Rambeau, Humans/Skrull and to a lesser extent Danvers/Lawson and Fury/Coulson). So yeah – nice for a change.
On the other hand fims with sexualisation aren’t automatically sexist. As wonder woman shows. Sexy doesn’t automatically = sexist. Objectification is probably the key. One can admire someone while also being attracted to them. There are good arguments against overly sexualised film, sometimes among those arguments is that they can be sexist. However not every film with sexualisation in it is guilty of sexism.
@133/line: Right. It’s about the context. A scene where a female protagonist is totally nude while alone with a lover of her choosing is less objectifying than one where she’s fighting supervillains while inexplicably wearing a skimpy bathing suit rather than body armor. She’s more exposed in the former but more objectified in the latter, because the former exposure serves her while the latter only serves the people looking at her.
@134 Christopher Bennett
That’s an interesting thought I hadn’t really considered – does the sexualisation benefit the character (in text) or not.
I tend to think something becomes sexist when it is reductive. A character being presented in an attractive way is not necessarily sexist, a character being presented in an attractive way that un-person’s them and reduces them to a tool of gratfication probably is.
Personally I have no problem with Male Gaze provided my Female Gaze gets equal time. Super hero movies are full of very fit men in very tight costumes and we all like to look.
@99: Keanu Reeves?
Personally I liked this movie a lot. The fact that it had a female lead played no part in that — that wasn’t the reason I watched it, but neither did that deter me from watching it. I just thought the trailer looked interesting, and I wanted to see what the story was about (having no prior knowledge of the character).
It’s okay if you didn’t like it. Some of the Marvel movies that are highly regarded (Captain America, Thor, Avengers) did almost nothing for me. If you think it was *objectively* mediocre, though (as opposed to simply “less-than-stellar” or “not my cup of tea” or “I just couldn’t get into it”), I have to wonder what you’re comparing it to. I think the movie it shares the most in common with in terms of plot and milieu is Green Lantern.
Was it better than Green Lantern?
@93: “But for some very specific, criminally underserved audiences, these films showcase characters and themes that resonate with them, and that is something to be embraced, not derided. “
When a movie has sociological implications, and is widely praised despite poor plotting, acting, and worldbuilding, I become suspicious as to the motives and judgment of the people who praise it.
Why has it taken so much longer to get a Black Widow movie, since the character was introduced to the MCU rather early-on, is portrayed by a skilled actress capable of emotional depth and nuance, and is extremely competent, intelligent, and ‘strong’? Why is there a nonsensical all-female battle scene in Endgame? Why the mean-spirited aggressiveness in Captain Marvel? The reasons to be suspicious are obvious.
Still, I have high hopes for Scarlet Witch. I like the actress, I like the character, and she’s both strong and powerful – nearly taking down Thanos single-handed. Not a hint of misandry… because it’s not needed for her to appeal.
@139– there wasn’t any “misandry” presented in the Captain Marvel movie either.
@140 Yes, there was. Captain Marvel Steals Motorcycle
That man’s ‘crime’ was to be smarmy. His punishment was to be assaulted, threatened, and robbed. It seems we’re intended to find this funny. I find that to be funny. I particularly enjoy the comparisons to Terminator 2, in which the emotionless robot assassin who kills without hesitation or remorse steals biker clothing and a motorcycle. Yes, that is precisely the association we want people to make with a ‘superhero’, isn’t it. Especially since that event took place at a point in T2 where the audience doesn’t yet know the robot is supposed to be heroic.
Put a male superhero in those shoes, and people would have no problem seeing the problem. Yet it somehow eludes people.
Of course, there’s a certain amount of personal taste here – see the previous poster who said The Avengers left him cold. I considered it to be a triumph and a masterpiece of its kind, and an all-around great movie. But there are objective problems here, much like the philosophical issues with the Wonder Woman movie. That was also a massive disappointment – certainly it was better than most other recent DC movies, which generally had problems with understanding what superheroism is supposed to be about. But merely being the best of a bad lot doesn’t account for its massive acclaim. What does?
@141/melendwyr: Nice try. As already covered upthread, that’s a deleted scene, not in the actual film.
@139 I remember no assaulting or threatening. Did we watch the same movie?
I liked the variety and range of friendships in this movie and the decision to make these relationships powerful and important without being romantic. I also appreciated the way all the adults were adult; Carol’s growth into her power did not mean she had to grow up as a person.
@141– you’re stretching more than Reed Richards. And that scene isn’t even in the movie.
I love this review of the cosmic book news review, which points out just how ridiculous the claims of misandry in this movie actually are. According to cosmic book news Dingus in Chief, Matt McGloin, the fact that Nick Fury was depicted doing dishes if somehow and affront to manly men everywhere. How anybody could take this shit seriously is beyond me.
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2019/03/10/nick-fury-is-shown-washing-dishes-the-top-5-worst-male-bashing-elements-in-captain-marvel-according-to-some-dingus/
One complaint I don’t understand is the use of Just A Girl as being too “on point”, while Taika Waititi got praise for his use of Immigrant Song, which has these lyrics:
The hammer of the gods
We’ll drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, and sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming!
and:
So now you’d better stop and rebuild all your ruins
For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing
Thor was known as the Hammer of the Gods, and in the opening sequence he is literally fighting a horde with his hammer Mjolnir. At the end of the movie, his people board a ship to take them to new lands where they can rebuild the ruins of Asgard after losing the fight to Hel and Surtr.
So why is this praised but Just A Girl is panned as being too on point?
@145/BonHed: This is why I’ve never much liked the practice of using songs with lyrics to score TV and movies. It usually feels too on-the-nose for me when the lyrics are actually coming right out and saying what the scene is about.
@99/sunspear @129/foamy
My point wasn’t about the “flat” performance per se, from a woman or otherwise. As I mentioned before, it was perfectly explained and set up within the context of the movie, and even goes as good acting (someone controlling their emotions due to conditioning should come across as “wooden”). And, as mentioned before, the flashbacks indicate that this isn’t her real character (and that the actress can do the character differently, too). The problem stems from the very fact that this mannerism is expressly set up (“You must control your emotions!”) by the movie, and therefore has become a plot point that is then not paid off properly when her mannerisms don’t seem to change at all at the end of the movie. Not just during the battle, btw, but even in the quiet moments before and after, not to mention in Endgame (with the previously mentioned caveat that it was actually filmed first). That’s when people start to feel that the character itself is “wooden”, or badly acted. As I said before, it seems to me to be more of a writing/directing issue (maybe as a result of shooting order or such).
@112/Mayhem
Good point, thanks. Although they could have added a line to clarify that. I had just assumed that they were keyed in by the security guy’s call on his interaction with Vers (identifying as “Star Force”, asking about the planet and for communications equipment).
@124/Christopher
What bothered me with the presentation order is that not only is the surprise not surprising because of background knowledge (as in Iron Man), but even within the movie the audience is given most of the “surprise” information before the protagonist, only to then have a later “surprise” scene where she reacts to it. The fact that Vers isn’t Kree but human is revealed to the audience the second the Skrull memory scan starts (and was actually fully spoiled by the trailers, too), even though Danvers only begins to suspect at that point, and doesn’t fully realize until looking at the file (where her name and existence were redacted but not her photo?!). That means that at the time of revelation we are not feeling any surprise ourselves, only trying to empathize with hers (while possibly wondering why it took her so long). We also know from previous MCU movies that the Kree are rather less heroic than Danvers thinks, so again we are not surprised in the least when their narrative turns out to be false, except for the Skrulls actually behaving less like defensive refugees and more like insidious baddies, even in situations when they shouldn’t have logically. So not only is it that we know what the protagonist doesn’t way ahead of her, the movie tries to treat the information as if it is as shocking to the audience as it is to her, even going out of its way to have characters act illogically and out of character to do so. These are flaws in writing and direction.
@147/Shloz: “We also know from previous MCU movies that the Kree are rather less heroic than Danvers thinks, so again we are not surprised in the least when their narrative turns out to be false”
I didn’t see it that way. Guardians established explicitly that Ronan the Accuser was a renegade from his own people, allying with Thanos and breaking the Kree’s peace treaty with the Xandarians. So it seemed entirely possible that the mainstream Kree civilization was more benevolent than Ronan. True, Agents of SHIELD showed Kree in a generally antagonistic light, but this movie was set decades earlier, when different political or social factions could’ve been in ascendance.
So I was entirely willing to believe that Yon-Rogg represented a more positive side to the Kree, the opposite facet from Ronan. After all, I’m used to seeing Jude Law play good guys, and my main exposure to Ben Mendelsohn was as a villain in Rogue One, plus I’m used to seeing the Skrull portrayed as villains. So the revelations about who the real villains were did surprise me.
@146/Christopher, I find that if a song fits lyrically & tonally, it works even better for me, at least as long as it isn’t anachronistic. Using modern music in a fantasy/historical piece feels a lot more awkward and I generally don’t like that.
@149/BonHed: Maybe it’s different for people who are used to listening to that style of music, but for me, it’s clumsy if, say, an escape scene is scored with lyrics saying “We gotta get outta here,” or something similarly redundant. It feels like giving the audience too little credit for understanding the emotional intent of a scene unless you shout it explicitly in their faces.
It’s like the Robot Devil said in Futurama. “You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!” ;)
Nice
The other thing about too-on-the-nose-music is it depends on the context. For Ragnarok, the movie is close to being a comedy and has an irreverent tone throughout so I think it works there (not to mention the snippet they use is pretty epic). After seeing that scene it would be hard to imagine it scored any other way. I kind of feel the same way about Iron Man though to a far lesser extent.
For Captain Marvel, it feels more like they just picked a pop song from the right period with “empowering” lyrics and it isn’t nearly as integrated into the movie.
Weighing in on as the music (as somebody who thinks music/scoring is one of the best parts of a movie) – I admit, I also found I’m Just a Girl just a tad forced, but the use of Immigrant Song was fantastic, at least on a purely emotional level.
I think part of it is that (knowing about it from the trailer aside) – I can’t say I ever would have thought I’d hear a Led Zeppelin song in a Thor movie, but once it started playing, it was just perfect. Enough of a juxtoposition to be delightful and a surprise, but also thematically appropriate enough to be satisfying. Admittedly, I am more of a classic rock fan than a 90s rock fan (although funnily enough I hear that played on classic rock stations now ;) ).
I do love I’m Just a Girl, and it did fit the scene, but it was also one of those things I could have told you would be in the movie without even seeing it, so it just seemed like a bit of a low hanging fruit. It worked perfectly fine – and it WAS thematically appropriate given her history (at least on Earth; I don’t get the impression the Kree really thought less of her for being a woman as opposed to an Earthling) but it wasn’t surprising. It felt just a tiny bit focus group-y.
It’s been quite a while, so correct me if I am incorrect. Let’s see what we agree upon.
In the feature film as it was shown in theaters, Marvel is riding a motorcycle and wearing a motorcycle jacket at multiple points, including a meeting with Fury. Right? The bad guys get a lead on Marvel’s location from a reported theft of a motorcycle. Right? So she not only behaves in a manner unsuitable for a superhero, but commits a strategic error that gives the aliens information on her location.
Is any part of that wrong?
I wouldn’t hold it to the same level of quality and presentation as Wonder Woman, but Captain Marvel is as competently made it as it gets, for the most part.
It puts a new spin on the origin story, which is most welcome. It casts a solid actress in Brie Larson and takes us through a memorable journey in these 120 minutes. It’s a rewatchable film to be sure.
I do have a problem with it, however: direction. You can instantly tell Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck aren’t remotely comfortable with the responsibility of helming a blockbuster superhero mammoth, especially coming from the indie scene. It’s the same problem Ryan Coogler had when he did Black Panther. They’re not used to working with elaborate storyboarded action and extensive visual effects work. The first act of Captain Marvel suffers heavily from the muted cinematography* and inept coreography. You can barely tell the Kree from the Skrulls.
*It’s possible the multiplexes here in Rio need some serious retooling on their digital projectors. The picture was way too dark, and I think I’ve noticed this problem with other films.
The movie picks up when Danvers hits Earth and meets up with Fury. Then it becomes a fun chase story with plenty of fun moments, jokes and callbacks. And it captures the feel of the 1990’s without going over the top. Great Stan Lee cameo.
To me, the film becomes special when Danvers finally meets Rambeau. A captivating and detailed depiction of true female friendship without feeling corny. This is where Boden and Fleck shine as storytellers. This is the meat of the film (and with the rare good child performer spicing things up).
And, of course, Danvers journey in overcoming the bellittlement of male figures feels earned without ever becoming a ‘very special message’. It takes a good writer to be able to craft a coherent series of character beats, making a good story out of it without ever becoming a superficial morality play.
Overall, this was a solid outing, even though I wouldn’t rank it alongside the last two Avengers or the Captain America films.
Also, one thing I called in advance was figuring out the Skrulls were really the victims. Even though I never read a single comic, I figured the Kree were classic opressors with a hint of an Orwellian societal structure. Plus, I did recall Guardians of the Galaxy fairly well. I did a full MCU rewatch prior to Captain Marvel in January, so I remembered Ronan the Accuser and who he worked for. It didn’t take much to figure out the Kree were bad news, despite Marvel’s attempts at marketing them as lawful prior to the film’s release.
@155/Eduardo: Again, though, Guardians made it clear that Ronan was a renegade defying the Kree government, rejecting their peace treaty with the Xandarians and acting on his own to attack them. So it doesn’t make any sense to assume that the Kree state as a whole would be like him. Especially decades earlier, since a nation’s politics and policies can shift a great deal in that time.
@156/Christopher: Obviously, one character isn’t representative of an entire society. Not an unreasonable assumption, mind you. But I always assume that comic books and especially comic book films aimed at a wide audience will take the most archetypal path in order for viewers to easily digest this new world of content. By having Ronan as the big bad in Guardians, there was at least some precedent set for viewers to identify and interpret the Kree in a negative light.
Nevertheless, the earliest scenes with Yon-Rogg and Danvers make it clear that there’s something wrong with the Kree from the outset. And the skeptic viewer in me is used to never trusting military leaders who take to their cause with way too much devotion. The minute they painted the Skrulls as terrorists, it felt wrong, not unlike real-world examples.
I forgot to mention my first exposure to the titular character. I first discovered the character of Carol Danvers 25 years ago, watching the X-Men animated series. The episode A Rogue’s Tale is one of my all-time favorite X-Men episodes, with some superlative voiceover work from Lenore Zahn (Rogue), and a nearly perfect story about digging ghosts from your past and coming to terms with being essentially a rapist (if you interpret what Rogue did to Miss Marvel as such).
That episode has the best Rogue ever written: “You made me worse than a killer“.
Needless to say, whatever Marvel/Disney does with the X-Men, I’d pay good money to see a live-action rendition of what Rogue did to her. Brie Larson already showed she can play the abuse victim role thanks to Room. I can imagine great potential by taking Danvers in this direction of having her life and agency taken away by a misguided young girl.
@153– what are your feelings on Peter Parker stealing, and wrecking, Flash Thompson’s dad’s car in Spider-Man homecoming?
Or Steve and Natasha stealing a car, which was undoubtedly destroyed when the Hydra missile struck, to get to Camp Lehigh in the Winter Soldier?
@157/Eduardo: “But I always assume that comic books and especially comic book films aimed at a wide audience will take the most archetypal path in order for viewers to easily digest this new world of content.”
It’s generally best not to assume things at all. Good stories surprise you. Heck, CM certainly surprised us by showing the Skrull as the good guys, so it could conceivably have done the same for the Kree (at least the Kree of the 1990s) if that had been the story it was telling instead.
“Nevertheless, the earliest scenes with Yon-Rogg and Danvers make it clear that there’s something wrong with the Kree from the outset.”
No society is perfect, but a flawed society isn’t automatically an evil one. I didn’t think the Kree were as benevolent as the Federation, to be sure, but I was willing to believe they weren’t all bad either.
@143: I think it is at this point quite clear that anyone who thinks Captain Marvel was a ‘misandrist’ movie in any way shape or form is a. talking nonsense and b. didn’t see the movie and formed their opinion of it based entirely on clips and misinformation spread by idiots who *desperately* wanted the movie to fail because they don’t like that Brie Larson has opinions on things.
@147: I can see that argument — that Danvers at the end of the movie is still acting much like the brainwashed character she is at the beginning — but I don’t agree with it. Years of conditioning don’t slough off overnight, but there’s all sorts of moments — the interactions with Maria and Monica, for example — where that reserve is broken and more of her emotions come through. Or the sheer joy she takes in thrashing the Kree after realize just how badly she was screwed with by them, or on realizing she can fly and breath in space (like Batman :v).
The Endgame performance was a little disappointing after seeing CM, but I chalk that up to the reversed production order.
@159: Atrocious, in the first case. But I give Parker a certain amount of slack because he’s so bad as being a superhero at first. I severely disapprove in the second – as the two are fleeing from an evil organization that knows everything about them, they can access none of their usual resources, but Black Widow could have managed something more ethical if she’d tried. But of course she doesn’t consider herself a hero, which makes her ultimate fate that much more poignant.
To return to the movie – the scene was not only shot but is necessary to account for large amounts of content. I suspect someone higher-up induced them to remove the scene because its implications would harm the financial success of the film, and then let them release it after because it’s unlikely to have the same effect on DVD sales. Other deleted scenes which show how a situation arose are generally considered canonical. If only other similar scenes had been so excised from the MCU…
It wasn’t Natasha that stole the car, it was Steve. “Where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?” “Nazi Germany, and we’re borrowing. Get your feet off the dash.”
Was it? Wow. I do believe you’re right. Shame on him.
If I ever need an example of how you can’t use another person’s judgment as a litmus test, I’ll keep that one in mind. Granted that he’s entirely fictional. But you can’t even trust Captain America.
At the point Carol stole the motorcycle, she didn’t really think of herself as a hero either. She was a soldier on a mission.
@164/melendwyr, I’m not all that concerned about heroes committing small crimes like this. They frequently break the law when they beat people up and otherwise take the law into their own hands. The world isn’t black and white, it’s a million shades of grey, and there will always be extenuating circumstances; is it wrong to steal bread to feed a starving child? Even upstanding citizens like Steve Rogers have to make hard decisions, and occasionally break the law. It doesn’t mean they are less of a hero. I haven’t seen Into the Spider-Verse, so I won’t speak on why Parker did what he did.
@166- it wasn’t in Spider-Man into the Spider-verse, it was in Spider-Man Homecoming…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54JqmAhHEA0
Technically, wasn’t everything “superheroic” that anyone on Team Cap did after refusing to follow the Sokovia Accords against the law? So …
Let’s not forget the massive piles of property damage that follow Tony Stark wherever he goes.
I’m not concerned with “law”. Law can be made to mandate anything, or condemn anything. We could pass a law in the next half hour that requires us to beat people whose earlobes connect to their heads to death when we encounter them. Ethics, however, are everything.
Is it wrong to steal bread to feed a starving child if you have enough money to pay for it? Are we taking for granted that it’s right to feed starving children in the first place?
Danvers acted impractically – she drew attention to her actions and ultimately revealed herself to her pursuers. That’s in addition to her being a bully.
@170. melendwyr: “Is it wrong to steal bread to feed a starving child if you have enough money to pay for it? Are we taking for granted that it’s right to feed starving children in the first place?”
If it’s not self-evident to you that it’s always right and good to take care of children (innocents), then I’m at a loss. You’re getting into Javert territory here, whose pursuit of justice as he saw it made him evil.
You’re getting into the nitpickiest of weeds here trying to justify your hate of the Danvers character (for whatever reason) and, like Javert, not willing to give up your single-minded pursuit.
@170–. You say that Danvers acted impractically. Okay then, what else could/should she have done while on this primitive back water planet for which she has no local resources and a limited time span in which to complete her goals? Hailed a cab? Rent a car? Hitchhike? Yeah, sure, it sucks to be the bike owner, but it’s not like Carol crossed some irredeemable line of no return of immoral behavior. It’s a nitpick. Pure and simple.
As for Carol being a “bully”, well there’s absolutely nothing in the movie that actually supports that. You cannot point to a deleted scene, especially when an alternate at that same scene was actually used in the movie, as proof of your argument.
Given that melendwyr has not made any specific comments about any part of the movie except that deleted scene, I’m not at all convinced he’s even seen the actual film.
@173– Christopher– I would tend to agree.
“The Good Place” took a shot at the Captain Marvel haters…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/screenrant.com/good-place-season-4-captain-marvel-joke/amp/
It’s weird how much more fragile and easily threatened today’s supposedly tough, macho men have become, that the slightest hint of a story about capable women drives them into sheer panic and a frenzy of denunciation. I’m sure there were some sexist reactions back in the day to Wonder Woman, the Bionic Woman, Charlie’s Angels, Sarah Connor, Ripley, Buffy, Xena, etc., but I don’t remember it being so extreme.
(And yes, I included Charlie’s Angels. While it was certainly objectifying, it was also empowering in a way by showing women as capable action heroes. Enlightened modern viewers would find it sexist, but this bizarrely hypersensitive strain of misogynists we have today would go into a fit of the vapors at the barest suggestion of an action show with three female leads and only one male one.)
This thread just beat Age of Ultron for the most comments on any Superhero Rewatch post
@176, CLB, is it really necessary to generalize any man who didn’t like Captain Marvel as a sexist?
@178/roxana: “Not all men?” Seriously? The fact that something is not universal does not invalidate it as a thing that exists.
So you didn’t intend any such generalization. I apologise for misnderstanding you.
It’s long been an observation of mine that the people who shout the loudest about how other people are thin-skinned and need to just shut up and take it are always, without exception, the ones who react worst to such things being applied to them.
Hence all the weirdos getting super mad that somebody has dared to imply maybe they aren’t the kings of the world. It’s a pattern replicated everywhere out there these days, except in spaces that specifically push back against it, and it’s extraordinarily tiresome. Like an eternal game of Whack-A-Mole, so you can never get a prize at the end.
It would probably help if the media and the studios stopped paying attention to those enraged weirdos on Twitter and the like. They’re a minority of very strange people, mostly men, and they don’t have much power. At least not as much as they think.
But then, there is the matter of profiting from it. The media underlines the controversy to get more clicks, and the studios get to make hay out of being on the right side of history — support Captain Marvel in this cause against those cretins! Meanwhile, any and all criticisms can be easily dismissed as sexist or out of touch, the typical binary of online outrage makes the arguments even louder, the name of the product gets amplified, and you’ve got yourself a big “controversial” hit. It’s not quite a scheme worthy of a supervillain, but it is smart business. Disney, ya brilliant bastards.
I saw the move 1.4 times (projector problems, so I saw the first part twice.) I enjoyed it a lot. “Larson can’t act” baffles me.
I try to pay attention to violations of the “teal and orange” standard. The movie started out T&O, got greener on Earth, then I forgot to pay attention.
I root more for Maria being Carol’s adoptive platonic family than lovers.
I regret to say that I saw the movie. I have to second the first comment as noting that I consider it a very low point for the Marvel movies. As for “what else could she have done?”, there would have been plenty of ways for her to steal a motorcycle that weren’t that stealing of a motorcycle.
Again, I have my hopes for the upcoming Scarlet Witch movie, and hopefully the Black Widow project will have better writers than this film did.
@184/melendwyr: “I regret to say that I saw the movie.”
Prove it. Mention a detail that isn’t about the deleted motorcycle scene.
> plenty of ways for her to steal a motorcycle that weren’t that stealing of a motorcycle.
She stole a motorcycle, and some clothes off a mannequin, without assaulting anyone. What more do you want?
@186– It’s becoming very apparent that melendwyr can’t come up with any actual justification for his dislike of the movie other than the talking points that he’s parroting.
I loved this movie. In general, I tend to love movies where the hero realizes they’ve been on the wrong side and need to reevaluate (I loved that in Winter Soldier too). It gets away a little from the standard action-movie template by reminding us that we can be wrong, that sometimes the heroes and villains aren’t who we thpught they are.
It’s also nice, for variety, to get away from the Marvel template origin of “arrogant, selfish ass learns to be less arrogant and selfish”.
I enjoy Carol Danvers. A lot of people have said that her arc doesn’t make sense because Yon-Rogg keeps telling her to control her emotions but she’s really not notably emotional and is quite self-controlled. But that’s the point – Yon-Rogg is trying to control her by treating her use of her powers as emotionalism and lack of self-control, and the author of the review is right to point out that it’s a common tool employed against women. “I have nothing to prove to you” was easily the most memorable line from the film.
Talos was wonderful and is quite possibly my favourite secondary character in the entire MCU. I loved the way the Skrulls were used early on – really ramping up the paranoia factor – and I loved that they turned out to be basically good people fighting for their survival.
Fury had a great dynamic with Carol, and I’m stunned by how good the de-aging technology has gotten. It’s not even noticeable here, compared to earlier films where it had a kind of uncanny valley effect.
Monica Rambeau as a kid was great and made me very eager to see her as an adult superhero.
If I have a critique, it’s that they could have made the shift in Carol’s personality more evident by having her more clearly buttoned-down and serious among the Kree and starting to losen up, relax, and joke more once she’s on Earth and iperating independently.
A few random thoughts now that I’m binge-watching the MCU over Christmas weekend:
1.) As long as we’re pointing out homage to earlier movies, how about The Godfather? (“Take the Tesseract, leave the lunchbox”)
2.) How did Fury end up losing his eye? Did the Flerken wound become infected? Was it a slow-acting poison? I’d hate to be S.H.I.E.L.D.’s doctor on call!
3.) Mother Flerken! is now my new favorite safe-for-work expletive.
Carol Danvers is an example of a troubling trend in heroines, live action Mulan and Rey are also examples. This character’s problems are entirely external. She is oppressed! Naturally possessed of amazing abilities, that she needs no training or development to use, her only issue is the nasty people, mostly men, trying to hold down her amazingness.
Now it is inarguable that cross culturally women have had to deal with often arbitrary limits on their activities and ambitions. Women’s history is made up of the many, many ways they have subverted or used the rules to their own advantage. The trouble with these heroines is they are ridiculously overpowered and need to learn nothing. Not how to control their power, or use it responsibly. All they need is for the nasty people to get out of their way and everybody to fall down and worship. This makes for a boring character. It also makes for a very bad role model. Do we really want to teach little girls they are entitled to success and so naturally gifted it is unecessary for them to be trained, that teaching and training are in fact just ways of controling them?
princessroxana: I don’t agree that this is the case with Danvers, mainly because we see her constantly having to get up after falling down and failing at various things. The whole montage of times where she was knocked down and got back up paints a picture of someone who did go through training and development. There’s a saying in martial arts: seven times fall down, eight times get up. Danvers fell down several time, whether trying to play sports or ride a bike or go through Air Force training, and every time she got back up and tried again.
That looks like a pretty good role model to me…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
We see her get up. Do we see why she gets up? Do we see her learn from it or are we supposed to assume it? Is persistence really development?
Carol seems to shift instantly and painlessly from a guilt free war of extermination against the Skrulls who are suddenly revealed to be VIctIms!! to a guilt free war of extermination against the Kree, now revealed to be Bad Guys. this bothers me. I wish the writers had mad a less violent more nuanced choice.
I’d love this movie a lot more if it didn’t go in with the knowledge that Monica Rambeau was THE first Captain Marvel after Mar-Vell kicked the bucket….. and she’s a side character in this movie who dies off screen in the second one.
It’s not a deal breaker, I like Larson’s performance. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Wait a minute, who “dies off screen in the second one?” Monica certainly doesn’t — are you thinking of Maria? Although Maria’s death was established in WandaVision, I’m pretty sure.
Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with an adaptation telling a story differently than the original version. Plenty of MCU movies have done that already, reinventing or combining characters.