Movie: Captain Marvel

The People: Bea, maybe you need to be less wordy with your reviews. We get it, you love Marvel, but –

Me: HAVE A 2,000-WORD CAPTAIN MARVEL REVIEW.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

General review

As a movie, Captain Marvel successfully capitalizes on its advantages: the MCU’s popularity, the immense level of universe-building that has happened over the past decade, and the social context (i.e., the era of Trump and the #MeToo movement) in which her film is being released -- all without sacrificing her unique characteristics, instead using its advantages to enrich her narrative. She’s the first of many things in the MCU, and while that adds a certain pressure on her every move and the film’s every beat, Carol/Brie manages to use that pressure to her advantage.

I thought the movie was able to strike the important delicate balance between Past Carol and Present Carol without sacrificing storytelling and empathy with the character. The commentary on war and the refugee crisis and feminism enriches not only the plot (it provides some of the best twists!) within the movie but also provides good social commentary, as pretty much every Marvel movie has.

Overall, I thought this movie was thoughtful, emotional, and much quieter than the usual Marvel fare. That said, it still had a bad-ass fight sequence at the end and that patented Marvel humor, thanks largely to the chemistry between Sam Jackson and Brie Larson. It said a lot that the loudest scene in the movie (Carol busting through Ronan’s fleet) and the quietest scenes (Carol getting back up after falling, Carol talking to Maria, to name a few) all affected me with the same amount of depth. I love that.

Striking a balance

The movie is unique in the context of MCU in that it actually shows us two origin stories: one that already happened (Carol getting her powers), and one that happens during the movie (Carol regaining her memories).

As such, there was a delicate balance that needed to be struck between (1) keeping the audience in Carol’s point-of-view in terms of struggling with the disjointed memories of her past and (2) being able to build up the relationships she had with people that you needed to be able to buy into. I think the movie did well enough here, and it helps that Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau did such a fantastic job in her interactions with Carol.

Still, I did think the film had some issues in telling (and not showing) some of the narrative. I don't that I personally would have stuck with a verbal narrative in that scene where Maria retells the story of the crash. I see its value in showing us prolonged and sincere interactions between Carol and Maria, but it might take some getting used to for an audience expecting a funny action flick. Overall though, I actually like that they chose to just let the emotions of the scene play out instead of diluting it with a joke (though, yeah, that still happened sometimes, haha).

In that sense, a pretty difficult balance had to be struck in Carol’s characterization in the movie. She wasn’t completely the Carol we saw in the flashbacks, and she doesn’t stay stagnant as the Carol who doesn’t know who she is. She’s finding her footing between the two chapters of her life, so what we get is the Carol that learns to reconcile who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be from now on. And what a great thing it is a witness!

For comparison, other out-of-time MCU characters struggled with this but in, I would argue, a more passive fashion. Steve Rogers/Captain America struggled with being a man out of time and reconciling who he was (1) pre-serum, (2) post-serum, and (3) post-ice. However, and I’ve said this before, he ends up becoming something of a passive character to reacts to external stimuli rather than being internally driven. In addition, Bucky struggles with being The First Avenger!Bucky, The Winter Soldier!Bucky, and Present Day!Bucky, but has even less characterization to go off of (as it is, most of Bucky’s present-day characterization is built largely on Sebastian Stan’s puppy dog eyes and not on any significant plot points, dialogue, or external relationships). In this sense, I think the movie did comparatively well in showing that Carol is a woman of action and agency.

Larger political narrative

One thing I love about pop culture is how it ties in with larger political narratives in real life, and this is particularly true for the MCU: from Iron Man 1's commentary on war profiteering, Captain America 2's commentary on government surveillance, Civil War's commentary on accountability and oversight, and Infinity War's commentary, however flawed, on overpopulation. There were two political narratives in particular that struck me in Captain Marvel: (1) how the world views refugees and (2) feminism.

Refugees and war

I’m generally familiar with comics and how Skrulls are viewed there, so it was nice to see people's expectations of the Skrull plot being turned on its head. Everyone expected the Secret Invasion arc to follow this movie; instead we get what we expect in the beginning – information about Skrulls being evil – and then we see it being totally debunked in the second half of the movie. In a roundabout way, especially for fans of the comics, we’re shown what it’s like to buy into a pre-presented ideology and then get turned around when new evidence is shown. It’s like the Mandarin twist in Iron Man 3 done right. Oddly, even in the beginning, when Yon-Rogg and the Supreme Intelligence were talking about Skrulls, I found myself thinking that this kind of speech wouldn’t work on me in real life because it sounds pretty strongly like propaganda. I felt pretty vindicated when it turned out that it was.

The idea that Skrulls are refugees seeking a home and that they’re seen as a threat because they won’t submit to the Kree is as direct a metaphor as you can get from the current political climate, especially in the US and Europe. I like the message in here of acceptance, tolerance, and pacification.

Feminism

In as much as there was a political commentary on this end, however, Captain Marvel – by the mere nature of her character – is herself an icon of feminism. On one hand, her past self, as we see in the (somewhat heavy-handed, haha) flashbacks, experienced sexism firsthand even when she was a child. Still, having had her memories erased, she bears very little baggage over this issue. When she’s catcalled by a biker outside an Internet café, she didn’t seem to take any special offense and just took his motorcycle because it was convenient. There are undertones of explicit feminism here and there with Rambeau talking about their time in the Air Force, but I thought a lot of it was positively integrated as seamlessly as possible: Anette Benning being the Kree scientist and the one Carol admired most, the strong friendship between Maria and Carol, and even Carol’s relationship with Maria’s daughter Monica. Every interaction between these characters was used to build each other up, never to tear each other down. In fact, the only time it was to tear each other down, it involved Mar-Vell’s likeness being used by the Supreme Intelligence.

More significantly, the movie tackles the age-old stereotype that women can’t control their emotions by addressing the crux of the matter: why are emotions seen as detrimental in the first place? Under Yon-Rogg, Carol is told to control her emotions and is presented with the false dichotomy of sound judgment versus emotions. In the end, her embracing her emotions – rage at Yon-Rogg’s deception, determination to finishing what Mar-Vell started, and certainty in and of herself – that allows her to break free of Kree control. The climax of the movie doesn’t happen when she blasts through the Kree spaceship; it happens when she fights the battle within her mind and fights back against the Supreme Intelligence. Take that, false dichotomy!

Beyond that, this puts into light that Carol is the only Marvel hero whose external conflict is that she’s being held back and she has to break free. I love that the climax shows how she takes full agency over her powers, literally empowering herself. Oh my god. And this is followed by one of the most fun superhero movie fights set to I’m Just a Girl, and a whole sequence of Carol showing off all of her powers, literally drilling a hole through a Kree battleship, and fully scaring the daylights out of Ronan the Accuser. When she blasts Yon-Rogg and says that she doesn’t owe him anything, it was like I was having an out-of-body experience and fully reaching self-actualization for a few minutes. You can probably tell, I really enjoyed this movie.

Championing humanity

In the end, it is Carol’s humanity – as much as it is her femininity – that is championed. In the montage (which made me cry) where she stands up every time she’s put down, she declares that she is human. Maria Rambeau says it best: Carol was powerful long before she could shoot photon blasts out of her fists. In her struggle to realize her identity, Carol finds that it is not her power which defines her, but what she does with the power and who she helps: it is her humanity that defines her.

The movie also makes use of humanity as its charm point. Fury gets soft at the sight of cute kitty*, the Skrulls are as funny in the end as they were menacing at the beginning, and Carol herself, with and despite her power, is just another person trying to navigate through life.

Really, the importance of humanity is a pretty good main thesis for what makes the MCU itself work so well. They humanize heroes and show the audience, who are hungry for inspiration and motivation, that anyone can be a hero, superpowers and super weapons be damned.

Links to a larger universe

As I said, Captain Marvel doesn’t shy away at all from capitalizing on the MCU’s success and a decade of universe-building. While it stands well enough on its own (I watched it with a friend who's seen... maybe about half or less of the MCU movies, but she absolutely loved Captain Marvel), it also ties up a lot of the “loose” (so to speak!) ends and gives a nice glimpse into the earlier workings of the universe that was already so well-established when it first came out.

From tinier details like how Fury’s eye got blind, or how Coulson and Fury’s working relationship got built, to the draft Word document of The Avengers Initiative, to bigger things like the history of the Tesseract and the role of the Kree in galactic history, this movie touches base with a lot of the peripheral details of other MCU movies. On one hand, I personally enjoy these things because it builds a more grounded cinematic universe, but on the other, it runs the risk of alienating some viewers by prioritizing others. However, I do think that Marvel is big enough now that they can afford to do this without losing profit. People will continue to flock to this movie, and I’ve known moms who couldn’t understand Infinity War who ended up wanting to re-watch the whole series of MCU movies to gain a better understanding of what was happening.

For me, as a person who’s – safe to say – pretty invested in this universe, a little thing that’s been happening for the last few movies is that I end up spoiling myself for some twists because of weird knowledge. For example, in Civil War, I knew that the year that first flashed in the beginning was the year Howard and Maria Stark were murdered, so I knew going in that that was going to be a plot point. Because of this, the backstory of the Winter Soldiers being created, though I bought into it for a while, didn’t have as much impact on me when it was revealed to be a red herring. When that happened, I was just worried about how Steve and Tony were going to fight it out.

Similarly, when I read Pegasus on Mar-Vell’s nametag, I knew that that was the SHIELD project that involved the Tesseract (as it was in one of the scenes shown at the beginning of Avengers 1). So when the Tesseract was revealed to be involved, I gasped along with everyone else in the theater, but I also already knew it would be involved somewhere along the way.

Still, I think the payoff of this immense and unprecedented universe-building is best exemplified by the first post-credits scene featuring a cutaway from Endgame. When a bearded Steve Rogers showed up on the screen, you could hear people quietly screaming. When Natasha turns around and comes face-to-face with Carol, people full-on exploded in shouts and claps. That’s the kind of emotion and strong reaction you can only really get when you have a decade's worth of build-up. I love everything about the payoff here, and knowing that Carol holds the power of an engine that acted like the Tesseract really, really opens up the possibilities of how Endgame is going to resolve this arc of the MCU.