YouTube has a way of recommending videos that don't really relate to the ones you normally watch, and then bombarding you with videos that DO relate to those recommendations after you watch them. In my case, this meant crossing paths with one video about Captain Marvel star Brie Larson's snarky comments on the excess of "white dude" film critics and how she wants to use Captain Marvel as her form of activism...and then watching dozens of other videos about that, the audience censorship on Rotten Tomatoes for Captain Marvel, Disney's alleged string-pulling to boost the film's box office numbers and review ratings, and how they're trying to hold this "glass-ceiling-shattering" film so high that feminist activists can't see Aliens, The Terminator, Underworld, Resident Evil, The Hunger Games, Wonder Woman, or Alita: Battle Angel in its shadow. And this went on for about a month.
Well, in the end, I got invited to a ten-year-old's birthday party to go see the movie, so I caved.
So what do I think of Captain Marvel now that I have seen it?
I don't know if it was intended, but I do think that setting this movie in the 1990's helps to make the whole don't-let-white-dudes-hold-you-down angle feel less ham-fisted. It's a lot more believable, though still debatable, that male air force pilots would be that discriminant against a female pilot back then, as opposed to today. The film doesn't show as many moments of that discrimination as you might think, but there are a few, plus some pretty blatant song choices like No Doubt's "I'm Just A Girl" and one cringeworthy line about how a responsible mother character needs to go along on a potential suicide mission in order to set a better example for her daughter. Although, I don't seem to recall the "I'm kinda done with you telling me what I can't do," line from the teaser trailer being said in the final film.
So yeah, the winks and nods at social justice gender politics throughout the movie can be a bit grating, but I don't think they're so prevalent that they overpower the story.
The story itself is pretty standard. It's an action mystery where Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Carol Danvers) gets stranded on Earth in the 90's and tries to stop aliens from invading it while also trying to remember her past. In Marvel terms, it's like a cross between the first Thor film and Howard the Duck if it starred Wolverine. There's a decent theme of paranoia and not being able to trust people at face value throughout the film, illustrated best by the shape-shifting aliens, and also one big twist that fans of the comics might not expect. Also, I did laugh at the end of the final showdown for basically giving the finger to one really cliched action movie trope. Overall, the story is passable, but it feels more like something you'd see in Phase One of the MCU rather than something you'd see near the end of Phase Three. It just doesn't have the same sharp edge to it that the franchise has evolved since 2008.
And speaking of 2008, it's worth mentioning that Captain Marvel contradicts a few things that were previously established in the MCU. One example is how Fury and Coulson refer to their organization as S.H.I.E.L.D. despite not coming up with that acronym until the end of the first Iron Man a decade later. It's a minor nitpick, but given how good the MCU seemed to be about avoiding those errors until now, I find it telling of how differently the studio approached this film's production.
I also agree with the criticisms that Carol just rising above something that was holding her down without really coming to terms with any of her personal flaws or mistakes is a pretty big narrative misfire. I'm actually curious to see her in Endgame just to see if the Russos course-correct this by making her more reflective.
Lashana Lynch as Carol's friend Maria Rambeau and Ben Mendelsohn as the villain Talos also do surprisingly good jobs in their roles. Jude Law gives his usual decent performance, and it's nice to see Clark Gregg make his big-screen comeback as Agent Coulson. The only weak link, surprisingly, was Annette Bening as Dr. Mar-Vell. I don't know how, but this movie managed to make a four-time Oscar nominee like her sound like she didn't read the script until an hour before the cameras started rolling.
As for Brie Larson...well...putting aside the way she comes across in real life, I didn't hate her performance, but I didn't like it enough either. She has a lot of good moments, especially in her scenes with Samuel L. Jackson, but I don't think she has enough sincere ones. You can tell Marvel Studios is trying to give her a combination of Tony Stark's humor and Steve Rogers's stoicism, and that makes sense since she's supposed to take their place as the face of the MCU after Endgame. However, Stark and Rogers used those traits largely as fronts, as defense mechanisms to help them cope with their situations. In private moments, we saw that they were more vulnerable, genuine, flawed people. They were fully realized characters, relatable characters, and so were heroines like Black Widow, Gamora, and Scarlet Witch. What character flaws does Carol Danvers have? The only one I can recall the movie giving is that she's overemotional, but she hardly ever comes across that way. We get a flashback where she discovers that aliens exist when they shoot down her fighter jet, her passenger also turns out to be an alien and then dies from the crash, and she discovers from someone holding her at gunpoint that the fate of an entire race is suddenly in her hands; I don't think her facial expression or tone of voice changes once.
Even in those private moments where the protagonist is supposed to drop their facade, she's still either emotionally distant, snarky, or angry. We never get a satisfactory sense of humanity from her performance because the film seems afraid to make her vulnerable. I don't know if the fault lies with the actor, the director, or just the script again, but it doesn't make me connect with the character enough to really want to see her succeed.
I'm not sure why Marvel Studios is trying so hard to sell us on Captain Marvel. Maybe they're scrambling to outdo Wonder Woman since the DC Extended Universe made a female-led superhero film before they did and that gave DC some competitive traction. Maybe they're also trying to make up for the way they've handled their female characters in the past, such as not bothering to release any Black Widow action figures when Avengers: Age of Ultron came out. That's all just speculation on my part, though. One thing I can say for sure is that Captain Marvel is only groundbreaking in the scope of the MCU itself.
The irony is that looking back on all the drama surrounding this film's marketing, I actually think less may have been more. It's the end of the MCU's Phase Three; the studio doesn't have to work that hard to get viewers into the theaters anymore. There's barely been any advertisement for Endgame, but everyone's rearing to go see that. Heck, the setup for Captain Marvel in Avengers: Infinity War was such a morale booster after that cliffhanger ending that ticket pre-sales for this film were once through the roof. Had Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige and even Brie Larson just taken a step back and let their movie sell itself, I think it would have fared much better. Some people probably still would have complained about the gender politics in the movie afterwards, but most of us would have gone into it more positively.
At the end of the day, I think that Captain Marvel on its own merits is just an average Marvel movie -- and that's all she wrote.
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