She Believes

Captain Marvel

starring Brie Larson, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Gemma Chan, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace and Ben Mendelsohn

directed by Anna Boden (It's Kind of a Funny Story and a bunch of prestige TV) and Ryan Fleck (It's Kind of a Funny Story, Half Nelson and a bunch of prestige TV)

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This is not a spoiler warning. Read it or don't read it, either way is OK by me.

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It's 2019, so what kind of a world are we living in? It's the one where harmless film review aggregator sites who never choose to carry my reviews which is TOTALLY FINE by the way and not something I take seriously seeing as I do this ALL FOR THE LOVE OF MY READERSHIP and never for the recognition or validation, have had to take extraordinary steps to alter the way they accept and present information to the public due to an onslaught of poison pills* queering the audience-sourced aggregated numbers ahead of even seeing the movie because it has the audacity to feature a lady person. But it's also the type of year where the president is... well, let's just say on the whole we have bigger problems than the shrill braying of men and their sensitive, sensitive feelings.

Despite being a single father of three boys, I'm not now nor have I ever been a men's rights activist or anything approaching sympathetic to any of it. I think it's important for me to set an example for my male children to treat women with respect by insisting on opening doors for them whether they want us to or not, not sharing any nude photos they'd been sent and making sure they know to tell a woman how cute it is when they try hard at something. Because real feminism is anti-feminism, otherwise you're saying women are too fragile to handle misogyny and erasure.

I'm not sure Captain Marvel counts as a feminist statement film the way maybe parts of Wonder Woman explicitly did. I'm not going to compare the two as I'm pretty sure it's a self-defeating and actual anti-feminist move to insist the only two super hero films to be solely headlined by female heroes should be lined up head to head in order to illuminate the weakness of one or both. Because pitting two women against each other in order to undermine both of them is a Hillary-era move. But whatever problems this film might have, forgetting to emphasize the resilience and resourcefulness of the female protagonist is not one of them.

A better comparison would be the first Guardians of the Galaxy, introducing both more obscure characters and an unfamiliar cosmic setting. That film was such a rousing success because of its focus on the characters of the crew and their bonding. The space stuff is kind of secondary, to the point where the entire population of Xandar they save at the end could be exchanged for any other planet in any galaxy and it would have changed the film 0%. The heavy plot lean in Captain Marvel steals the rousing character bits from us and ends up being a bit cold.

Brie Larson herself is... let down a bit by the writing for her character and some of the direction, I think. She starts the movie as a blank, a cypher of sorts fitting in with her surroundings and her job but fully aware that locked away in her mind is a memory of a life with karaoke and playing pool in a public place. I spent the whole first half of the film just being relieved for her. Imagine never having heard of karaoke as an adult. It's the only utopian fantasy I dare to entertain. If selective memory-wiping technology is ever released by the CIA for public use, that's the first thing I'm signing up to forget. She's such a capable and extraordinary actor, she makes what she's given work to the extent any human could.

There's SO MUCH story to try to tell here. The backdrop is the Kree-Skrull War which is the comics has been going on for like a thousand years, and even in the physical books themselves since 1969. There are expositionary stunts here and there ("...as you well know..."), but that context is always fighting with the fact that the heroine is an amnesiac. With its runtime limited to less than 3 hours, the film is presented with a choice it never satisfactorily makes: Carol Danvers or Galactic War. Instead it kind of flops at both, sometimes in clumsy passing, that makes bits of the film irritating.

But it's never going to be too bad because, like all Marvel films, the casting is so superb. Some of it was easy (Jackson and Gregg, digital face paint be damned), others inspired (Annette Bening in a cool dual role and a great leather jacket) and one a sly commentary meant I think only for me. Ben Mendelsohn has made a career out of being a high-status bad guy in The Dark Knight Rises or Ready Player One. I won't go into detail, but thinking about it since, his role in this is a specific metajoke about typecasting and audience and critical expectation. Plus he gets to be wry and funny, quality he has in spades but we rarely see.

The other stand-out SHOULD have been Lashana Lynch, who makes more than the most out of her limited screen time. But Brie Larson's Carol Danvers is literally hollowed out, a shell of a personality, so much so that when the BIG REVEAL reunion moment happens between the two, SIX YEARS after she presumed her best friend was dead, we get... well, nothing really. We don't have enough invested in either of them for it to mean as much as it should, but Lynch's character doesn't jump up and laugh or scream or cry or run in shrieking terror from the ghost with her friend's face. It's just a couple of lines of dialogue and then the Skrulls show up to be pain in the ass Mission:Impossible villains. The early ones, not the later ones, those are masterpieces.

There is of course intrigue and betrayal and a few swings at tension and humor. Sam Jackson is there as the audience proxy, asking questions through a layer of face CG, but again, he's there as plot fuel and, more cringingly, to force connections between this film and the rest of the Marvel universe that ultimately feels tacked-on, unearned, but necessarily sped up with Avengers: Endgame only about six weeks away.

At the end of course lots of hero-positive things happen, but most intriguingly, we end up with a Superman problem: how do you threaten a creature of near omnipotence? Because by the time we've ingested the end of credits scenes, Captain Marvel is an asteroid made of dynamite and lazers and diamonds and rabies: dangerous to all and nigh invulnerable. It's OK to tear through your enemies like crepe paper when you're trying to pay off an origin story, but good luck going forward. The end of this one even left me disinterested in the idea of the aliens with the pew-pew guns were going to singe my girl's mohawk. They just weren't.

All of that said: I did like it. Then, I liked the Ghostbusters that had just girls in it also, but be kind. We cucks need entertainment too.

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*I call them poison pills because I feel like a lot of today's broken social climate could be fixed if those people had better access to poison pills. But ha, it's America 2019, we know they already do.