Captain Marvel isn’t just a cookie cutter Marvel origin story. It’s focus on autopsy and self knowledge makes it a storyline that is tailor made for a different kind of hero and a different kind of audience. A lot of the villainy of the film has to do with control of female power through gaslighting and other forms of deception. Carol’s recognition of her own power and her conscious moral alignment with the downtrodden is central to the drama of this story.
Captain Marvel is a bit of a slog for the first half of the movie. Vers is amnesiac and a little bit neutered, and the conflict between the Kree and a race of watermelon/chameleon (or “watermeleon”) people manages to be both confusing and yet unoriginal. The story warms up in the second half–the fight scenes are played for laughs. It’s where Brie Larson’s understated swagger and impish braggadocio best fit her physicality. The flashback scene in which the shapeshifters spin through Vers’s memory like an amateur DJ is visually interesting way to tell backstory, because it’s not quite a passive learning experience. There seems like there’s room for an unreliable narrator and some manipulation of people and places and events, and the unsettling commentary overlaid and Vers’s unsettled expression ups the creep-factor.
There are some confusing aspects to the movie and its got a few disappointments. Spoilers.
Confusing: Why is she called Captain Marvel? Do we at any point have foreshadowing that what the one guy finds at the lab is actually why they’ve come? Because everyone looks pretty surprised except Carol, who seems like she’s figured it out. And then the wife’s explanation is equally unsuitable and vague.
Disappointing: the iconic scene from the trailer that you’re hoping is a super cut, Dunkirk-style, of three separate storylines, is, in fact, actually a single moment where three scenes we’ve never witnessed at any other part of the film are spliced together to make for a faux-meaningful moment of the resilience of women/humanity getting back up after they’ve been knocked down. What was so traumatizing on that day at the beach when she was four years old that it’s lodged in her memory at that life-or-death moment in the climax? Why is her strained relationship with her parents so generically bad? Why does no one shoot Carol in the head while she’s being restrained by the AI overlord of the Kree? Also, why does the Kree have an AI overlord and then also that other dude in the hood calling the shots? Where’s the flow chart for this organization?
I’m not entirely certain that this film would hold up to multiple viewings. It seems like the major twist and a lot of the gags are visual jokes that rely on an unexpected component of identity being shifted. That being said, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from finding out. I’ll see you on the other end of my extended break in Europe. Have a lovely March!
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