Well if the incessant Comic Book Resources and Screen Rant articles hadn't alerted you already, "Captain Marvel" has been released finally to an audience already so polarized their immediate vicinity has become an officially protected penguin habitat. Why you may ask? Well we can thank Brie Larson, the WOMAN lead, for that. And I put the word WOMAN in all-caps because good lord, I don't know about you but I've never ever seen a woman in the lead role for an action film so it pays to emphasize this fact. Which, in all fairness to Brie Larson, is what the ad campaign for this film did.
Because it's not about whether the product itself is any good, it's about how many people you can convince you don't hate women.
Speaking of the product (Full Disclosure: I have not read any of the comics), I'm going to borrow an expression from a friend of mine who attended the screening with me, as I feel it describes it pretty well; "Aggressively Average".
At least one can say that about most of the movie. In fact generally speaking it's so average that one could even wonder what all the fuss was about; not necessarily from those who hyped the movie but from those who were all but ready to piss on it from a great height. I honestly had trouble feeling anything for it throughout my viewing other than a few moments where my hands gripped the armrests of my cinema seat in spasms of pure uncut cringe. In fact those moments are probably what kept me awake.
In spoiler free summary; it's formulaic, the story has very little weight or lasting effect in terms of the MCU, those who telegraphed Brie Larson's performance being akin to a corpse on marionette strings just by watching the trailer were directly on the money and the aforementioned cringeworthy moments of horrendous propaganda were nowhere near funny enough for me to even recommend it as a "so bad it's good" affair. In fact I'd hazard to say that you probably wouldn't even need to see it in order to understand the upcoming "Avengers: Endgame" film.
As for the moments of horrendous propaganda, well....
Look, there's nothing wrong with having a message in your film as long as you have the skill and nuance of mind to put it across without making your product ultimately come off didactic or unsubtle. The people who made Captain Marvel do not have this ability. Very early on we are privy to a set of scenes which honestly would not be out of place in a feminist ad campaign. Carol Danvers taking on some military obstacle course as a group of chortling men heckle her from below, a scene where her father chastises her as a young girl after she careens off of a go cart track (right after ignoring the advice of a boy on the track to "slow down" as she comes up to a turn - insert woman driver joke here); seriously there were times where I thought the film hadn't even started yet and Cineworld were showing Gillette's latest marketing travesty. There's even a part later on where a biker dude randomly tells her to smile and we all know THAT'S a hate crime akin to a man asking for your phone number.
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| Fake news, you never smile. |
It can also be seen in the way that the film treats characters like Nick Fury, turning him into an outright joke of a character. I get it, he's younger in this film, not yet the director of S.H.I.E.L.D and as such less experienced, but he honestly comes off as a totally different character and ends up doing very little. This, I'm afraid is a hallmark of this kind of Mary-Sue-centric storytelling. Don't believe me? There's one particularly hilarious moment when Danvers sends Fury out of the room so she can sit and have a chat with her friend, Marie Rambeau (mother of Monica Rambeau who was actually the SECOND Captain Marvel way before Carol Danvers, a black woman too - naughty, naughty Brie Larson, deplatforming a WOC like that), just so that the film could pass the fucking Bechdel Test.
I was probably the only one who noticed that but my mind is trained to home in on feminist bullshit like a heat seeking missile. It is my gift and my curse.
Going back to Fury himself and how they turn him into a joke.... the scar over his eye was from a cat scratch.
I'm not kidding.
To be fair, it's an alien cat that proves to be deadly. But it's a cat scratch nonetheless. But I'll give it this, the jokes surrounding the cat are some of the only ones that landed for me. The MCU is often praised for its sense of humor and for the most part this film manages to fuck that up also, and a large part of it comes down to Larson being an extremely humorless actress (and let's face it, probably person). She has two settings; neutral and smug. Either way it inspires anger and/or boredom more than it does mirth. Despite the film's other failings I feel it would have been drastically improved with a different actress. Both performance wise and PR wise.
Ultimately her character has the same problem that Rey from the latest Star Wars movies also has. She starts off awesome and ends godly. She has very little flaws and whatever flaws she does have are negligible, making her unrelatable and a chore to watch. Compare her to, say, Miles Morales in the recent "Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse" film, which I had my problems with, but is a vastly superior film with a vastly superior main character.
As for villains... I can't really say much. The film has one of those "omg they were the bad guys all along" twists that anyone with a functioning frontal lobe can see coming from a hundred miles away. One villain is basically a space SAS commander and the other is the "Supreme Intelligence", the central AI controlling the Kree world, which, I have been informed by my friend, in the comics looks like a giant green gorgon face.
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"... AND I'M GOING TO MAKE MEXICO PAY FOR IT."
"Yes Supreme Intelligence."
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Which is awesome. They don't do this in the film of course but I understand, adaptations need to be made.
So, is this the film that's going to "set the stage" for women leads in superhero movies? Well, aside from the action films with female leads that already exist, we had Wonder Woman before this. Ideally the stage was already set. Women CAN be action heroes. We know this. It's been done. But you see... those movies were not orthodoxy approved. As was proven by Wonder Woman being generally well received by the public and critics but chastised by ideologues for not being feminist enough.
And for the record, I thought Wonder Woman was okay. It's certainly the best of the DC movies. But no one ever talks about it as though it's this groundbreaking event that sets the stage for female fronted action/superhero movies. And yet Captain Marvel - THIS - with it's boring story, unmemorable villain, unrelatable hero and generally fucking insufferable lead actress is the one that's being reflexively defended from hordes of "manbabies" and "fragile males"? The one that Rotten Tomatoes is actively changing aspects of their website and deleting reviews for? THIS?
My prediction is that Captain Marvel will forever be remembered as the Amy Schumer of comic book flicks. Not merely because it similarly got a website to change due to its horrible ratings. But because it wouldn't stop shoving its cunt in our faces.
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| Pic unrelated |
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