What the past 20 Marvel movies have taught me is that a hero has to be weak at some points in order to be strong. This is a major theme that is completely overlooked in this movie in favor of portraying Captain Marvel as a strong woman to please feminists. It was a very mediocre superhero movie that happens to star a female hero, and because of this, the directors and producers decided to overlook some important details in regards to the rest of the franchise in order to make the female hero unnecessarily strong. They never did this with the male heroes, because they didn’t have the same pressure to make them invincible as they did with this movie.
Captain Marvel is the twenty-first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and the first this year. Last year, the Universe saw hit movies like Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Ant-Man and the Wasp, but Marvel is entering the new year with one of the most mediocre movies the studio has ever released. This movie is decent if you are a casual moviegoer in the mood for some comic book action. If you have seen as many Marvel films as I have, this ranks pretty low on the list, even when just ranking origin stories.
The film stars Brie Larson as Carol Danvers (the alias of Captain Marvel) and follows her origin story and how she becomes the all-powerful Captain Marvel. Through a series of semi-unfortunate, confusing, and mindless events, she ends up reaching her full potential in a truly cliché and superhero-esque fashion. It was directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who has only directed indie, film-festival movies before. They did a good job on the transition to a multi-million dollar movie, but it still fell flat overall.
The screenplay is what usually makes or breaks a film, and in this case, it shattered it. The lines were dull, and they were delivered by an emotionless Brie Larson and an over-enthusiastic and comfortable Samuel L. Jackson. Brie Larson attempted to play Carol Danvers as a witty and sarcastic young woman, but she ended up coming across as arrogant and a little rude. Her character didn’t go through much development throughout the film. She started as a hero and ended as a hero, with a few little blips in between. As so perfectly stated in the trailer, she started out as a “noble warrior hero,” and ended as Captain Marvel, who is a noble warrior hero.
Jude Law and Ben Mendelsohn played supporting roles brilliantly, and it almost made me sad that we didn’t get to see them more often.
The first half of the movie was bogged down with exposition and confusing flashbacks and time changes. It was slow and more than a little dull. Some of the scenes were trying so hard to be dramatic and serious that they just ended up being funny. The second act was considerably lighter and more fun to watch, especially her interaction with Nick Fury. He has appeared several times before in the MCU as the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (a super-secret government organization), and this gives the viewer more details about his life before the Avengers. In this way, it is not only Captain Marvel’s origin story, but it is also Nick Fury’s. Because of this, there are several callbacks and references to previous occurrences in the MCU that someone who has not seen at least the first two Avengers movies could never understand in full.
By the last half of the film when Captain Marvel was fighting all the bad guys in what was supposed to be the most critical and exciting sequence of the whole movie, it got terribly boring. Not because of the visuals, which were gorgeous, but because she is such an overpowered character that there are no stakes in the fight. All of the skirmishes were of Carol Danvers blasting or punching a faceless enemy, and after a while, I wished that she wasn’t as strong as she was. A strong hero is good, but unlike Captain America, Iron Man, or even Thor, she didn’t get beaten up as Captain Marvel before assuming her full potential. All of the other heroes have experienced their weaknesses, and it seems like the audience is getting cheated out of one from Carol Danvers.
