Captain Marvel’s biggest battle is fighting audience superhero fatigue
Captain Marvel is here! That’s right, one of the most powerful characters from the pages of Marvel comics and the frontrunner to defeat Thanos in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame has finally arrived in the MCU. And accompanying her on this cinematic journey are whiny fanboys bitching about feminism, female social commentators applauding representation, and a multi-billion-dollar franchise that turned Disney into the overlord of entertainment. So, great conditions to enjoy a popcorn superhero movie, right?
Thankfully, Captain Marvel is up to the standards we’ve come to expect from an MCU origin story with strong visuals and that spared-no-expense production value you get from a quality film of this size. It looks good, and as we learned from the CGI mess that was Justice League, looking good can make a big difference in how a film feels to audiences.
Brie Larson is Carol Danvers, or just Vers as she’s known for most of the film. Formerly a test pilot on earth, she’s now living in space with the Kree (who you might remember from Guardians of the Galaxy) and fighting crime with supercharged photon blasts she acquired six years earlier in an accident that left her memory hazy. Using the “I don’t remember my past” angle lets the film take us with her as she starts solving the mystery of her past, though it’s not as exciting as you might hope because the origin of her powers is pretty obvious.
As a result of an early action sequence, Vers crash lands through the roof of a Blockbuster Video on earth in the 1990s before quickly meeting up with a young, digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson. The de-aging is good enough to never be distracting, though at first, it feels a little off seeing Nick Fury with hair and both eyes.
Vers open Fury’s eyes (both of them) to a long-waged war between the Kree and the Skrulls, shape-shifting green aliens who are masters of deceit because they can transform into anyone right down to the DNA. For your average cop or government guy, this revelation might be shocking, but not to Fury. He’s been in S.H.I.E.L.D. long enough to jump on board and agree to help his otherworldly visitor.
From there, action ensues, secrets are revealed, there are betrayals, there are quips, there are explosions, and all the rest of the big-budget stuff we’ve come to expect from Marvel movies.
We’re more than 20 movies deep in the MCU at this point, and I’ve got to be honest, I’m starting to feel a little bit of superhero fatigue. It’s not that superhero movies are bad, at least when we’re talking about Marvel movies, it’s just that we’ve seen these comic book heroes save the world so many times by now that it can start to feel a little routine and generic.
This is doubly true when it comes to origin stories, which all have to follow a pretty traditional format: hero gets powers, hero struggles with how to use those powers for the forces of good, hero crosses some kind of emotional barrier and learns to own their powers, hero defeats bad guy in big CGI battle, mid-credits teaser for the next movie, lather, rinse, repeat. Origin stories are at a particular disadvantage right now because there’s no way for them to feel as epic as the team-up spectacles of the MCU, especially Infinity War.
And that’s kind of the problem with Captain Marvel. We know where this is going, so getting there is less engaging than we might have hoped it would be. Starting our heroine out with amnesia and having us learn her origin should be fascinating and mysterious, but you can predict most of the twists and turns from a mile away, so it loses a little bit of that excitement. Still, that’s not to say that it’s not fun or that you won’t be engaged at all. It is still a Marvel movie, so perhaps it’s unfair to measure it by the obscenely high standard established by MCU faves like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor: Ragnarok and Infinity War.
Unfortunately, Larson, who is genuinely a fantastic actress, feels a bit flat at times. It’s like they told her to be distant and disaffected because she’s an ultra-powered space warrior, but it sometimes comes off as bored or too passive. Things seem to happen to Captain Marvel more than she makes things happen, and aside from a few smirky lines, she starts to lack an emotional center that we need to really invest in her character. The only scenes that do provide some kind of emotional core are the ones with Carol and her best friend Maria Rambeau, Lashana Lynch giving us a truly likable character we can connect with.
Jackson and Clark Gregg, who is back as Agent Coulson, are fun and entertaining enough, though Ben Mendelsohn easily steals scenes from everyone with the charm he brings to his role as Skrull leader Talos. In fact, in a film that can feel a tad subdued in terms of performances, he often feels like the only one willing to take it to the snarky, entertaining place we’ve come to expect from Marvel movies.
That lack of an emotionally engaging hero is the biggest letdown, in part because we’re used to seeing it in most other Marvel movies, but also because it only fuels the fires of the horrible troll community who has decided this movie will be their hill to die on. By now, you’ve probably heard about salty men launching a targeted attack on Rotten Tomatoes to make the movie look like a bomb before it’s even been released or maybe you’ve seen a social media post from an angry dude complaining that female superheroes are unrealistic because women could never be that powerful—because a boy who gets superpowers when a radioactive spider bites him is ripped right from the headlines of a newspaper. Yes, sadly, Captain Marvel has become another absurdly controversial film for incels and MRA morons to throw a fit about, proving once again that we can’t have nice things without someone launching a hate-filled social media war. Honestly, the whole thing is so commonplace with female or minority-led movies at this point that it hardly even warrants talking about. Just let them throw their tantrums until they tucker themselves out and the non-assholes among us can enjoy a fun movie.
So yes, I’ve still got a little superhero fatigue, and yes, I’m getting really tired of “fan” communities actively rooting against representation for anyone who isn’t a straight white dude, but I still think Captain Marvel is worth checking out. Go see it, not because you’re a feminist (though there’s no reason not to be one) and not because the fate of female superheroes rests on her shoulders, but because it’s a fun Marvel movie that will help get you excited for the next big team-up movie the way all good MCU movies do.
