Captain
Marvel (2019): Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck,
Geneva Robertson-Dworet, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Starring:
Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Jude Law, Gemma
Chan, Lee Pace, Djimon Hounsou, Annette Bening, and Clark Gregg. Running
Time: 124 minutes. Based on the
comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, and Roy Thomas.
Rating:
3/4
At
long last, the women are running the show in a Marvel movie. The past few years have finally seen some
major barriers broken down regarding representation in major tentpole blockbusters,
thanks especially to Wonder Woman and
Black Panther, though Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse deserves
to be considered on that same plane. Now
Marvel has gotten into the game of letting a lady lead the way with Captain Marvel, the big prequel film
setting up the character that, we’ve been led to assume, will play a key role
in the next Avengers movie.
This
movie starts in medias res, as “Vers” (real name, we eventually learn, is Carol
Danvers) is introduced to us as a soldier of the Kree, being trained by
Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) to control her seemingly remarkable powers. She has total amnesia regarding her past, but
it’s pretty clear she’s a human who had a strange run-in with the Kree of some
sort. This only starts being revealed to
us after a mission against the Kree’s sworn enemy, the Skrulls, goes awry, and
she finds herself captured and under a sort of memory check at the hands of her
captors, triggering further flashbacks of who she was before the Kree found
her.
She
breaks out in time to make it to the surface of the Earth, circa the early 90’s,
where she soon runs into a digitally-youthized Sam Jackson- the effect is
actually quite good, better than I expected- who she enlists in finding out
where the surviving Skrulls are hiding and what, exactly, they were after in
the first place.
As
far as the story and narrative are concerned, there is nothing groundbreaking
here. Obviously, not everything is at it
seems to be in the beginning, and there are a few twists and turns where some
perceived villains are actually good and vice versa. In the main, then this falls more into the
middling-tier of most Marvel films; perfectly well-made and nice to watch, but
nothing in the bare narrative structure to make it really stand out from the
pack. If this had not had the
distinction of being “The First Female Lead” of the MCU, and simply been about
another white dude, it would have ended up rather forgettable, like Ironman 3, Ant-Man, or Doctor Strange.
Thankfully,
it does have that “first” factor in its favor, and even more beneficially, it’s
Brie Larson in the title role, and she is clearly having a blast. There is a confidence and swagger that she is
able to effortlessly project with every smirk, every twist of her head, every
glance. None of it is explained or
excused or given a reason for being- it would have been all too easy to connect
her strengths as being direct results of the traumatic amnesia she suffered
under for 6 years- but the film doesn’t go that route. Carol is who she is and makes no bones about it,
and is all the better for it.
Larson
has an especially enjoyable chemistry with Jackson, finally getting to have
some fun with the Fury role, and Lashana Lynch is damn near hypnotic as a
friend from her past who helps her discover the truth about who she was and
what, exactly, happened to her. I could
watch a whole set of movies devoted to just these three characters; that’s how
strong their scenes are, which contain the film’s beating heart.
The
lack of a real threat amongst any of the villain characters, real or perceived,
does still drag the film down a bit; there is plenty of Prequel Syndrome to be
found here. I also can’t say that there
is much in the action to really stick in the mind- again, like with the vast
majority of the MCU canon, the action is mostly-serviceable in the moment, but
hardly sticks around afterwards, unlike the occasionally dynamic sequences we
got in the previous few movies. No
matter. This was a fun movie and a great
experience, and I wholly recommend seeing it in theaters.
-Noah Franc
No comments:
Post a Comment