Captain Marvel Discussion - Spoilers Within

Going Higher, Further, Faster

Previously, I said that 'what this movie says is better than how it says it,' and I want to give that statement it's proper evaluation. But that requires a separate post, a deeper dive into the film itself.

Ultimately, I think this a good, fun movie with the potential to be an exceptional movie. It's not without its problems, which I will get to, but I think it's positives genuinely shine. The casting is all fantastic. I don't how the whole 'Brie Larson has the chemistry of a wooden block' thing caught on, but it's severely misplaced. Brie as Carol carries such swagger and cockiness, and she plays extremely well off of Samuel L. Jackson and Lashana Lynch. The performances are never the problem in this movie, nor is the message. If anything, the themes of the movie never really go far enough. And that's the core of my general problem with this movie.

Marvel has this weird problem. The MCU is immensely successful, and it makes millions with every release. Everything they put out is a sure-fire box office win. Yet, despite of that guaranteed success, the MCU is continually afraid to really branch out. We saw this previously with Doctor Strange, where despite a few glimpses into the genuinely weird, the movie mostly relies on familiar Marvel tropes and arcs, often restricting the characters' movesets to 'uses magic to create a physical weapon.' And Captain Marvel has an innate similar fear of taking risks.

The initial trailers for this movie promised something more akin to a character drama than a Marvel romp. There was a focus on flashbacks, of exploring the past of Carol Danvers. The directors were known for their character work. Privately, I had a hope that Marvel was going to do something new. It looked vaguely Nolan-esque, like Marvel doing Memento or something. Ultimately, however, those flashbacks were mere window-dressing to typical Marvel beats. As I said in my broader review, this movie gestures towards being an amnesia thriller but also wants to be a family-friendly action film, and it never really finds a merging point between the two. By not doubling down on either genre, the film sits in a lukewarm hodgepodge in the middle. The movie wants to be a character exploration, but it is too hamstrung by its structure to make its points. Which is a shame, because its points are really good.

At its core, this is a movie about Carol Danvers rising from a system of oppression and abuse, and finding her identity. She rejects the identity that the structure forged for her, the ‘Vers’ identity, and finds her true self. From front to back this is a movie about identities and how we define them, and about us being more than what we seem. There’s a woman who has lived a double life, unsure where her truth lies. There’s a society that plays nice but hides dark secrets. The society is led by a ‘Supreme Intelligence’ who changes form based on who it’s talking to. There’s a mentor who’s secretly an alien. There’s a cat who’s secretly an alien. There’s a race of shape-shifters. The plot pivots on Danvers discovering herself and what she stands for. And yet a lot of people have left this movie not understanding Danvers or her motivations. That seems like a pretty fundamental flaw of the film, especially when her arc is as impactful as it is.

So, who is Carol Danvers?

Danvers, in the movie, is a character whose history is defined by struggle. She has fought every inch of her way forward. Her list of friends seems to be short, but those friendships are deep. She’s almost arrogantly focused, but that focus brings her results. It brings her into the Air Force, and eventually into space. She’s captured by the Kree, who brainwash her and try to inhibit her powers. (The Kree inhibitor device is possibly the weakest plot point in the movie. It’s so obviously an inhibitor device from the beginning of the movie. But the Kree are pretty obvious bad guys as a whole, so this is just par for the course.) She spends a vague amount of time with the Kree, who lie to her and do everything in her power to keep her submissive. They accuse her of being overly emotional and unable to keep herself in check. Yon-Rogg puts up a front of rooting for her in public but undermines her in private. He is always clearly the authority. This is all standard abusive behaviour. Danvers has her identity ripped from her and is molded into whatever it is Yon-Rogg and the Kree desire. They turn her into someone who they always goad into doing ‘better,’ into ‘proving herself.’ She stays stuck in this system until she is captured by the Skrulls, who, digging into her memories, uncover something else below the surface. With her memories jarred loose, Danvers breaks out and crashes into Earth, confused. She follows her standard operating procedure and pursues the Skrulls on the planet, aided by Fury. Their search for her past and the nebulous ‘Light-Speed Engine’ leads them to Danvers’ childhood friend Maria Rambeau, who forces Danvers to come to terms with herself. She connects with the past she has lost and rejects the ‘Vers’ identity the Kree have crafted for her. Danvers and her friends find a new colour for her suit, showing that her true colours have now come to light. She confronts her Kree ‘friends’ directly. Both the Supreme Intelligence and Yon-Rogg try to lock her back into the cycle of abuse, but she rises above both. Against the Supreme Intelligence, she breaks free of the boundaries that have been placed upon her and takes off the inhibitor. Yon-Rogg tries to lock Danvers back in the same cycle; knowing full well he can’t take her in a straight fight, he tries to get her to ‘prove herself,’ keying back into his well-worn technique, but this time she doesn’t take it. She has found security in herself, far from Yon-Rogg’s opinions. This should be a compelling arc. So, what is missing? Why don’t people connect to her?

The Problems:

On one level, I think a lot of people don’t get this movie because they simply haven’t seen the toll abusive and oppressive systems take on a person, but I’m not comfortable saying that’s the entire problem. As I’ve said before, I do think a lot rests on this movie simply not going far enough. The film punches, but it never winds up, and as a result, a lot of people have missed the impact that those punches ought to have had. In the end, we have a montage of Carol Danvers standing up through her history, showing she is someone who will not be kept down – but because we haven’t really developed those flashbacks as a thread, the montage is lacking a sense of resolution. This problem is echoed throughout the movie. The fact that Lawson, Danvers’ old mentor, is actually Mar-Vell should be a sizable twist, but the movie never develops Danvers’ connection with Lawson, and so the reveal doesn’t affect anything. Even Goose just sort of shows up, we don’t know if there’s any particular reason he sticks around or if he just senses the plot. The need for a ‘Light-Speed Engine’ is never really explained, and the fact that the Engine is based off the Tesseract (or is the Tesseract?) is sort of brushed off. Not to mention it’s never really clear how much Danvers remembers of herself at any point in time, making it hard to follow her arc closely. She never really fights for her past, either, she never has a Rejection of the Call moment, she just says ‘huh, yeah, I guess I’m from Earth. Weird.’ And as a result, we never really see the chains of abuse coming undone, she just suddenly is willing to turn against the life she has known. And that’s problematic. That should be the choice of the movie, the defining piece of her character, and I don’t recall it ever being presented as a pinnacle moment. Without any real build-up or fanfare, Carol Danvers’ arc winds up falling flat for a lot of audiences who aren’t looking for it.

There are a few related mistakes that seem glaring to me. In this movie where two of our antagonists are shift-shapers of some kind (the Skrulls and the Supreme Intelligence) and where the core of the movie is our protagonist’s rejection of self, we never see a mirror match between Danvers and Vers? Maybe a show-down in the Supreme Intelligence chamber where the Supreme Intelligence takes the form of Vers with the green and black suit? Like, I get it’s a cliché, but sometimes it’s a good cliché and this seems like the warranted place for it. Or there’s a Skrull faction who’s actually villainous? Maybe one working with the Kree to orchestrate the war? So, Danvers stumbles upon a Skrull dressed as Vers? (Broadly, I don’t like the interpretation that all the Skrulls are just nice deadbeat dads. Let some Skrulls be evil. And let the Kreee be morally ambiguous because with Ronan and Korath’s presence there’s set up for a split in the Kree factions that… never happens. Missed opportunities.) Speaking of identity, Nick Fury losing his eye to Goose is bad. It’s funny, but it’s bad, because his whole character apparently revolves on this moment of losing trust, and rather than utilize your shape-shifting bad guys, you get a joke. Honestly, the fact that this movie is so intrinsically about identity and yet the Skrulls are wasted is a shame. I like the twist with them, but I think it robs the movie of a lot of potential.

And then, yeah, the flashbacks need to be worked in more. They should have been an integral part of the plot and the mystery. The scene of Danvers at the bar, watching it replay in her head, is good. More of that. More of her chasing her steps and less ‘90s references just for the sake of references. This movie never feels like it takes place in the ’90s, it just has good ‘90s gags. By genuinely having Danvers pursuing her past, you can fix that as well. You fix the disconnect with her backstory and her disconnect with her shift in character. You can see the stiff, less emotional Vers contrasted with the cocky young Danvers. Maybe she picks out the NIN shirt because she recognizes it on herself, not just because it’s the first thing she sees. Every hit she takes can be punctuated by the weight of her past coming against her. Danvers isn’t physically weak, but she is emotionally scarred, and that needs to be played up to understand who she is. Her current wry headstrong energy isn’t just the directors saying, ‘look she’s a strong woman,’ it’s an attitude she’s developed through surviving and coming out of all the emotional trauma in her life. She’s able to mask her weakness with her strength. She should come off a lot like Thor in Infinity War, actually; an arrogance covering deep wounds. But the film never plays into her background and so it never plays into those wounds, and so people see her as just cocky and bland. It’s like trying to understand Tony Stark without knowing about Howard or trying to understand Steve Rogers without knowing him pre-serum. Of course it falls flat for some audiences. I don’t think this movie needed to be more of a character exploration because I think that would be fun, I think it needed that because that’s what the movie is, it just never lives up to it.

I honestly really enjoyed this movie. I think the extent to which it has been bashed has been severely overblown, and I do think there is a background of misunderstanding behind a lot of that criticism. But the movie does have its flaws, and in those flaws, it doesn’t go deep enough to help audiences understand. In its satisfaction with being a fun Marvel flick, it misses the deeper messages latent within its themes. Watching Carol Danvers fly around in space and beat stuff up is fun, but without the intimate exploration of her painful past, seeing her rise up like a phoenix isn’t satisfying. And that’s where the movie falters.