movies
Reshaping the
Marvel Universe
THE DOMINANCE OF MALE SUPERHEROES IS
QUESTIONED IN THE SMART, FUN CAPTAIN MARVEL
By Molly Templeton
R
On the one hand, Captain Marvel is on a different
scale than the many-movie Avengers arc. It’s an origin
story, but it’s also about a crisis of identity, and about
how difficult it is to figure yourself out when the people
you trust are lying to you. It’s heavy stuff — about the
consequences of uncritically aligning yourself with dominant
power structures, and about male fear of female power (a
theme also driving Netflix’s Umbrella Academy).
All of this heavy stuff is baked into the foundation of
a movie that’s a joy to watch. Carol has a lot to figure out
about herself and about her two worlds, but she also has a
best friend, fellow pilot Maria (Lashana Lynch); a mentor,
Dr. Lawson (Annette Bening, doing double-duty as an
alien Supreme Intelligence); and a new buddy in the
apparently cat-loving Fury (who’s mellower than the
older Fury of the earlier films — though he does insist
on being called by his last name).
Captain Marvel is about Carol — it’s not about
saving the world, though that happens along
the way. The antagonist, a brilliantly cast Ben
Mendelsohn, is not the problem. Something
much bigger — and subtler — is.
Captain Marvel isn’t perfect — for one
thing, I’d pay good money to replace No
Doubt’s too-on-the-nose “Just a Girl” with
just about any other sly ’90s jam. But it
shouldn’t need to be perfect. It should need
to be good.
Movies that work to reshape what a blockbuster
can be shouldn’t be held to a different standard. If
there’s room in the MCU for the tedious and flat
Ant-Man and the Wasp, there’s more than room
for the powerhouse that is Carol Danvers, who
takes everything her enemies throw at her and
blasts right through it, laughing in delight.
(Broadway Metro)
ight now, in the glow of Captain Marvel’s
excellent debut, it feels like there are as many
articles about the troll response to Captain
Marvel as there are articles about Captain
Marvel.
It’s deeply frustrating, this phenomenon,
and I’d rather not waste time on it except to say
that there is something to be annoyed about as a result of this
movie: the way its smart characterization and lightly subversive
storytelling highlight the weaknesses of so many of the earlier
Marvel Cinematic Universe films. (For the record, Black Panther
and Thor: Ragnarok are generally exempt from my MCU
frustrations.)
When Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) dominates the screen,
wearing a practical outfit and a smirk, refusing to smile at men
just because they want her to, and questioning the underlying
assumptions of her adopted alien society, it’s not just a proverbial
breath of fresh air. It’s a question lobbed straight at the MCU’s
tendencies toward underused female characters and supervillains
who, like a cartoon mouse, want to take over the world.
Captain Marvel is set in the ’90s, so that Pinky and the Brain
reference is entirely apt. And that ’90s setting does more than
just support a host of era-appropriate references and hit songs. It
also serves as a reminder that this movie was a long time coming.
Every one of those songs and ’90s references is a welcome mat
set out for older female comics readers who never got a movie like
this when we were Carol Danvers’ age. This is for you, too, is what I
heard when Elastica and Garbage played.
The setting isn’t just emotionally relevant; it also reframes
the history of superheroes within the MCU. Captain America was
first, but Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson) met
Carol long before Iron Man showed up. And her influence on the
Avengers Initiative is greater than anyone but Fury knows. (Yet.)
(So where was she when all the bad shit of the last twenty
Marvel movies went down? Presumably we’ll find that out in the
sequel the film’s end neatly — but not too forcefully — sets up.)
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