You Are Probably Wrong About CAPTAIN MARVEL

As is becoming a seasonal regularity, the biggest media event in the world right now is the new release from MARVEL Studio's ongoing Cinematic Universe, this time their first female-fronted film - Captain Marvel. Even if you haven't seen the film yet and don't generally follow This Stuff, you're probably aware that Carol Danvers' debut is both a landmark and an unfortunate battleground.

While the film is an absolute smash hit, it's been the target of "fan" backlash for months (if not longer) leading up to its release, largely engineered by the same sort of sad hateboys who still can't stop complaining about The Last Jedi. The film's audience ratings were targeted by trolls for mass tanking (a practice by which user engagement scores are manipulated to make it look like a thing is massively unpopular just because A Number On the Internet says so), and while critical response has been undeniably positive, it's slightly muted compared to the past several entries in the MCU. Even the praise has been largely tinged with a brush-off of "well, it's solid enough, but it's just a standard MARVEL origin movie." It's a sentiment I've heard in various forms from a lot of, well, mostly dudes.

And I'm here to call bullshit on that.

This is not a review, but a deep dive into the details and themes of the film, so from here on out:

**********S P O I L E R   W A R N I N G**********

No, seriously, if you haven't seen the film, stop reading. I'ma talk about all the stuff. Yes, even that. Yep, that too. Oh, and especially that.

Ok, here's another disclaimer: I'm writing from my own limited perspective and this should absolutely not be seen as any sort of definitive word on the film - there are a lot of great reviews and pieces by women and WOC that can help with that. This is more about me wrestling with a lot of statements that I found to be shockingly wrong-headed given the obvious text of the film.

(Also, yes, the title is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, so no one should take actual offense. Even if you are one of The Wrong Ones.)

Now, this isn't to say that the movie is without flaws. At the risk of bringing up Rankings, I don't think Captain Marvel is what you'd call "Top Tier MCU." It's not as wholly satisfying an experience as The Avengers, it's not as auteurishly singular or quirky as James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films, and it's not the bolt-from-the-blue that Black Panther was last year. There's some structural nitpicks you could lay at its feet, it does some kinda unneeded "prequel business" towards the end, and the action and cinematography lack the clarity, composition, and color that could have really made it sing as a '90s period piece. That said, while "it's no Black Panther" is going to be a familiar refrain, Captain Marvel is every bit as much About Stuff™ as Ryan Coogler's Wakanda epic.

One of the primary complaints (both genuine and disingenuous) about the early marketing was that Brie Larson's Vers/Carol Danvers seemed stilted and aloof in a lot of the trailers. As the film unfolds, taking us from her life as a soldier of the Kree Empire's Starforce to crashing on Earth to learning her real identity that was stolen from her, Carol's personality develops as one of the most well-defined in the MCU. Why yes, her no-nonsense hard-ass attitude comes off as awkward and unnatural because she feels awkward and unnatural doing it. This is clear from her introductory scenes, where her easy sardonic wit shows a personality at odds with the emotionless warrior that Jude Law's Yon-Rogg is trying to sculpt her into so she can be "the best version" of herself. Carol has a wit that tends toward wry or deadpan rather than smug, which sets her apart from other MCU heroes, especially the usually "straight-man" ladies. It makes her stick out among her Kree teammates, but feel almost immediately at home bantering with Samuel L. Jackson's Agent Fury once she starts trying to piece together her life on Earth. Unlike Steve Rogers or Diana of Themyscira, Carol finds herself a fish back in water, and discovering that she likes it very much, as the very thing that kept her isolated among the Kree bonds her with others on her personal journey.

The primary stumbling block she's tasked with overcoming on her way to finding out who she is - the shape-shifting Skrulls who are supposedly infiltrating the planet - is another feather in the film's "Doing Much More Than You Think" cap. As Vers, Larson's character is told that the Skrulls are a galactic threat that will swarm the cosmos if left unchecked. When Vers learns she is really Captain Carol Danvers of the USAF, it's the Skrulls who help her piece together the final missing pieces of her memory. General Talos (Ben Mendelsohn in an absolute banger of a double act) explains that the Skrulls were actually the victims of attempted genocide and are now migrant war refugees who are simply trying to find a new home and be reunited with their families.

. . . Yeah. Sound familiar? The MCU is certainly no stranger to exploring modern political hot buttons, but that one is a doozy.

However, maybe the smartest move that Captain Marvel makes as a film is how it chooses to handle its 3rd act spectacle - or rather, the surprising lack thereof. The emotional climax of the film comes in three-fold: first, during the Act 3 kick-off, when full weight of Carol's past hits her childhood best friend, Maria Rambeau, tells her she is kind, powerful, and already the "best version" of herself. Second, when Carol breaks free of the inhibitor chip implanted by the Kree, and access her full potential as the titular hero, visualized by the now-iconic montage of a Carol of multiple ages falling down, but getting up again and again. And finally, as she races to protect friends both old and new from her former mentor, Carol is shaken from a spaceship and falls to Earth. . . and not only does she rise, she FLIES.

The rest of the finale is largely made up of action beats that provide playful punctuation to these more powerful emotional moments, whether it's Fury and his alien "cat" wreaking havoc on Kree soldiers or Maria dog-fighting a star-fighter in a knowing homage to Independence Day. The sequence where Carol takes on all of her ex-teammates to the tune of No Doubt's "Just a Girl" is a delightful romp as Danvers both experiments with her newfound abilities and utterly mops the floor with everyone, and rhymes neatly when, after the arrival of the Accuser fleet as the Kree's "final option," a fully-powered Captain Marvel Supermans the hell out of a kinetic bombardment and throws herself bodily into attacking warships with audible glee. Through this, the scale is focused mostly on the title character and her immediate allies, avoiding the bloat that comes with too many sky portals and wrecked cities, but it's also never prolonged because. . . well, once she's well and truly "Captain Marvel," the fight's already over. Which she damn well knows, planting herself in front of Ronan the Accuser's battleship and - rather than blowing up all the bad guys in a big ol' extended CGI fracas - stares Ronan down until he turns and runs.

This comes to a head in Carol's final showdown with Yon-Rogg, which - deliberately - feels far more like the Hulk throwing Loki around in The Avengers than it does Captain America facing off against the Red Skull. Brendan Foley has already written a brilliant piece on why the twist regarding the Kree, the Skrulls, and Jude Law's character in particular works so well, but in addition to being a great Trapdoor Villain, Yon-Rogg sidesteps the "mirror image of the hero" villain that even some of the best MCU films trade in for something far more sinister and close to home. Even though the film's text doesn't make a lot of hay about Carol's gender (at least, not in the context of her life among the Kree), an emotionally-abusive "mentor" character who is revealed to be gaslighting and exploiting someone for their own gain will be all too familiar to some members of the audience.

After all, he doesn't say "smile more," but he does insist she joke less, that she control her emotions, that she know her place, and uses this as excuse to strip her of her bodily autonomy. Even I know how loaded that kind of language is, and the fact that Carol's final response to him is to blast his ass into the side of a mountain makes for one of the most satisfying pops in the MCU since "puny god." She has nothing to prove to him, just as - by that point - the film has nothing left to prove. It's told an emotionally-resonant and deeply character-driven story with a surprising amount of thematic weight and a hate-able but gloriously powerless villain, and has provided not only the MARVEL Cinematic Universe, but blockbuster cinema with one of its most powerful heroes.

Like Carol herself, the film has been unreasonably held to higher-than-normal standards, and yet has still succeeded grandly.