BEFORE: That's right, I went to the movies for a SECOND time in 2019, after seeing "Aquaman" in January. I didn't know whether "Aquaman" would be available in any home video or streaming format by March, so I hedged my bets. And once I realized that Djimon Hounsou was in both that DC film (his voice, anyway) and this Marvel one, well, then my road became a bit more clear.
I couldn't NOT see this one, because of the way that the last "Avengers" film ended, with a very strong hint that Captain Marvel would be coming to save the day, just as soon as Fury's phone call reached her, wherever she might be. So then that leads to the possibility that this film could be just as important to the Marvel 2019 films as "Black Panther" was to the 2018 line-up. I got to see the film last Monday, on just the 4th day of release, figuring that everyone would pack the theaters on opening weekend, and I might be able to slip in once the crowds died down a bit.
NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD, proceed with caution unless you've already seen this film in the theaters! There's just no way to talk about this film without giving away certain plot points.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Avengers: Infinity War" (Movie #2,940)
THE PLOT: Carol Danvers becomes one of the universe's most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races.
AFTER: Finally, there's a game-changing Marvel super heroine movie! This follows, of course, on the heels of DC's smash "Wonder Woman", and making the lead role in the latest "Star Wars" trilogy female, and isn't it about damn time? Marvel hasn't really had the best track record when it comes to landing and then keeping female fans - in the past they've tried getting girls hooked on comics with everything from Millie the Model to Barbie (umm, no, try again, aim higher). Eventually they figured out that women could be superheroes, too - but the demographics still weren't fair, only 25% of the original Fantastic Four and 20% of the original Avengers and X-Men were women. Things improved slightly during the 1970's and 80's, especially among the X-Men, with the introductions of Storm, Kitty Pryde, Dazzler, Rogue, Psylocke, and many of the New Mutants, but the top-respected teams, the Fantastic Four and Avengers, remained mostly a boy's club.
Even today, the current incarnation of the Avengers has only two women, Captain Marvel and She-Hulk, among 7 members (and She-Hulk's being romanced by Thor, but only when she's in Hulk-form and has diminished mental capacity, so that's a sub-plot that needs to be extinguished ASAP). Meanwhile, the Avengers' West Coast team, which was 40% female when introduced in 1984, is faring better with 50% women now - including Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), Miss America (Chavez), and Gwenpool. The team still has one too many archers, but at least they're demographically on point. (And the Fantastic Four still holding at 25% female, but I guess that's never going to change - I'm just glad that they're back.)
In the MCU, they fell into the same trap with the first "Avengers" movie - just one female member, Black Widow, but now that they're 20 movies in, they can afford to take some chances and try to turn things around. 50% of the movie audience is female, why should women be only 16% to 20% of the heroes? (see also "Guardians of the Galaxy") But then last year's "Ant-Man and the Wasp" finally got a female hero in the TITLE, and that seemed to go over well, so here we are. In the comic books, the quickest way to add a female character (and to display zero creativity) is just to gender-swap the successful male hero - so after Spider-Man was a success, they created Spider-Woman. People like Hulk? Then they'll love She-Hulk! More recently, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster became Lady Thor for a few years, and we've also had the Iron Man knock-off Ironheart, the aforementioned female Hawkeye (also stupidly called Hawkeye) and so it's very rare when an original, non-knockoff female character becomes a hit, like Black Widow or Squirrel Girl. There have been EIGHT characters going by the name "Captain Marvel" in Marvel Comics history, and the Carol Danvers one (who notoriously went by "Ms. Marvel" in the equal-rights 1970's) is just the version that's managed to connect with the most fans since 2000.
Political analogies are all over this film - the Skrulls are creatures that can change their shape and look like you, replace you and then do your job, while they await further instructions. They're thinly-veiled Mexicans, right? We'd better get to work building a wall around the Earth to keep them out, while SpaceForce - sorry, STAR-Force battles them throughout the galaxy.
The Kree, meanwhile, have a class-based system that seems to be based in part on the color of their skin - not like Earth at all, we swear, except the "pink" Kree seem to be at the top of the pyramid, followed by a bunch of "blue" Kree on the next level down, while the "brown" Kree are at the bottom and doing all the grunt-work. Nope, no race-based analogy here that would have any relevance to human society, please keep moving...
But we're still living in a fictional cinema world where movies that were developed PRE-election 2016 are being released, so it's very possible that this film was planned to be released in the world of President Hillary Clinton, with all the good and not-so-good things that might have come along with that. Why else would the Supreme Intelligence, the de facto leader of the Kree, appear (at least to Carol Danvers) as an older woman with short blonde hair wearing a pants-suit? In the comic books, the Kree Supreme Intelligence is an ugly giant head floating in a jar, resembling a giant boiling cabbage with eyes, or maybe an eggplant with some broccoli florets on top. You know, more like Trump. But here everyone sees the Grand Poobah in a different form, so to Danvers it looks like someone from her past who she respects, and may or may not have been First Lady at the time.
I'm just kidding - the person she envisions to represent the Supreme Intelligence is actually based on a top female scientist from Project Pegasus, who's working to develop an engine that's faster than light, and also is placed inside a military fighter plane. One imagines that this is sort of a reference to the first planes that flew faster than sound, with Chuck Yeager and other pilots trying to do what was thought to be impossible for a time.
This whole film is a throwback to the 1990's, since Veers (as the Kree call her, for some later-revealed reason) finds herself on Planet C-53 (you may know it as "Earth) during the time of Blockbuster Video, Radio Shack, and music from TLC, Nirvana, No Doubt and Nine Inch Nails. The Skrulls had previously captured her and tooled around in her head, jarring some memories loose that suggest that maybe she's been on Earth before, that this might in fact be where her journey started. What are the odds? She's tracked down by a pre-Captain America Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, back when they were simple, naive MIB Government agents, before there was any truth "out there" to be found, and they (eventually) believe her story about being from another planet, and Skulls coming to take their jobs.
After piecing her past together, and this may be the first time where a movie superhero learns her OWN origin at the same time as the audience, we find out that Veers isn't who she thought she was, and that her (male, of course) Kree handler has been using her memories of past failures to keep her from using her full power. Which all seems a bit weird, because if she's the ONLY Kree soldier who can generate cosmic energy blasts, wasn't that a tip-off, that she was different from everyone else in the Kree empire? Finally, after getting all of her memories back, she realizes that she's been lied to, kept down and manipulated by (probably mostly male) Kree for six years, and that's just about enough of that, thank you very much. Prepare for an energy blast to connect with somebody, square in the nuts. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't make Yon-Rogg her lover in addition to her mentor/handler, because that could have added an extra nod to the #metoo movement.
So America's ready for a female Marvel superhero to headline, but I guess they're not ready for a lesbian superhero involved in a multi-racial relationship? I say this only because the Maria Rambeau character seems more than just a "best friend" character, as Carol refers to Maria and Maria's daughter as "family". Which doesn't mean that they're lovers, but come on - tomboys, military pilots, feminists, no men in the picture, you do the math. Marvel has added a bunch of new gay characters in the past few years, and revised some of the older ones (Iceman, Shatterstar, Moondragon) to be retroactively gay - again, it's mostly the X-Men leading the PC charge here, and the Avengers are slower to catch up. The only Gay Avengers (so far) have been Living Lightning, a lesser member of the West Coast team, and two of the Young Avengers, Wiccan and Hulkling. (Yes, in addition to the female versions of popular heroes, now there's also a "junior" version of almost everyone, like Iron Lad, Miles Morales Spider-Man, Viv Vision and the new Young Wasp. There's also a new Ms. Marvel, taking the hero name that Carol Danvers dropped some time in the 1990's.)
This film also subverts everything that Marvel history has told us about the Skrulls - they've spent the last 40 years in comics being the evil, ruthless, deceptive shape-shifters, and now we're supposed to throw all that out the window? It was only 10 years ago that the big crossover in the Marvel books was "Secret Invasion" where the writer (Bendis) sand-bagged everyone by starting the story in progress, claiming that the Skrulls had been kidnapping key figures on the Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic Four teams for months, replacing them with Skrulls, totally "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-style. Surprise, kids, that hero whose exploits you've been following for months isn't a hero at all, it's a dirty green evil alien! Yeah, that did NOT go over well with the audience, even though the heroes had been kidnapped to Skrull-World and not killed or anything, but it's the type of reversal that fans don't like, because we read stories and enjoy stories and we don't like having the rug pulled out from under us like that. Saying any story didn't happen after the fact, or erasing Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane, should cause fans to storm the Marvel offices with pitchforks and torches.
There's still a lot to like here, and beyond the action, the film manages to be both fun AND funny in some places, but with so many alien races coming to Earth, I can't help but feel that there's a great debt owed to the "Men in Black" franchise (which also started out as a comic book, I believe..). I don't read the "Captain Marvel" comics, so I'm not really sure how much of this was adapted from that. It's too bad that DC is fighting back with the "Shazam!" movie, and the character now called Shazam used to be called "Captain Marvel" himself at some points, before all the lawyers got involved. I think that may muddy the waters quite a bit, I wouldn't be surprised if some older folks who haven't picked up a Marvel Comic in say, 30 years, start complaining that Marvel's just ripping off DC here, when in fact DC looks like they're going to be ripping off the Penny Marshall film "Big" with their rendition. Turns out there are no new ideas in comics OR movies, so now we're just judging how well people now are stiching together all of the bits of story ideas from the past.
NITPICK POINT: Why is a Kree scientist working to develop this faster-than-light engine, when their society already has some kind of warp drive? OK, they use jump gates, as my friend Adam pointed out, and they still have to travel TO and FROM the gates, which takes time. But the tech should already be there, unless there's a difference between warping/jumping and traveling at hyper-speed. I'm not up on astro-physics. Once all the secrets are revealed, it sort of makes sense that the scientist is doing her own thing, but I'm still not convinced. It's kind of like if a scientist was working on technology to get across town, and then someone said to them - "Why not just take the bus?"
Also starring Brie Larson (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Jude Law (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Annette Bening (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Lee Pace (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them"), Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, McKenna Grace (last seen in "Gifted"), London Fuller, Akira Akbar, Matthew Maher (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Robert Kazinsky (last seen in "Mute"), Vik Sahay, Chuku Modu, Colin Ford, Kenneth Mitchell, with cameos from Stan Lee (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), (redacted) (last seen in "Gifted"), (redacted) (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), (redacted) (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing") and (redacted).
RATING: 7 out of 10 clips from Stan Lee's MCU cameos
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