Crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog
Just for fun, how many movies do you imagine fulfill all the following criteria?
- Based on comic books, or about superheroes, or both
- Released in cinemas
- The title consists solely of the protagonist’s name and/or hero pseudonym
- The title protagonist is female
Well, I can’t be bothered tracking down movies from every country in the world. But on Wikipedia’s lists of American movies there are, as of the release of Captain Marvel earlier this week, exactly six. The other five are, in order of release: Tank Girl (1995), Barb Wire (1996), Catwoman (2004), Elektra (2005), and Wonder Woman (2017). The 1984 movie Supergirl apparently was British, not American, but you can go ahead and include it if you like.
By contrast I count about 49 American movies which fulfill all the other conditions but have a male title protagonist. That’s being conservative, because I chose not to count titles containing epithets that refer to their heroes but aren’t their actual names, like “The Dark Knight” or “The First Avenger” or “Man of Steel”. If I had chosen to include those, that would have added at least another half-dozen to the male list and exactly one to the female list: My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006). I also didn’t count sequels even when the title was just the character’s name and a number (e.g Deadpool 2), which would have lengthened the male list by another dozen or so and the female list not at all.
You could argue that manga should be counted as comic books, which adds exactly one more American movie to the female list, namely Alita: Battle Angel, again released only weeks ago. And if you want to include movies named for more than one character, that brings in things like Batman & Robin and Batman v. Superman on the male side, and one lone female character taking second place in the title of last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.
The YouTube comments on trailers for Captain Marvel are full of remarks like “Ooh, a strong female character, how novel” and “I don’t go to Marvel movies for the politics.”
Mind you, having now seen the movie, I can tell you there’s another strain of YouTube comments that’s even more ironic: the kind that go “I don’t need to see the movie now, they put the whole thing in the trailers.” The trailers are almost entirely taken from the first half-hour or so. The rest of the movie then takes the premise set up in that half-hour and unabashedly flips it upside-down to lie waggling its legs undignifiedly in the air.
Spoilers both great and small below the cut.
I’ll come back to this matter later. First, I’m going to start with the things I liked least about Captain Marvel so I can build up to the good stuff. That’s going to be difficult, though. Not because the movie is perfect – it isn’t. But I’m having trouble picking out specific bad points. I just came away with a hard-to-pin-down feeling that it wasn’t quite as good as it could have been.
Well, I mean, one concrete thing was the idea that when Skrulls shape-shift, their new body is indistinguishable from the one they’re copying “right down to the DNA”, and yet they apparently don’t copy the brain well enough to pick up long-term memories. There are several rants’ worth in there about the mangling of molecular biology in science fiction movies. It would have been better just not to bring up DNA testing as a potential means of Skrull detection in the first place; after all, Captain Marvel is set in the ’90s, when sequencing DNA took months and cost thousands of dollars.
No, look, I’m not going to go there, because it was a very minor annoyance, much less egregious than the silly science in some of the other movies (no, Ultron, picking up a city off Earth and dropping it from a great height would never do one whisker more damage than just blowing up whatever energy source you planned to lift it with), and, more to the point, it didn’t contribute to the faint nagging dissatisfaction I’m talking about.
Another point, I guess, was that Captain Marvel didn’t tie in as well as it could have to the established MCU. I thought they didn’t come up with the acronym “SHIELD” until, was it Iron Man or Thor? We do get to see how Nick Fury lost his eye, and where the name of the “Avengers Initiative” first came from, but there’s a plot point late in the movie which (a) isn’t properly explained and (b) causes continuity problems with the larger story.
The Tesseract turns up, and the villains are after it. Carol Danvers decides, for no reason she bothers explaining, that it’ll be safest hidden on Earth. She then leaves it to SHIELD to deal with; the last we see of it, it’s on Fury’s desk. So – um – what was all that stuff with the ice and the laser beam at the beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger? And why were SHIELD so scared of it in The Avengers, with all the isolation they’d put around it when Loki came looking for it? Why did they think Steve Rogers would know more about it than they did, if they’d already had it in their possession in the ’90s?
While we’re talking about continuity problems, for that matter, didn’t we find out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier that SHIELD had been infiltrated by Hydra agents all this time? I thought, going in, that the Skrulls were going to be involved in that storyline somehow. They weren’t. But I don’t think it was continuity errors that bugged me either.
Grace Randolph of the YouTube channel Beyond the Trailer comes close to picking it out, I think, in her review of the movie. (As I write I’m still waiting for her to put out a spoiler review for Captain Marvel, because she generally goes into more depth in those.) Unfortunately she expresses it by saying that Carol Danvers in the final act of the movie becomes a “Mary-Sue”, which is a term I no longer use because more often than not these days it’s tainted with misogyny. I don’t think Randolph is using it misogynistically here, but so many other people do.
The general idea of a “Mary-Sue” is that she’s a character with either abilities or moral status that she hasn’t earned in the course of the story. If she wins the entire conflict without being challenged, or if the author expects you to cheer her on and boo-hiss at her enemies without her having done anything particularly meritorious beyond being polite to people, that’s a Mary-Sue in the original sense of the term.
It’s a fair enough criticism that if you want your readers to see your character as a brave warrior or a wise leader or a noble hero then you need to make them do things that are brave and wise and noble. And it’s natural but bad, when you’re writing, to think of your characters as people and not want to hurt them. Both are hurdles a lot of writers need to learn to get over.
But far too often in practice “Mary-Sue” means a female character who has the dreadful, dreadful temerity to do the same things that male characters do and expect to get the same credit. I once saw a YouTube whining at length about “Mary-Sues” in a certain popular fantasy TV show, where the guy defined the term as “a character with powers that aren’t justified in their backstory” and then applied it to a character who had become a competent assassin after three seasons of training to be an assassin. Guess the character’s gender. Go on, guess.
Even Randolph applies it in her Captain Marvel review, by way of example, to Rey from the latest Star Wars movies, on the grounds that she masters her Force abilities and lightsabre technique without us really seeing her learn how. I disagree, but that’s a different movie and I’m not going to go there now.
Randolph’s point is that the same is true of Carol Danvers. After her full powers are unlocked she doesn’t need any time to figure out how they work, the way Tony Stark had to with his suit in Iron Man. The first time she flies (on her own, without a plane), she does it gracefully; she doesn’t seem to need any practice to calibrate the power of her full-body energy blasts; and so on.
And this is kind of approaching where I feel the movie fell short of perfection. But it’s not quite there. First, Rey was indeed similar in Star Wars and that didn’t bother me the same way; and second, Captain Marvel takes pains to establish that Danvers doesn’t need to learn to rein in her power like the Hulk – she needs to learn to stop holding back and unleash it. That’s what her main arc is about, a neat reversal of the standard superhero trope. If you can believe a human body can absorb the energy of an explosion and turn it into superpowers, you can believe a human brain can rearrange itself to understand how to use those superpowers.
Yet Randolph is right that somehow it doesn’t feel like quite as much of an achievement as it should. Why is that? The closest I’ve come to an answer is by comparing Captain Marvel with its DCEU predecessor Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman also goes off the rails a bit in the final act, because the DCEU brand is about big characterless battles with generic CGI monsters, and yet to me the Diana-Ares duel was more compelling than the ending of Captain Marvel.
I agree with those commentators who say that when you have a character who’s too strong to be challenged externally, like Superman, you need to throw them into internal conflict – a point where the MCU generally shines and the DCEU, except in Wonder Woman, flounders. Where did Diana’s internal conflict come from in the final act of Wonder Woman? I hate to say it, but it centres on her love for Steve Trevor and his act of self-sacrifice – she can’t love humanity because it killed him, and she can’t hate humanity because it included him. The conflicts Danvers faces in this movie just never get that personal.
And yet one of the good things about Captain Marvel, I would have said, is that Carol Danvers don’t need no man. Though she and Nick Fury spend a good portion of the movie getting into and out of danger together, there’s no hint of any romantic attraction and the movie is better for that. I get the vibe that her Kree mentor Yon-Rogg has feelings about her that aren’t entirely appropriate, but Danvers doesn’t seem to reciprocate and again that’s a good thing.
So no. Danvers is better for not having a boyfriend. And yet it would have made the final act so much more satisfying if she could have had a stronger personal stake in the welfare of someone on Earth – someone in her lost memories. What could possibly be the solution?
Well, frankly it’s staring me in the face now that I think about it in these terms. This movie would have been far more satisfying in the end if only Danvers and Maria Rambeau had been romantic partners as well as best friends.
Of course that would have had knock-on effects through the whole memory-loss plot element as well. It would have made the initial reunion between Danvers and Rambeau, the fact that Danvers doesn’t remember their past together, vastly more emotionally charged. But again I feel this would have been a good change – even though this was part of the story where I didn’t particularly feel there was anything missing.
Don’t get me wrong. Maria Rambeau is a great character as-is. She represents Captain Marvel’s anchor to the Earth in more ways than one. Not only is she the most prominent living person in Danvers’ pre-explosion memories, she’s also a living picture of what Danvers’ life would have been if she’d stayed behind. Being a fighter pilot and a single mother, she’s a person of extraordinary courage and motivation. As a character, she doesn’t need to be a love interest. But I think Danvers’ arc would have been more satisfying for her having a love interest, if and only if that love interest was another woman, and Rambeau would have been the logical choice.
Yes, I know, everyone ships Steve and Bucky, and fair enough. Yes, the attempt to straightwash Steve with Sharon Carter was one of the clumsier things the MCU has done. But even without a romantic dimension, Steve and Bucky’s friendship feels deep enough to me onscreen that I can buy it as a story-driving motive. Possibly that’s because we’ve seen Bucky die, we thought, and then gone with Steve through the ordeal of rescuing him from Hydra and having to fight Tony Stark over him. Nothing so traumatic happens to Rambeau; it’s Danvers who’s been apparently killed and come back with no memories. For me, Captain Marvel is the first MCU movie where, even without taking issues of representation into account, the story really needed a same-gender romance to make it complete.
But now, on to better things. Where to start?
Visually I think this is one of the better MCU movies. The space settings are, I don’t know, less cluttered somehow than the Guardians of the Galaxy movies or Thor: Ragnarok, while at the same time brighter and clearer than the first two Thor movies. The visual elements never overwhelm the storytelling as they do in every DCEU movie (even, eventually, Wonder Woman). But perhaps the most important visual element was the one I didn’t notice until I thought about it afterwards; the digital de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson back to how old he was when he was first becoming famous. I think this is the first movie I’ve ever seen where they’ve managed to make an age change look unobtrusively real.
In tone, Captain Marvel is relatively light, with frequent comedic moments. Many of these revolve around Goose the “cat”, in conjunction with Nick Fury. A lot of people love the laughs in the MCU, but I have seen others complain about what they call bathos – where a joke drains the meaning out of a scene. Each MCU director has dealt with it in different ways, the most successful in my book still being Taika Waititi’s seamless weaving of the comedy into the story of Thor: Ragnarok. Captain Marvel isn’t quite that good, but it’s equal to anything Joss Whedon pulled off (and for all Whedon’s faults, that was one of his strengths).
Brie Larson as Carol Danvers has to carry the movie, and for my money she pulls it off – with teamwork from Samuel L. Jackson, Lashana Lynch, and Ben Mendelsohn, mind you. Danvers is driven like Steve Rogers, sassy like Tony Stark, genial like Thor, and self-assured like T’challa. As I’ve already mentioned, her character arc is not the well-trodden path of the over-confident hero who has to learn control, but the opposite one, where the hero has to break free of the limitations they’ve been labouring under. I don’t think that arc is complete yet; I’m more eager than ever to see what happens in Avengers: Endgame.
As Danvers grows in power her conflict moves from external (breaking free of Skrull captivity, chasing down the Skrull “invaders”) to internal. She has to overcome the quasi-religious ideology that the Kree have indoctrinated her with – to scrape away her entire worldview and start again from the beginning. I have to say, I can relate, which might help explain why I find her character arc more satisfying than Grace Randolph does.
The real strength of Captain Marvel is its social commentary. Of course, politics as such is nothing new to the MCU. I can’t resist repeating here a reply I left on one of those YouTube comments I mentioned earlier complaining about the politics:
Let me get this straight. You’ve watched, what is it by now, 20 movies? more? in which—
a weapons dealer discovers the moral bankruptcy of the arms industry; a troubled man confronts his own inner tendencies towards violence; a disabled man dedicates his life to punching Nazis; the heir to an imperial monarchy grapples with his nation and family’s violent past; an African leader chooses to share his nation’s wealth in order to help black people in other parts of the world; a gifted kid has to deal with criminal gangs formed after the government stepped on working-class people’s attempt to better themselves; a group of escaped convicts beat the system to save the galaxy from power-hungry tyrants; all culminating in a story demonstrating the falsity of Malthusian resources-before-people ideology...
—and then Marvel puts up a movie with a female protagonist, and that, that, to you, is the first sign of a “social and political agenda”.
Not that Captain Marvel hits you over the head with politics, exactly. But when political questions impinge on the characters’ lives, the movie doesn’t shy away from them. It turns out to be one of those little ironies that, before the movie came out, some guy photoshopped the poster to make Brie Larson smile and passed that around as an “improvement”, because in the movie, a guy comes up to Danvers shortly after she’s landed on Earth and tells her to smile because it would make her prettier. She nicks his motorbike.
Politics sits at the root of the plot. Danvers lost her memory destroying an experimental spacecraft so that hostile aliens couldn’t get their hands on it. Why was she working on a spacecraft? Because she and Rambeau had volunteered for that secret project with one Dr Wendy Lawson, actually a Kree scientist working against her own rulers to help the Skrull refugees. Why were Rambeau and Danvers working on that project in particular? Because in 1989, when the incident happened, the US Air Force didn’t let women fly combat missions. That’s within living memory. I don’t know about younger viewers, but someone my age can’t file that away under “oh well, that was the past” like I can with the more blatant sexism of 1918 British society in Wonder Woman.
Kudos also to the screenwriters for making the Kree-Skrull war more interesting than “The ones who look human are the good guys and the ones who look like orcs are the bad guys.” That sort of stereotyping has been a problem in fantasy literature of all media since long before The Lord of the Rings. I mean, in Tolkien’s time it was an improvement that the all-evil races weren’t actual humans of colour. But I think it’s time we got past the very concept of an all-evil race. As it stands, the fact that the people we first hear of as “terrorists” turn out to be “refugees” is probably the most blatant bit of political allegorizing in Captain Marvel.
Dr Lawson (one of two characters played by Annette Bening – it makes sense when you see it) meanwhile stops the movie from falling into the same error the other way around and making the Kree an evil race. The Kree government and their enforcers are an evil empire, but that doesn’t taint every individual Kree with collective guilt or any such nonsense. We may yet see villainous Skrulls in future MCU outings; I hope they come with continual reminders that their villainy is an individual, not a racial, trait.
Anyway, what we have at the end of the movie is a hero who just might have a chance in a one-on-one fight with Thanos, and I presume that’s what we’re going to see in Avengers: Endgame. The Russo brothers have a good track record so far with the arcs of characters other people have invented; let’s hope they keep it up.
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