Captain Marvel: movie review

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.

Goodbye and thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett

I still own several Discworld books with the old “About the author” blurb that begins “Terry Pratchett was born in 1948 and is still not dead.” That sentence is now only half true. Because of the International Date Line, it was Friday the 13th here when I found out he had died. This seemed appropriate.

I met him three times, if thirty seconds in a book-signing queue counts as “meeting”. The first time, I was fifteen, and the signing was at my high school. I remember hurrying to get to the auditorium in time for his talk, and very nearly bumping into him in the corridor – a small man, egg-bald, with a neatly trimmed grey beard, and eyes that looked like he had had some bad news earlier that day. That last impression stands out in my memory because it was so unusual for me to notice anything like that when I was fifteen. (Even today, I’m not fantastic at facial expressions.)

And now I’m sitting here trying to pick one thing or a few things out of his immense body of work, and tell you how it impacted on me. This is difficult. Even doing it chronologically is proving to be a problem, because it goes so far back that I honestly don’t remember what the first Pratchett book I read was. I’m almost sure it was either Wyrd Sisters or Moving Pictures. I do remember reading Reaper Man when it was new out, and that was the one after Moving Pictures. And I can tell you that Pratchett got me out of the endless loop of Tolkien that I got stuck in for a bit there in my teenage – not that there’s anything wrong with being a Tolkien fan, needless to say, but it’s better to read more than one author. Pratchett showed me that fantasy doesn’t have to be about battles and kings and the fate of the world. Ordinary people’s stories are worth reading too.

There was darkness under Pratchett’s good humour. When Robin Williams died last year a lot of people pointed out that comics tend to have honed their craft battling inner demons. Williams’ familiar demon was sadness; Pratchett’s, according to Neil Gaiman who knew him for nearly half his life, was anger. It’s no coincidence that his two most complex and fully realized protagonists, Granny Weatherwax and Commander Samuel Vimes, both wrestle perpetually to control pent-up inner fountains of rage. Rage at what? For their author, rage at the unfairness of the world; rage at how stupid people can be. I don’t mean the sneering “Why do I have to put up with you peasants?” kind of anger at stupidity – I mean that Pratchett saw how officialdom and pomposity and cant and petty-mindedness get people hurt. And he could never quite shrug it off with an “Oh well, life’s not fair, that’s how it is.” Pratchett always cared what happened to people. He stood for practicality and hard work like Kipling, and for social justice like Dickens.

But perhaps because he lived with darkness, Pratchett also learned to embrace it. He made Death a sympathetic character, “not cruel, just terribly good at his job” (and how those words sting just now!): calm, friendly, professional, fond of little pleasures like good food and the company of cats, but perpetually bemused by the foibles of humanity. I don’t have figures on how much that one creative choice has helped people cope with the inevitable end of life. Apparently elderly readers used to write to him, hoping he’d got Death right. Other fantasy franchises seem to be adopting the idea, at least partly. Much of Supernatural is blatantly pinched from Pratchett, though their Death character is slightly sterner and quicker on the uptake. Harry Potter may not have a personified Death, but Rowling’s treatment of it – calm, courageous acceptance – has a distinctly Pratchettian feel.

I toyed with the idea of writing a short story for this post, where Pratchett himself meets Death, but there’ve been a couple of good ones already that I won’t try and better. Let me instead say farewell by echoing the final few entries on his Twitter:

At last, Sir Terry, we must walk together.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The End.

Saving the planet is not what's keeping us from exploring other ones

(Originally published 13 June, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
Recently one of my friends was seen to praise a politician known to seriously employ the slogan "People before the planet!"  Boggling somewhat, since my friend is an intelligent person, I mentioned the fundamental problem with this.  His reply:

...this is a positive approach to counter the anti-evolutionary madness promoted by some Greens. Evolutionarily speaking, anything that impedes or does not actually advance the human race is a toxic dead-end. Humans are no longer bound inexricably to this planet (in fact the sooner we get a viable population off it the better). The comment makes imminent [sic] sense in that context. 

My friend is wrong, for illuminating reasons.