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| Book cover from Amazon.com |
Opinion
Good morning my friends, welcome to Friday! To make sure I can use a cover for this review, I'm linking to the Comic "The Life Of Captain Marvel" to any of you who are interested in the written word of this character. Now onto the film review!
What? A film review? Mrs. Y, you should be ashamed of yourself. This isn’t a book review. Your cover picture is misleading. How dare you!
Yeah, I know, I’m ashamed, it's not a book review.
But there is a reason that I decided to trek from my normal pursuit of Indie writers and their constant work to bring culture into the world. Captain Marvel is a movie based on not one book, but many books in the comic book world. This particular character is essential to Marvel lore, both in title, deed and as an individual in Carol Danvers. If I were to ignore this review, given my track record of comic book love and appreciation, I think I’d be forced to return my geek card. I’m not about to do that guy, I love me the comics. They are just as crucial for novels and short stories as they are for screenwriting and plays.
But let’s get right into this review because that’s why you are here, not to hear me prattle about my credentials on why I did this.
Let me give you all some very nerdy back-story filled with Mrs. Y nostalgia first. Carol Danvers is a character that first appeared in Marvel Comics in March of 1968. Since that time, she was one of the first heroes to introduce the idea that scientists can be women and be just as good as the men if not better.
I was first introduced to the character in the origin story of my favorite Marvel Comic Super-hero, Rogue during "X-Men: The Animated Series."
Rogue, in this case, was not so good and stole Carol’s abilities, but it caused her life-altering changes that she still has to this very day. What is commendable, Carol did not die from having her powers taken from her. Instead, she was so strong and powerful she made a recovery and eventually she became Captain Marvel. Carol represented to me that equality is about working toward humanism. She posed to me that any person, regardless of gender, or circumstance of birth, could do impressive things if they put their mind to it.
Yes, she’s a superhero, and yes, she got help along the way from space, but even without that, there was this underlining thing about Carol that was very Carol. It had nothing to do with her title as either Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel, it had to do with her as a person. She was and will always be a strong person in her soul and her will, and that is something I admired about her. I felt her will is what made my favorite character stronger, that Rogue who was damaged by anxiety and a crappy childhood, was better for being part of Carol’s life. The two are intertwined forever in my mind.
What does this mean for the movie? Well, all of the stuff I just explained, that's the core of the character. They kept a lot of Carol’s back story and the theme of her character very accurate. There are TONS of Easter Eggs in the movie, and the only one I’m going to spoil is the Air-Force Bomber Jacket. That must be an homage to Rogue. It brought tears to my eyes with how good it felt to be that much closer to seeing the character I want to truly see represented properly on screen, brought to life even if it's only through her jacket. C'mon Marvel Studios, please make the X-Men correctly and please make Rogue who she should be. Pretty please!
Let’s go into a couple of critiques here, and no I have no scoring system for this, but I feel that you all should be able to understand where I am coming from. My first critique, while I get what the point was of making her strong from moment one, the problem is we didn’t find out truly who she was before. There is a montage later that came out from left field showing clips in Carol’s life of things she’d learned from. Nowhere in the previous memories aside from 2, was any of that mentioned. I think the issue here was editing and cutting stuff out for time, that if they just showed 2 examples instead of 6, it would have made sense anyway, but it felt weird. This is her origin story. If Tony Stark, who when he started out was a misogynistic D-bag could get a complete and total origin story with his first movie, why can’t Carol Danvers, the first female Marvel character to get her own film?
I want to know about her childhood. I want to know how she overcame stuff when she was young. That’s important to establish who she was. Not everyone is familiar with her, they have no idea that Carol collects Space Stations like a co-ed with a no limits credit card collects shoes. There are things about Carol that I feel are important to selling that last piece of Act 3 and were missed.
If the argument is, it’s challenging to do exposition when the goal is to make the character a bad-ass from the offset, I will give you another movie that had the same idea and did it better as a counter-argument. Specifically, I give you “Rocky” with Silvester Stallone. In other words, don’t add a montage if you have no intent on putting in the elements that make the montage and exposition it gives importance to the character. “Rocky” didn’t do that, Rocky’s montage was a collection of what he was doing with Mickey in separate scenes before. So there you go, it's a minor spoiler because I'm telling you about a montage, but I'm not going to tell you what the montage was about specifically, so I hope I haven't ruined your day.
Now to critique something controversial, and that is the character of Nick Fury felt off to me. The Nick Fury we have known and loved since he appeared in the darkness of Tony Stark’s house in “Iron Man” has been a confident and controlled man. He has his moments where he gets very dark or his moments of occasional lightness. For example, when he tells Tony to exit the donut, that was funny and light-hearted from Iron Man 2. But in this movie, I felt like his presence was there had shifted. Okay, so let’s say the argument here is that when he was younger, he was different, but his experience with Captain Marvel changed him. Sure, I’ll buy it, but he’s very different in my opinion, and a lot more carefree than the man who stared at cops in his SUV in “Captain American” The Winter Soldier.” Tiny spoiler here, I also felt his chemistry with the cat was better than the chemistry that you find with some buddy cop movies in the ’90s.
Which brings me to my last critique. I felt honestly this was a mix of a buddy cop movie and a homage to “Lethal Weapon,” with a mix of “Captain America: The First Avenger.” At times, it was a touch cringe, but I loved those old buddy cop movies, so I got over it. Still, just be aware of it.
Okay now onto the good stuff, what I really enjoyed about “Captain Marvel.” Firstly, I loved the writing that was done to move the threads from Phase 1, 2 and 3 together into a beautiful package. I loved that the Kree and Skrull conflict was so well handled. No, we don’t have the big space fights yet, but we do have some of the most fantastic tension between the two that has been shown. See, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, we heard all about Rohnin the Accuser, but what we missed was why he was as bad as all out. He’s seriously terrible guys, and to have that pay off back to this and tie up any loose ends on what a horrible person he was, worked out beautifully in my opinion. I also really enjoyed payoffs to smaller things, like Fury’s trust issues, and I was happy to see Colson too. I felt like all of this worked out well, and I’m glad the threads came together.
Another thing I enjoyed, knowing that this will make Endgame better. I don’t know what they are going to do yet, but I’m confident that Avengers: Endgame is going to be that much better with Captain Marvel around. That's what I really enjoy about Marvel Movies. I love series that end and tie up threads for the individual movie, and Marvel does that well, but they also set up big picture things too.
Okay, this one may be controversial, but this is me, and this section is what I liked from the movie. I enjoyed the antagonist in the “Captain Marvel,” even though by technical definitions, there is a lack of a unified and holistic villainry. No spoilers. All I’m going to say, you don’t have to have a hero conflicting with one individual person to have a balanced story. I’m perfectly comfortable and accepting that there are amazing stories where a hero is fighting a greater and whole antagonist, be it an environmental issue, a cause, an entire belief system or even a series of individuals who have varied and misguided beliefs to the protagonist. The main villain, our true 100% bad guy in Marvel right now is Thanos. In my opinion, with the story, we have here, if the were to even attempt to craft or put in place another villain akin to him, this would have taken away from the overall series of stories. To anyone who says “But in Black Panther, they did XYZ with the villain.” You would be correct. I thought the villain in Black Pather was terrific, and I felt that he was a breath of fresh air given what other Marvel movies had dealt with.
For "Captain Marvel" the villain or antagonist, in this case, needs to be different because Carol Danvers is not T’Chala. Her backstory is very different, and the creativity sandbox to play in is going to be different when scoping conflict that fits the elements of the story. Now, I’m welcome to any comments anyone has about this below after you see it, but I felt that what was done here with the struggle and the evolution of conflict in the story was adequate and fine for what the story was.
Something that I also enjoyed, Jude Law and Ben Mendelson were terrific. Each had different roles, but their roles were critical to the plot, and I felt they did their respective characters justice. I expect this to get lost in the overall discussion of the story, but both men were great in this film. I truly enjoyed Ben Mendelson’s way of crafting his take on his character in this movie. I really loved that he can act in all of the makeup and challenges he faced through just being the character he was. In Jude Law’s case, he embodied ever sort of male big brother type that I’ve had over the years, some good, some bad, but all seemed to fuse in this character. And I felt that the end of the interactions with him and Carol was justified. There may be some who go “But the response was excessive given the past they had” and I counter with “Um, no.” The story they have together, given what had occurred, I felt the response was more than adequate.
Lastly, I loved how much my daughter understood it, and she’s never read, Captain Marvel. She knows Mommy likes it, but she doesn’t understand the subtle things or Easter eggs, and she got the film. She realized what was going on quickly, and it made sense to her. That’s what’s great about Marvel movies, I can take her to one, and we can talk about comics after and I’ve been able to get her interest back into reading. This is important. At the end of the day, literacy is essential, and if someone starts with comics and goes later to short stories and novels, more power to them. What I like to do, is a tie into the book with the movie, so she knows there is more to understand and appreciate.
Score
No math here, I’m going from the heart. Captain Marvel is a 4 Star from me, and I have nowhere to post this other than my blog; thus this is an exclusive review for you only. There were some issues with it, it's not the greatest Marvel Movie ever made, but it did fantastic with what it was working with.
I hope you all can enjoy my point of view. I also hope you all go out and watch it! If you did watch it or are going to, hit me up in the comments below, let’s talk about it!
