Captain Marvel: Film Review
Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening
Director: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
It's hard to pinpoint exactly why Marvel's latest solid outing Captain Marvel doesn't quite fly in the way that perhaps you'd be expecting.
Is the fact that in a decade and twenty films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the first with a female lead, giving the film a kind of timely resonance that's culturally mirrored in the Time's Up movement?
Or is the fact that a deeply feminist film of a woman hero who's been told to suppress her emotions as they don't make her strong suffers from an abundance of mansplaining and on-the-nose music cues?
Whatever it is, Captain Marvel's Brie Larson deserves the accolades, even if the material isn't quite up to her stellar standards.
Larson plays amnesiac Carol Danvers, who we join in space as she's briefed on a mission to infiltrate Skrull (who look like 80s comic Eagle's Doomlord) territory and retrieve a Kree spy. But when Vers, as she's initially known, is captured by Mendelsohn's Talos, she glimpses a prior life, setting her on a collision course with both 1990s Earth and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Jackson).
Captain Marvel is an intriguing non-linear film and uses a softer methodology to impart yet another origin story.
Ahead of Avengers: Endgame, it's more of a necessity than a creative gamble, and because of that there are parts of Captain Marvel which feel uneven and even, whisper it, uncertain.
Larson's ferocity works best when she has something to work with. And while the trope of the amnesiac superhero trying to remember who they are is an all-too familiar one, there are moments when Danvers feels more hollow than she should be, and beholden only to what others make her.
Certainly, it's a problem for any film introducing a character with literal deus-ex-machina powers and how to make them realistic and relatable.
Larson gives her all, and the film's spunk comes from uniting her with Fury in 90s US (even if the film's heavy-handed inclusion of 90s throwbacks groans from excessive over-use), setting up the usual fish-out-of-water shenanigans and then immediately smartly side-lining them. Jackson clearly has fun here, and Larson helps him come to life in some scenes that crackle along.
Rising above the script's duller edges, Larson gives the film an emotional core that's a hollow cypher at the start. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in scenes with her former fellow pilot, played by Lashana Lynch. Their understated interplay feels warm, human and rife with a history that's hinted at rather than explicitly explored.
Equally successful is Mendelsohn's Talos, a Skree baddie who has depth and nuance (and an Aussie accent through the prosthetics).
While the final act has Doctor Strange level of trippiness and spectacle, sillier edges start to filter through as the "Without us, you're only human" message threatens to overwhelm what is, at times, underwhelming.
What cripples portions of Captain Marvel is that the makers are so determined to proudly fly the banner for "the message" that they occasionally take a sledgehammer to crush open a nut.
A fight scene to Just A Girl negates some of Danvers' power and feels like a back-handed compliment, whereas a sequence of Danvers' repeated rising up against various knockbacks could be dismissed as manipulative and over-stated when taken out of context.
But placed within an audience of young boys and girls, this moment, coupled with the fact that Captain Marvel is retrofitted into continuity and is shown to be more powerful than any of the Avengers brings an important and timely message home with some subtlety - for girls robbed of cinematic figureheads and for boys who need to see the woman can be more powerful.
