Captain Marvel

(spoilers!)

For years the billionaires over at Marvel were giving men male-centered comic book movies with ease. Several times a year the boys and men in Marvel fanbase got to see someone who shares their gender lead the film and kick ass. The women in those movies? Award winning actresses playing love interests. The only prominent female character since the beginning of the franchise is Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow who started as eye candy and then in - Joss Whedon's awful Age of Ultron - had the dubious honor of participating in the absolute rock bottom of MCU as she suggested since she cannot bear children she is a monster. Now Black Widow is getting her overdue solo movie, only after the character lost its spark and Johansson clearly lost interest in playing her.

Things started looking up only last year - with Black Panther bringing us brilliant female characters Shuri, Okoye and Nakia and Marvel releasing Ant-Man and the Wasp and patting themselves on the back that they finally released a female co-led movie. Never mind she was turned to dust instead of her male co-lead in the mid-credits scene which totally annihilated any sense of joy the movie preceding it generated. The less is said about Valkyrie, a character Tessa Thompson is insisting is bisexual even though the evidence of that was cut from the movie by the powers at the studio, the better. Representation doesn't work when it's not actually there on the screen and when it only exists on the cutting room's floor.
And now, finally, we have arrived at the moment when Marvel decided to do something about their awful track record. 20 movies and 11 years after MCU began, Marvel has finally decided to give the women a female-led CBM.

*muted "yey" and sarcastic slow clap*

There is so much backlash surrounding the movie and while most of it is due to our society being stupid and most men apparently being weak and insecure, Feige and co. contributed to it. They trained their male fanbase to expect women to be either love interests or eye candy. And now they are trying to make up for it. They still have a very long way to go, but this is an excellent first stop.
Captain Marvel arrives way too late but thank God at least it's a good movie with plenty of heart. I cannot even imagine what a disaster it would be, all because of Marvel's reluctance to make a female-led CBM for years, if this movie was awful. That said it's far from the best MCU films and a lot of it could have been done way better. There is a truly dreadful beginning and things don't really start going once Carol begins to delightfully show her spark and her powers, which ends to her landing on Earth and running into Agent Fury.

The person who deserves the most praise here is Brie Larson. There are some people out there calling her performance as Carol bland but it couldn't be further from the truth - her Carol is fun, lively, brave, hilarious and arrogant - a trait that apparently makes Tony Stark "cool" but causes a backlash when is depicted by a woman. I liked Carol a lot, I liked that she was confident, I liked that she was spontaneous and I liked her sassiness. If this is "bland" then do Chris Evans in Captain America and Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange even exist? Or have their blandness cause them to disappear? Because they were not great in their first appearances and only got better - much better - in subsequent ones. Larson wipes the floor with them and delivers a heroine I instantly liked. I cannot wait to see her interact with other characters in Avengers: Endgame.
Larson has wonderful chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson who is clearly having tons of fun. There's underused Annette Bening and Jude Law in forgettable roles but thankfully there is also Ben Mendelhson who delivers hilarious and memorable performance as Skrull leader Talos, a character I hope we get to see again. The cast is all at the top of their games, it's just the script doesn't give everyone enough to do. There is also a cat called Goose played by four feline thespians, that everyone is going to love after this movie. The cat, Fury and Talos (and his science guy!) provide so many laugh out loud moments, making it one of the funniest MCU movies to date.

The cinematography and visual effects are lower-tier MCU effort with some of it evoking the memory of Aeon Flux - the dreadful look of the scenes where Carol talks to Supreme Intelligence. It's a mixed bag, though - the CGI work to make Samuel L. Jackson look much younger is incredible. But then there is the problem almost all of MCU movies face - bland look of the movie. What do they spend money on with those films and why don't any of them except for Guardians movies look good? 21 tries and 2 movies with impressive visual side is not a good result at all. Thankfully, at least the music is better in MCU flicks lately and this one is no exception - with both the score and the selection of songs being great.
The bland VFX side of the film is rescued by Larson's performance whose Carol is having so much fun while using their powers even with the film not looking as spectacular as it should, her joy distracts from that part. The gesture she makes after she shows Ronan the extent of the powers is the most badass thing she does in this movie. But Marvel should have tried harder here. It's inexcusable that the technical side could have been better and isn't. They have the money and the resources. The film sometimes looks like a Star Trek inspired show and even though is is a theatrical release from a major studio the production design and the look of the movie are worse than in that one Black Mirror episode.

While the story overall is nothing new, there are two rather inspired elements of it - the twist as to who the real villains are provides a smart and insightful surprise, positioning the beautiful as the bad guys and the different looking Skrulls as the victims of oppression. And another great bit is that while this is an origin story, there is an interesting way of presenting it, with part of the mystery being what really happened to Carol and us putting the pieces along with her.
The film may not have a scene of such incredible power as Wonder Woman's No Man's Land sequence but the montage of Carol persistently getting up after she fell down, over and over again, throughout her life, as men tell her what she can or cannot do and she constantly defies them, showing them exactly how capable and brave she is, is the film's most emotional and best moment. There's also truly lovely tribute to Stan Lee at the beginning of the movie and the shot of Larson's smile after his short cameo, a moment that was added recently, is such a nice and heartwarming touch.

While Captain Marvel, if it had been a Phase 1 movie, would be right on time and appear better than it does today, it would be unfair to hold it against the filmmakers that the studio itself has been out of touch for so long. It's a fun, heartwarming and entertaining movie, like pretty much all of MCU movies are. And with Brie Larson's Carol we finally have a well developed, interesting female heroine from somewhere other than Wakanda. It took a very, very long time but the future of MCU is finally, at least in part, female.
74/100 (USA, 2019, 124 min)
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.
Directors: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
Writers: Anna Boden (screenplay by), Ryan Fleck (screenplay by)
Stars: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn