Captain Marvel (2019)

Here there be spoilers...

Yes, it’s more than a bit ridiculous that Marvel Films, having produced twenty movie vehicles for their roster of superheroes with ever-escalating profitability, just now gets around to an entry showcasing one of their female protagonists. And then only after seeing how much money Wonder Woman (2017) made. Captain Marvel is a character who’s known radical alterations over the years, as a nomenclature that’s been around since the 1940s, and was only claimed by test pilot turned cosmic wayfarer Carol Danvers in 2012, after she had served as Ms Marvel since the 1960s. To be fair, there’s certain spry calculation to the way Captain Marvel has been installed in the pantheon to service the wider Marvel universe, presenting perhaps their most powerful hero yet, who carries the brand identity in her name, in a way that makes us anticipate how she might intervene in the nihilistic situation the end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) left us with. Directors and coscreenwriters Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck also try to shake up the basic template of this kind of origin story introduction, with a different approach to the accustomed process of meeting a hero and following them through transformation and apotheosis. 

Here Danvers (Brie Larson) is introduced as Vers, an amnesiac soldier in training for the Kree Empire, an alien realm whose warlord Ronan (Lee Pace) was the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Vers appears human but bleeds blue Kree blood, and possesses a strange, unstable power that lets her unleash energy bolts from her hands. She’s being trained in combat and discipline by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), on the behalf of the Supreme Intelligence, a faceless entity that takes on the appearance of someone beloved or respected of anyone in audience with it, and guides and instructs the Kree. The Kree are fighting a vast cosmic war, and Vers, Yon-Rogg, and a team of fellow superwarriors are sent out to take down a cell of the Skrulls, a race of shapeshifters, designated as murderous terrorists by the Kree. Vers is taken captive by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), leader of the Skrulls, who uses mind-tapping technology to analyse Vers’ brain in their search for some ambiguous clue. Vers manages to break loose, creams many of Talos’ goons, and flees their ship, crash-landing on the planet C-53, or Earth as the locals call it – specifically, in the Los Angeles of the mid-1990s. 

Flung into the company of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, CGI’d within an inch of his natural life), a senior agent of the fledgling SHIELD security organisation called out to investigate her strange appearance, Vers begins to uncover her true identity as a military test pilot lost and presumed killed in a crash six years earlier, and tracks down her old comrade Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch). The key to Danvers recovering herself and gaining true mastery of her mysterious power lies in working out what she was doing with Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening) at the time of her crash, whose appearance the Supreme Intelligence takes on when Danvers speaks to it. Turns out Lawson was actually Mar-Vell, a Kree scientist turned Skrull sympathiser who was trying to develop a great new energy source whilst operating undercover on the relatively peaceful Earth. She enlisted Danvers in helping her elude Kree discovery, and Danvers absorbed the power during a struggle to prevent Yon-Rogg capturing it. The threatening Talos and other Skrulls prove to be desperate refugees out to rescue family members Mar-Vell was hiding on her hidden space laboratory, and Danvers begins to realise she’s not only fighting on the wrong side but has had the real scope of her abilities carefully bonsaied and repressed by her masters. 

Catapulted to major stardom by winning an Oscar for Room (2015), Larson was highly effective in two 2017 releases, Kong: Skull Island and Free Fire, playing in each 1970s characters filled with Women’s Lib-era pith and forced to negotiate with hulking male companions and adversaries on the path to self-realisation. Danvers promised to be a natural extension of these roles, a dazzling straight arrow whose great problem is learning how to circumvent the limitations imposed on her, whether by sexist expectations of her parents and society, or the equally pernicious constraints applied by the Kree, symbolised by a dampening device installed on her neck. The script of Captain Marvel had input from Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who wrote 2018’s surprisingly good Tomb Raider revival. There’s a similar lilt of quippy, ever so mildly eccentric humour here and there for Danvers, as she falls into a buddy action movie rhythm with Jackson, who, having survived Die Hard With A Vengeance (1994), knows well how those work. Boden and Fleck pay arch tribute to Pulp Fiction (1994) by having the two actors swap fast-paced lines in a diner, whilst making Mendelsohn call back to Reservoir Dogs by copying Michael Madsen’s milkshake-slurping technique.

Despite its many promising collaborators, however, Captain Marvel carries the faintly desperate aroma of a franchise running on fumes, almost completely lacking in cleverness, real wit, or a compulsive sense of adventurous undertaking, retreading the motifs of the earlier Marvel character introductions but never finding a way of making them feel at least vaguely fresh. The plotting and background seem to befit a film that might have come a good six or seven entries earlier in the franchise, with a story involving the recovery of the – yawn – Tesseract and cameo appearances by villains already defeated and who weren’t terribly interesting in the first place, like – double yawn – Ronan. The effect of the flashback-riddled structure is less one of slowly resolving enigma than one of general, irritating clumsiness. Captain Marvel coasts by on cute reminiscing on the recent past, from pop feminism to Blockbuster video stores and the clunky early internet, in a way that never develops beyond a grab-bag of appended memes; the film has no interest in anthropology apart from reaping a few chuckles from the parents who’ve been dragged by their ten-year-olds to the screening (also, I admit to being profoundly unready for ‘90s nostalgia). Captain America has been defined by a similar trick of disparity between his general, ingenuous virtue and his status as creature out of time and place, but there the incongruence is much more marked and dramatic, and says something about the gap between the age that gave birth to superheroes and the current one. The period setting here is such a thin conceit it lasts about twenty minutes before the film abandons contending with it. 

The splintered backstory and the way it relates to Danvers’ stranger-in-a-strange-land quandaries foils itself when it comes to generating much chance for humour or depth of theme. Thor (2011) worked in this regard because its hero’s arcane turns of phrase and behaviour were genuinely out of step with the world he landed in. Here Danvers faces no such style gap. Some more inspired filmmakers might have tapped the disparity for a sharper social commentary: for all its failings the Kree culture doesn’t seem to have any sexist or racist reflexes beyond its desire to assimilate, but nobody here had the inspiration to portray Danvers as bewildered or appalled by plunging into a society where such things exist. Whilst I was no great fan of Black Panther (2018), at least it attempted to root its drama substantially in the radical racial attitude its material invoked. Doubtless there will be think-pieces spun off this film’s gestures in the same direction, as when Danvers stoically ignores a biker exhorting her to smile before pinching and riding off on his chopper, itself a hoary cliché of girl power imagery. But there never seems to be any point in the tale where Danvers actually seems unsure or scared or endangered by her fractured sense of self, which means there’s no suspense or meaning to a late montage which demonstrates that, well, she gets knocked down, but she gets up again, you’re never gonna keep her down. 

I did get one good laugh, as Fury comments to Danvers that she ought to change out of her stolen clothes, which includes a baseball cap and Nine Inch Nails shirt, because they make her look like “somebody’s disaffected niece,” a line that at least admits the phoniness of the trope deployment. But like many Marvel films, there’s a surplus of modestly amusing banter and a painful deficit of real invention to situations and staging. The schism between expansive space opera and down-to-earth thriller might have yielded some surreal visual and story energy, but there’s a general, blithe acceptance here that betrays the way the Marvel universe has long since become familiar. Boden and Fleck, best-known for shaggy, seriocomic films like Half Nelson (2006) and It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010), are the latest indie film talents pressganged to handle the actors interacting whilst farming out the big stuff to the well-oiled studio effects houses. To say they have no apparent talent for style or spectacle or orchestrating a sci-fi action movie would be a gross understatement. About seventy percent of the film takes place in a house, an array of tunnels, and identical space station corridors. The key twist about the Skrulls, who turn out to be the good guys harassed by the Kree and trying to find a new home, is delivered with absolutely no conviction or credibility: Mendelsohn swings from swaggering, teasing antagonist to earnest victim-hero without a pause for breath.

The film leans on Jackson’s near-infinitely malleable ability to play upon his ferocious persona through degrees of effect from high threat to low comedy, and he and Larson plainly get along like a house on fire, but that’s about it for actual entertainment value. I’ve been waiting for an entry in the Marvel cycle since Jackson’s appearance at the end of Iron Man (2008) galvanised the entire proposition that gave him something to do; now here’s a vehicle that gives him an extended role and yet, somehow, still feels largely inconsequential. Larson’s intelligence and energy, far from being unleashed by her role, feel swaddled in cling-wrap, dull and shiny and upright as a Kenner figure. Male superheroes can be prickly or oddball or pathetic or poignant, but all those memes about the noble power of female role models that did the rounds after Wonder Woman’s success have birthed the most duly plastic of protagonists. This leads to interminable scenes underlining that Danvers is being inspirational for Rambeau’s daughter Monica (Akira Akbar) and through her for a presumed audience, in a manner as flat and bland as the nods in the same direction in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), with added overtones of the pedagogic directness of the admonitions appended to ‘80s and ‘90s animated kids’ shows. Perhaps progressivism is as desperately nostalgic and longing for safe and familiar postures as conservatism at the moment. The script is downright painful in places for how it keeps foiling its beats and climaxes. It feels revealing in some manner that Scarlett Johansson’s much more complex and interesting Black Widow has been constantly neglected for a standalone vehicle in favour of this stiff. Many superhero films are most entertaining between action scenes, but here the sequences of biffo are, although mostly interchangeable, actually a relief from the stodgy run-arounds and sit-downs and heart-to-hearts, and Larson actually seems to be having fun as the film stops needing us to remind us that women can be powerful and simply lets Danvers actually be powerful. 

Late in proceedings Boden and Fleck offer one bash-up scored to No Doubt’s “Just A Girl,” a touch that’s both on the nose (what, no training montage to “I Am Woman”?) but counts as playful genius in these circumstances. Actors of the calibre of Gemma Chan and Djimon Hounsou are completely wasted in their roles as Yon-Rogg’s henchmen, not to mention Law himself. Meanwhile a great deal of screen time is instead dedicated to a cat: Danvers and Fury pick up Goose, an apparently stray animal living in a government bunker, and eventually find it’s actually a ferocious alien beast in disguise, but not before Fury has revealed an unexpected softy streak in hugging the adorable pet. Yes, here’s a multimillion dollar special effects extravaganza that leans on Samuel L. Jackson making smoochy with a cute cut, like a struggling YouTube account. Now there’s a metaphor for current popular cinema if ever I saw one. At least the finale, as Danvers at last unleashes her complete power and assaults Ronan’s space fleet, does deliver some grand sprawls of unleashed power fantasy. But make no mistake, this is to the action-adventure film tradition what Soylent Green is to nutrition. There’s still a good chance Larson’s Danvers can work well for the Marvel imprimatur, especially if she butts heads with some of the established rivals. But someone had better work harder on that one, because my patience with the brand is wearing very thin. I was instead left dreaming of what kind of soulful, grounded take on the material Kathryn Bigelow might have conjured circa 1995…