Captain Marvel (2019)
Captain Marvel character was in DC and Marvel Universes, and do to legal issues, was a series of characters. In 2012, they made Ms. Marvel into Captain Marvel and the screenplay was started soon after. There was a ton of politics around creating Feminist Superman -- and the reviews were getting trashed before the film came out. But out of curiosity, I went and saw it, and despite a few flaws -- it was one of the better Marvel movies. (I preferred it to Black Panther (2018) which was also the obviously Black Justice Warrior).
Cliché
This movies starts with no backstory, and the amnesia/nightmares trope... where we slowly get pieces in flashbacks that don't make sense. It's not fast paced at the beginning, but you get the basics: Kree Empire's capital planet of Hala, Starforce member Vers, combat, badass with energy blasts from her hands, planet controlled by an AI God, shape shifting enemies, yada yada yada. Interesting enough but the first 1/3rd was kind of weak-sauce clirché drek, if that was going to be all there was, for 2 hours... but the plot kept shifting and getting more interesting.
Eventually, they get back to earth (in the 1990's), the backstory starts to make more sense, and it's an origins film about Coulson and Fury as well as Carol Danvers. The plot kept moving with predictable but face paced twists... and getting to know Fury, and a little Coulson and S.H.E.I.L.D./Avengers, was worth the price of admission. And while there were plot-holes and stupid things they should have filled in more (how does shifting into someone's shape give you their memories), and stuff like that -- overall it was amusing once immersed in it. And I like ones that have humor weaved in, and this one had quite a bit, once the story got moving.
I far prefer individual super-hero films with a lot of backstory to the ensemble film chaos and one-liners of the Avengers. So this one fit what I like. By the end it runs into the same issue I had with SuperMan and Wonder-Woman films -- I don't like the omnipotent Super-Heroes that are more God-like than Human (way too overpowered). And she falls into that category. But the film still played really well for me, and while there was a little dose of "Girl-Power" stuff, I didn't see what all the hoopla or negs (negative reviews) were about. I'd recommend it for being a good Super-Hero film, if that's your genre.
The Girly StuffHollywood (Marvel) created their best intersectional-feminist Super-Hero (Wonder Woman was DC), because that's what they do -- try to make a super-hero for every major demographic, to broaden their audience. It's annoyingly obvious as it is saying that people of a certain race/gender should only identify with those like them -- e.g. it's trying to be "inclusive" by assuming everyone else is a bigot. I want to be entertained, not lectured to. So it can rub me wrong... but the comics and Hollywood have done it long before this film. If they do a good movie/story, I don't care. The best execution was last year's "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)" where they just combined all the Spidermen (and women) into one movie where multiple Universes intersected. The film was entertaining, and showed that there's a lot of spidermen, boys, women and pigs, of different races/creeds -- something for everyone, without having to be preachy. Usually they create disasters like Ghostbusters, for no good reasons. This was more towards the former than the latter.
Then there's the reviewers (Critics) that tend to lean left, and hate good movies if the message is informed and conservative, and love bad movies if the facts turn out later to be false, but appeal to leftist ideologies anyways. I have a section on Reviewer Bias that goes into many examples of the spread between Critics/Viewers. That Gender-bending Captain Marvel seemed to outrage the trolls, and the movie got abysmal interest ratings before it was release. RottenTomatoes changed their policies to block rating a movie before release in response (to help the studio out, or for political agenda). Not a good reaction, if you ask me. Let it work itself out, and people will learn/grow on their own. All this did, was on the day of release, the leftist critics give it an 80%, while the pent up angry-viewers gave it a 34%, a +46 point spread (it was actually 92/17 at peak/valley). That was after RT filtered out a bunch as invalid. But leave it alone, and the viewers are bringing the ratings up into the high 50's, and still climbing. After seeing it? I'm on the critics side: this was one of the better Marvel films, and all the negs were likely trolls against the politics of Hollywood switching his gender, or the actresses comments in reviews (where she got a little to "Girls rule, Boys drool"), rather than the quality of the final product. So did they have to play gender-bender and create the Feminist SuperMan? Not really. But who cares? It was still a better story and movie than any Superman film. And the message crossed genders, without being in your face. And the trolls will lose, without RT having to do anything. Enough viewers are liking it, that they're overcoming the trolls and the ratings are going up. And the hype might get as many to see it over this fight, as will avoid it. Heck, I went to see it, just to see if the trolls were right or not. And decided that they are not. If Hollywood and the actors/promoters had just shut-up about the feminist angles on this, and let the work stand for itself, it would have probably done much better. Trust your audience and the people to gravitate towards your product, without the lectures, and you could have gotten all the rewards without the backlash. Because the backlash is more against the promoters than the actual film. IMHO. |