Captain Marvel (2019) | A Billion-Dollar Failure

After Avengers: Infinity War set the world on fire with anticipation for the thrilling conclusion of the Infinity Saga, Marvel Studios released a little movie about a singular superhero in the Marvel universe that had yet to be featured in her own movie. Sandwiched between two of the biggest film sequels of all time, Captain Marvel was released in 2019 and made more than a billion dollars at the box office. Having seen the film for myself, I find it stunning that a movie this boring could have made so much money.

Pros

Jude Law never phones in a performance

Cons

Unlikable protagonist
What was her struggle, exactly?
Allegory for immigration is dumb on multiple levels
Boring experience
Jokes that devalue characters in the universe

Plot & Thoughts

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) is an intergalactic warrior for the Kree Empire with superpowers, which are expanded and explained much later in the film. She is hunting a group of shapeshifting aliens known as the Skrulls, but gets separated from her team and ends up on Earth. She meets a young Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) of the ‘90s who has not yet lost his eye, and agrees to work with him to find the Skrulls and stop their evil plot. Or are the Skrulls not as wicked as she’s been told, and Danvers is being misled? Who are the real villains of this story? The truth may surprise you…Or will it?

As the Infinity Saga drew to a close, it had a great climax with Infinity War, only to be followed up by something that’s less than underwhelming. The origin story of Captain Marvel could have been contained in a flashback sequence of her in Avengers: Endgame, and you could have spared everyone several hours of boring “girlboss” storytelling.

Captain Marvel is just a mess of a movie and contributes next to nothing to the inhabited world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The plot is uninteresting. The hero is unlikable. The decision to make the shape-shifting Skrulls an allegory for immigration only sets this movie and future films up for failure. I’m not sure what the filmmakers were thinking when they made this movie, other than their hatred of a certain politician, because that’s the only explanation for making a villainous species from the comics into a metaphor for immigrants. Just make them like they were in the comics; there’s no need to date your movie with a political viewpoint that screws up your plot. There was plenty of room to make the Skrulls an intimidating and scary group of antagonists, but the filmmakers settled on making them sympathetic victims of the same thing that was keeping Captain Marvel down: The Patriarchy Kree Empire.

It’s not even as though we can rely on the main actress to keep the movie interesting, either. Two hours with Brie Larson staring or grimacing without emotion does not make for a compelling character. Her performance is not just wooden, it’s petrified to the point of being a stone. Larson’s attempt at stoicism makes her both boring and unsympathetic as a protagonist. Even her origin story sells her short. I won’t bother getting into too much detail about the overt symbolism that has already been done to death when it comes to the plot or what the character’s powers represent or how she overcomes the antagonists, but I still have to acknowledge it in some way here. In summary, she had the power all along; she just needed to unlock her potential by having a self-affirming vision of herself getting up after being knocked down, over and over again, to defeat the Patriarchy villains. There are plenty of scenes in this movie that have the tropes designed to appeal to that “modern audience,” which heavily dates this movie.

Also, the stupid cat thing. It’s used for shock value and comedic effect to the point that it actually undermines a beloved character. Nick Fury gives a harsh and compelling speech during Captain America: The Winter Soldier about the things that he’s seen and the costs that they had while removing his eye-patch to reveal his scarred eye. It’s an impactful moment in that film and one of Fury’s best. Unfortunately, I guess he was just bullsh*tting because he actually lost his eye to the cat alien scratching him. Ha-ha, so funny, right? Glad we could use that gag and eviscerate a good moment in a better movie. Good job!

In between the moments in which Danvers and Fury are searching for the Skrulls are scenes that tell a little more about who Danvers was before she got her powers, some more overt “modern audience” propaganda, and occasional action. The action in this movie isn’t very exciting, with the sequences in the first half of the movie proving to be better simply because you don’t yet know how powerful Captain Marvel is.

By the end of the experience, it’s clear that she was never at risk of getting hurt because of how immensely strong she is. She even demonstrates it after her self-affirming vision and completely destroys a Kree ship by flying through it at light speed. Some might consider that a cool moment, but I can’t help but think about the fact that she is part of the Kree’s forces at the beginning of the movie and likely had various friendships with some of them, and now that she realizes she was being used by that empire, she does not hesitate to wipe out hundreds or even thousands of them in an instant. In other, more thoughtful films, an act of violence like that would probably be treated with a little more scrutiny, but since she’s the female superhero who was supposed to be the new face of the MCU, no accountability is required.

TL;DR

Captain Marvel is easily one of the worst films in the Infinity Saga for the MCU, but because it is so dull and about uninteresting characters, I don’t really have that much to say about it. The plot pretends there’s a fair amount of intrigue and mystique to its story, when it really is just a bait-and-switch experience that manages to bore you while it shoves political ideology down your throat. Brie Larson gives a stiff performance and manages to make the titular character come across as insufferable. She may be the strongest hero in the universe, but I think we’d be better off without her.

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