Captain Marvel

Deus Ex Marvela
or
"Trust Me, True Believer" (My Flurken Swallowed My McGuffin)

The first of 2019's "Captain Marvel" movies is here,* and it has a lot of significance for movies, Marvel movies, and Women-in-Films, and as a result it's stirring up "the usual" dust-up's on increasingly unreliable review aggregates and social media. It's like the perfect storm of click-bait, but it has nothing to do with the movie itself.

...Which is good, clever (in the details stream) and provides a great role for the peculiar talents of Brie Larson, who's been a joy to watch in everything I've seen her in. It's a good entertainment, but not a great movie. But, worth seeing...if only because you're going to get a hint of how The Marvel Movie-Makers are going to solve the issues caused by the cliffhanger of Avengers: Infinity War—which, in short-hand, is "they're going to cheat" by some story-telling sleight-of-hand while they were distracting you with other stuff. Fair enough.

After an atypical Marvel Studio's logo—the "R.I.P Stan Lee" version—we meet "Vers" (the afore-mentioned Ms. Larson), who is having nightmares and can't sleep. The dreams have something to do with a crashed ship on a blasted landscape, where Vers is bleeding green blood and looking at a woman (Annette Bening) as she's pointing a weapon at an alien form (a Skrull, if you're familiar with Marvel comics) and wakes up. She goes and wakes up Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), her commander in the Starforce, based on the planet Hala of the Kree Empire (yeah, that's a lot of exposition there) is annoyed, but still accedes to her demands for a fight-work-out where he tells her she needs to tamp down her emotions and not rely on her abilities of using force-blasts out of her hands (luckily for him), a gift of the Kree for her abilities (and, of course, if she's not a good little girl-soldier, those powers will be taken away). Face front, soldier.

Rogg assigns his Starforce Squad to rescue a Kree spy from captivity, but the mission is a blind, designed to lure the Starforce agents into ambush by a band of Skrull warriors led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn, who we don't get to see enough of). Vers is captured and subjected to a memory scan in which she starts to remember that many years ago, she was a human on Earth, an Air Force pilot, working for a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). Her memories of her past inspire her to escape, she grabs a convenient space-pod, jets out of there and crashes on the most convenient planet nearby, C-53 according to the Kree.

That would be Earth circa 1995.

You can tell. You can just tell. 

Well, Vers' checks out a couple video's, then tries to find a way to contact Yon-Rogg, which she does by hot-wiring a telephone—in a booth—and telling him that she's on the hunt for Skrulls and don't wait up. Thing is, with Skrulls, they can shape-shift. Makes it easy to detect...except if you start asking them questions because any memory they might have of their shifted shape is only a few seconds old and they're no-good at long term memory.

Meanwhile, Skrulls have chased Vers to Earth where they start doing good human imitations and looking for her. They should just ask around because she's walking around L.A. "dressed like she's ready for laser-tag." That line is from a young agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who with his partner Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), is getting a lot of reports about a woman going around Los Angeles looking a little surly, dressed in rubber armor, and freaking people out, like the Security Guard outside that Blockbuster whom she approached and asks "Do you understand me? Is my Universal Translator working?"

This is where casting is kind of important. A lot of actors would play up the confusion, the fish out of water aspect, but not Larson's Vers. She walks around like she owns the place and doesn't give a rip if people are giving her second and third glances. She's got a job to do and she charges through it, with an attitude like she's dealing with morons—which she might be and probably is, so just go with it—it seems to be working with these monkey-people. No "Prime Directive" issues here. Just go with the "direct" approach. 

Meanwhile, Fury has his own encounter with a Skrull, while he's simultaneously doing a "French Connection" style chase with an elevated train with an escalated fight between Vers and one in  disguise. Taking the body of Fury's Skrull back to S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury decides to find "Blockbuster Girl" and find out what the hell is going on because he's never encountered anything like this before, and his desk job is getting a little dull.

Turns out they're looking for the same thing—Vers' identity, and between a visit to Project Pegasus, where Dr. Lawson had worked on a top-secret "light-speed engine" and the crystal containing Vers' extracted memories, they discover that Lawson was killed in a mysterious plane crash, where all were lost, including the pilot, a USAF flier named Carol Danvers. That's part of her memory. Afterwards, she was evidently taken straight to Hala...for some mysterious reason, given abilities by the Kree and enrolled in their Starforce. Why? 

After pouring over the files from the crash, Fury and Danvers take a flight to Louisiana to talk to a friend of Danvers', a fellow pilot named Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and she is recognized instantly by her and her daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar), and they fill her in on the woman she's forgotten to be. At the same time, Talos appears, with a story of his own, and the adults in the room determine that it's time to do things the right way...for once.

Carol Danvers: [Referring to the front of the baseball cap that Fury has given her ] What is this? 
Nick Fury: It's a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo.
Carol Danvers: Does announcing your identity with branded clothing, help with the covert part of the job?
Nick Fury: ...said the space soldier who's wearing a rubber suit. 

Okay, there's a lot going on here, as fully 3/4 of the movie is a grand setting up of a story that the last quarter completely subverts. Even stalwarts who've been reading the Marvel "Captain Marvel" stories over the years are going to be a little confused at how the five screenwriters (all but one are women) have turned and spun the "Mar-Vell" stories on the tip of curved blade atop the Starforce's helmets—the film-makers allude to this by making Danver's hair part of that design, which I found very clever. Trust me, there's a lot of back-story to tell, but it managed to be done in 2 hours and squeeze in a lot of credits (with inserts—one is advised to stay to the very end).

What they've done is turn the comics' Carol Danvers from the standard Marvel "girlfriend" who got lucky enough to acquire superpowers, to a person who grew up determined to be the best she could be—who then got lucky enough to acquire superpowers. She already HAS the responsibility before she gets the great powers. It's an improvement, if hewing a bit close to the Lantern Corps story. But, Carol already knows right from wrong and her responsibility before being rewarded by the..."thing"...event...that gave her powers.

Now, she just has to decide who's side she's on.

Performances are good, all the way through, with Larson being the stand-out, but a shout-out has to go to Jackson who does his most prolonged...and...best performance as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Especially, as he's got to play a much younger version of the character than he ever has before. Yeah, okay, he's been pixelated to lose a few years in appearance, but, hand it to the guy, he STILL has to play a character 25 years younger, and that takes attitude, bearing, and energy and he's all that here (the actor is 71 years, ladies and gentlemen).

And he's a great match-up with Larson—as they were in Kong: Skull Island, but this time's the roles are reversed (I kept expecting her to say to him: "Bitch, please..."). Fury is looser and more of a smart-ass, while she's regular Army in the uniform of a renegade and their banter may not have the wit, but it has the speed of old Howard Hawks banter, which combined with the duo's abilities to change expression on the thinnest of dimes, well, they're just a fun couple, and Fury's regard for this super-soldier from the sky explains a lot about everything he's done in the Marvel Universe movies.

It's the first time a woman has directed a Marvel movie, or co-directed one, and one wishes that Ann Boden and her co-Ryan Fleck had more of a command on things behind the camera as they do in front of, but it's just not so. They are well-regarded for their indie flicks, but their action scenes will leave you scratching your head about what's going on and who's doing what to whom. It might be they haven't figured out how to separate individuals who are all fighting in same uniforms, or the best way to hide a stunt-double, but the early fight scenes are a mess, and when the action turns cosmic, they shoot from a distance (to save on the rendering, or because we've gotten tired of super-heroics on a Richter scale?). No pun intended, but it gives it less of an impact. And, as we're just a little clueless about what Danvers' powers are, exactly, a little closer demonstration might have been nice—Marvel, whether in comics or movies, tend to be a little vague about power-scales/distributions. 

Without going into too much detail (now's my chance to be vague), as much as I enjoyed a lot of Captain Marvel, there's the sense that The Studio was holding this one back (or something else in the "I dunno know what it is, but it sure packs a wallop" side of the Marvel school of cosmic speculature) as its "Ace in the Hole" for writing itself out of the "How are they going to get out of THIS one" dilemma posed by the Thanos-culling of the MCU in Infinity War—and that is by telling you about somebody you didn't know about, with some powers that haven't been figured out yet, but will when it becomes convenient in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. In the meantime, just put in a "TBD" for that power-level and expect it to be risky and that "I've never gone this far before, I don't think I can handle it..." to be uttered at some point. I sure hope not. In the idiom of the internet, that would "suck."

So, the result is a movie with minor joys and good intentions that will eventually be enough to solve the Marvel Saga's immediate problem, and maybe—just maybe—allow the idea of more female-centric superhero movies in the Marvel Universe (how long has Scarlett Johansson been waiting for her "Black Widow" movie? Quite awhile, and enough that you can imagine her studio contract expiring before they get around to it).

Oh, and one other neat little idea in Captain Marvel—Stan Lee's cameo. The movie's setting being 1995, we see him on the elevated train trying to memorize his scene from Kevin Smith's upcoming Mallrats** (which came out about that time), a neat little call-back for his next-to-last cameo in the Marvel movies. As irritating and non-essential as they could be, one already misses the prospect that he won't be around for more of them, and that's a sad thing. Excelsior, true believers.

(Just don't say "Shazam!")

*It's a loooong story and since this post is about this current version of the trademark "Captain Marvel" we won't get into it. We will give this one it's due.

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