Review: Captain Marvel

I say in my blog tagline that I review "books and the very occasional movie". The movie reviews have been extremely occasional, and will probably continue to be, for a few reasons.

Firstly, I don't watch all that many movies.

Secondly, the movies I do watch are pretty much all popular ones that thousands of other people are going to review, and that generally don't have a great many depths to explore. These are the movies I like; I won't pretend otherwise.

And thirdly, I don't feel I have the same insight into the movie genre as I do into written fiction. I write fiction; I haven't, and probably never will, come anywhere close to writing a screenplay. (Though if anyone knows Taika Waititi, I have an urban fantasy novel series set in Auckland I'd like to discuss with him...)

Anyway, with those disclaimers made, I saw Captain Marvel the other day, and enjoyed it. The power was scheduled to be out at our house so that maintenance work could be done on the lines, and we decided going to a movie was the obvious play.

What interested me about Captain Marvel was that it's a kind of movie that wouldn't have been made just a few years ago. It's a superhero action-adventure, but with a woman protagonist who hasn't been raped, doesn't have a love interest anywhere in sight, has a close female friend, a female mentor... This is not how Hollywood used to make its movies. There was a maximum of one major female character, and she did not have a character arc; she was there for the men, because of course she was.

There are men in the movie. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) plays the sidekick, and plays him very Watsonly. Jude Law (speaking of Watson) plays the Damn Patriarchy. Most of the rest of the protagonist's initial team are men, except for one other woman who doesn't like her (emphasising her lack of fit in the team); but none of them are really developed much. They're like the dwarves in The Hobbit who aren't Thorin. The title character is the main character, and is also most definitely the protagonist. She's competent, confident, in charge, and taking no crap from anyone. Her undaunted stare alone is worth the price of admission.

I enjoyed the moment when her honorary niece, her best friend's daughter, encourages her mother to go off on the adventure, because if she didn't, "think about what kind of example you'd be setting for your daughter". I have the feeling we are going to see that little girl again in some future Marvel movie.

There's a major plot twist about halfway through that, if you reflect on it at all, is a commentary on current international affairs, but also works really well as a pivotal moment for a character in search of her identity.

And someone was credited at the end as "Cat Trainer". I'm sure that was a difficult job, but the cat scenes were great, whether by the cat trainer's ability or by CGI, who can even tell these days?

So, what were the movie's flaws? Well, the protagonist's powers worked by handwavium and we never did understand exactly how, but that's standard for superhero movies. Once they were inside the secure facility, there was very little evidence of security, but that, too, is standard in the action movie genre. They found the information they needed extremely fast, but searching for clues in real time is boring, and it's an accepted convention that, whether you're looking on a computer or in a set of files, you will find what you need almost instantaneously. So... no criticisms that don't apply to the whole genre and its tropes.

I can't quite bring myself to give five stars to a movie that's light enough that I would watch it, so it gets four. But it's a big four. Definitely five-adjacent.