Movie critics watch a lot of movies. It’s our job, but it’s also born from a passion for a creative medium that can be transportive and transformative.
Speaking personally, I see at least one movie, sometimes two, every day, seven days a week, year after year, and yet something remarkable happened when I watched Captain Marvel: For the first time, ever, I wished that I had a daughter to share the experience with. I actually imagined sitting and watching her watching this film, if only to feel the joy from seeing her mouth stretch cheek to cheek in a grin and a light in her eyes burn bright with inspiration.
If Wonder Woman broke barriers in 2017 by finally delivering the first female-led, comic book-inspired superhero film, then Captain Marvel represents the fruit borne from that watershed. But, instead of a goddess groomed for success, Captain Marvel’s Carol Danvers symbolizes something more powerful and lasting.
Over the course of 124 action-packed, funny and thrilling minutes, Danvers transforms into a touchstone for intelligent, confident, awkward and wholly individual young girls and women who refuse to be constrained by faux male superiority, and who still believe anything is possible as long as you believe in yourself.
Captain Marvel, the latest film from Marvel Studios, is hands-down its best standalone character introduction since Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014.
Marvel films succeed where others fail because they work on multiple levels. They aren’t content simply to translate panels from dusty, decades-old comic books into moving images. They reimagine existing tropes and templates for a new audience.
And each standalone MCU movie picks a familiar genre best designed to showcase its particular hero’s strengths. For Captain Marvel, that inspiration is the classic buddy-cop structure that anointed Reggie Hammond in 48 Hours as the new sheriff in town and made audiences watching Lethal Weapon trust that Martin Riggs’s suicidal tendencies were masking an indelible desire to save everyone else before himself.
Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wisely pair Danvers (Brie Larson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) on an odd-couple mission to thwart an alien invasion, but their adventure is as much about adding new depth to Fury (his first pet was named Mr. Snoofers!) as it is allowing Danvers to blossom and emerge as both his equal and a true leader.
At the same time, Captain Marvel is an unabashed and refreshingly geeky intergalactic space opera. It openly embraces its weirdness, much like Guardians, but in its own, wonderful little ways.
For those not in the know, Danvers was an Air Force pilot consistently dismissed by her father and a long list of male peers (one superior officer actually tells her, “There’s a reason they call it a cockpit”), who is exposed to alien Kree technology that imbues her with fantastic abilities, before being kidnapped to a distant planet. After a six-year absence, and presumed long dead by her best friend and fellow pilot Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), Danvers returns from the Kree capital of Hala with no memory of her former self, arriving back on C-53 (as Earth is known in the cosmos), in the early 1990s, hunting a band of shape-shifting Skrull warriors trying to locate a specific technology.
Captain Marvel regales viewers with bold vision (the Kree are ruled by a symbiotic A.I. known as the Supreme Intelligence) and a crackling urgency born of current affairs (the Skrull are basically immigrants caravanning to a new, safer planet, who find themselves demonized by the Kree simply for existing). Yet the film also basks in its weirdness, mining nostalgia through a Happy Days lunchbox and a killer '90s alt-rock soundtrack, and giving meaty supporting roles to Annette Bening and Ben Mendelsohn, who plays the funny and engaging Skrull commander Talos.
The film offers a killer, bittersweet cameo by the late Stan Lee (his second-to-last appearance before April’s Avengers: Endgame). It also showcases some startling new movie-making magic that de-ages Jackson and Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson to show them as younger versions of their beloved characters, and delivers one of the best supporting characters ever created for a Marvel movie, Goose the cat, who steals every scene in which he appears.
Captain Marvel also reimagines the entire Marvel template by telling its origin story in reverse, as a mystery to be unraveled, slowly building to its showcase, that moment when Danvers becomes the warrior she always knew she was, and it’s a show-stopping sequence that will leave fans cheering.
Much like Robert Downey Jr., or Chris Evans, who seemed born to portray Iron Man and Captain America, respectively, Larson seizes the spotlight as Danvers/Captain Marvel and soars in a role that should define the Oscar winner’s career and make her an icon for young women across the globe.
“I don’t need to prove anything to you,” Danvers says defiantly, during the film’s rousing third act, and she’s right.
With Captain Marvel, the MCU isn’t just introducing a new hero to its fold. After 19 films, Marvel Studios has handed the reins to a new leader, who just happens to be female, but who also succeeds because she’s female, and that’s revolutionary.
Thanos better watch his butt come April. There’s a new sheriff in town.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Mar 7-14, 2019.