«I enjoyed the film as a satisfying pro-empowerment romp.»
I should state up front that I’m a big fan of nearly all of the Marvel movies, largely because I grew up reading the comics and have a fondness for the characters. So, needless to say, I bought tickets for my whole family to see Captain Marvel a month ago and I’ll be seeing it opening night. I’ve been pretty careful not to read any spoilers for the film. All I know is what I’ve seen in the trailers and what I know about the character in general. The important point is that I was really looking forward to this. But I’m starting to get a sinking feeling from some of the reviews.
Today I started looking at some of the reviews and the tone I’m getting is making me wonder if it’s going to be an enjoyable experience or if everything now is just about checking the right socio-political boxes. From National Review:
Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and the directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence.
Okay, but that’s coming from a conservative site (and is written by a man). Surely it’s just biased? Here’s Time’s Stephanie Zacharek:
Is anyone else getting tired of role models? I don’t mean real-life people who are doing estimable work every day, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg (although even her recent commodification, through no fault of her own, threatens to flatten some of her dimensions), but virtuous fictional women who are put up before us as a jaunty reminder that “Girls can do anything!” Girls can do anything and, like all children, young girls can have moments of self-doubt, times when they need reassurance. And there’s no reason we shouldn’t be seeing women superheroes on-screen; Lord knows there are enough guys. But the delivery system matters, too. And while we know that little girls (or boys, for that matter) might not rush out to see an earnest biopic of, say, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt or Margaret Sanger, does our sense of the power and capability of women always have to be filtered through a highly fictionalized superhero universe—as if that were the only way we could possibly bring ourselves to register the value of what women can bring to the table? Words like badass and kick-ass, used to describe women, have been trotted out so often that they’ve come to mean nothing.
