Captain Marvel [Review by Haus]

Captain Marvel is a standalone hero film about a capable, hard-nosed blonde (with no love interests, natch) who (a) battles aliens, (b) discovers her own identity, and (c) does the right thing on a galactic scale. It starts out weird with a heady draught of alien twaddle, but builds steadily to a satisfying crescendo of nineties rock, she-power, and cutting-edge special effects. It also falls neatly into the lap of our particular cultural moment, which I classify here as a strange mocktail of Trumpism, #metoo, Pantsuit Nation, refugee family separations, and Frozen-drunk middle-schoolers coming of age on iPhones.

See it — it’s fun. If a strong, independent titular character doesn’t woo you (and she may not — as Brie Larson plays her quite flat), then come gasp as the digital fountain of youth lops two decades off Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg. And if that doesn’t do it, come for the marmalade cat “Goose” (bound to be a crowd favorite), the terrific Ben Mendelsohn (albeit under makeup that smacks of Gene Roddenberry’s table leavings), Annette Bening in color contacts, or nineties nostalgia (Blockbuster! Pagers! True Lies!) that will serve mostly to remind you that you’re now as old as Ozymandias’s sands.

Captain Marvel does surprisingly little crossing over to other properties in the sprawl, but it’s impossible to truly discuss this film without considering its place in the canon. So, let’s.

Captain Marvel is the bazillionth (okay, 21st) installment in the so-named “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” a never-ending hanky trick that’s been flowing without pause from Stan Lee’s magical top hat for over ten years.

In that time, Kevin Feige’s production team has earned over $17 billion at the box office, and we’ve been treated to a technicolor smorgasm of heroes. It’s been a bumper, but also bumpy, decade: While some MCU properties did fresh and good things with previously second-string characters (Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy), others soiled the knickers of prior mainstays (The Incredible Hulk), and some (the first two Thors) just filled out the waistline. Synthesizing all these scattershot origin stories and then some, the sprawling franchise has come together several times in the Avengers films, the most recent being last year’s Avengers: Infinity War — a film that, while not bad by any means, did strain under dozens of primadonna characters jostling and craning for screen time and plot points. The end result was rather like madlibs with special effects, or superhero speed-dating.

In part because of its too-many characters, Infinity War ultimately crashed into the elephant in the room: power unbalance.

What do I mean? Well, solo hero films work because the titular hero is presumably more capable than at least the surrounding citizenry, and roughly matched to the villain as well. But crossover movies complicate matters: It’s easy enough to throw all our favorite heroes in the same room, but why should Hawkeye or Black Widow, who have no special powers, be at all comparable to the Hulk, or Vision, or even Spider Man? How can Iron Man, who’s one buffer overrun away from plummeting into the gutter, go toe to toe with time-shifting wizards or explicitly immortal Norse-themed gods? They can’t, really, unless story architects concoct separate bubbles of influence in which each character can shine.

But that sort of partitioning doesn’t really work when one villain must face them all: Such as when, in Infinity War, baddie Thanos waved his bejeweled oven mitt and vaporized half the population of the universe — along with half the heroes, irrespective of their powers or popularity. No matter what powers they had, or how they stacked up against one another, Thanos always wins. Thanos was the nuclear bomb to the rock-paper-scissors, the playground’s answer to all questions — my toy defeats all your toys.

So where does Marvel go from here? If every hero in the room, however strong, is equally susceptible to disintegration by Thanos, then who can possibly defeat him?

As the after-credits scene teased, Marvel’s answer to the Gordian plot-knot of Infinity War was to simply conjure a new character — or rather, an old one who somehow wasn’t important enough to appear during the first twenty films.

That’s right: In the broader MCU context Captain Marvel’s main ability is that she was not once mentioned in the first twenty movies, and as such Marvel has never needed to paint her as being vulnerable to Thanos. Like the lucky passenger who missed a doomed plane, her chief value as Deus Ex Machina (or denouement diva?) will be that she just wasn’t around when it all went bad.

(It’s cute, really, watching the MCU architects writhe and squirm to keep continuity, particularly in films whose entire premise demands complete disavowal of accepted physics, biology, and astronomy. When a galactic cat horks up an energy cube, all bets should normally be off.)

All that said, you don’t need to have sat through the fifty-odd hours of MCU movies to enjoy Captain Marvel — in fact, it probably wouldn’t help.

This installment seems aimed at first timers, a gateway drug for newcomers to the franchise. And taken on those terms, it’s an enjoyable ride. So enough MCU navel gazing — just see this one.

Haus Verdict: Whether fate, fear, or focus groups kept Carol Danvers out of the MCU until now really doesn’t matter — either way, the Marvel brain trust has dusted off their back-issues and plopped her on center stage. We’ll see how that all plays out later this year. But for now, enjoy some light nostalgia and woman-led interstellar hero-fluff without the stifling gridlock of the Avengers films.

Captain Marvel opened everywhere March 8.

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