Captain Marvel

My wife and I went to see Captain Marvel yesterday, and with a day or two to reflect I have to say my feelings are mixed on the film.

Negative stuff:
The stakes didn't feel serious, not the scale thing, it's just you know what will happen to every important character already by virtue of the movie being a prequel of sorts to the MCU, so there isn't a ton of tension, we know who lives and dies because we already saw it in the future.

The story was a pretty basic MCU heroes journey thing, with a big flashy confrontation at the end that we all would know the result of even if it wasn't a prequel.

I guess the story felt like something that Marvel/Disney thought we needed to see so that Avengers: Endgame makes sense rather than a story that needed to be told on its own merits.

Good stuff:
The writing was fun, Samuel L Jackson's Nick Fury has been underused in recent movies and him and Brie Larsen's Carol Danvers worked well together.

Speaking of, Brie Larsen owned the shit out of the role. If the character doesn't become a franchise it won't be because of its actress. She was confident, motivated, and powerful, and had an arc that satisfied well enough.

Cat good.

There was nothing in the film that you could point to and say "This was poorly done", everyone involved was working hard and it looked and sounded good.


Now for my mixed feelings:
When I saw Black Panther I knew I was watching a good movie and I enjoyed myself, but I also recognized that it wasn't written for me. In large part that experience was the same with this movie.
I don't have a ton of experience with gaslighting, while I think everyone, man or woman, runs into someone who does it to them now and again, and most everyone gaslights someone else at some point or another, I do not have a systemic appreciation for the practice, if that makes sense. What I am trying to say is that the major theme of Captain Marvel's character growth is very clearly not written for me. It is a central idea of the film, that her emotions are invalid, and indeed make her weak, that she should be addressing problems not on her terms, but on the villains(a man, of course). Her fight with and eventual defeat of those ideas are given a weight that I personally am not equipped to understand in the same way that the average woman probably does.

This isn't a problem per se, like I have said before not everything has to be about me, the thirty-something straight white male, I am not exactly an underserved section of society. But without that impact the movie didn't hold as much attraction for me as many other Marvel offerings, I had a good time sure, but I probably won't be seeing it again in theaters.