Thoughts on Captain Marvel

[seekingferret]

As usual, I am that asshole who posts spoilers.


Jews do not dance in this movie.

I thought it was overall a lot of fun, but I thought the flashback-heavy beginning made for a disjointed movie that took a while to hit its groove. Which is okay if you want to make a movie about amnesia and memory, but the groove the movie eventually did hit didn't seem to me that it was really about those things, it was about action and ethical heroism.

The movie uses its amnesia premise to set up a reversal from Kree warrior Vers, invested in the struggle of the heroic Kree warriors against the evil, manipulative shapeshifting Skrulls. When Carol regains her memories, she realizes that actually the Kree are evil imperialists and the Skrulls are being victimized. But this is annoyingly simplistic, what I really wanted was the version of this story I've seen a few times in the comics where eventually the realization is that both the Kree and the Skrulls are causing damage with their war and our hero picks the third side, fighting for innocents. The film doesn't quite get there. And in fact as Abigail Nussbaum points out, the movie ends up concluding with Nick Fury learning all the wrong lessons from his encounter with Carol. He concludes that humanity needs bigger and more powerful weaponized humans - the Avenger Initiative- if it wants to be secure in the universe.

For all these reasons, overanalyzing the politics of the movie is ultimately going to be frustrating. But I liked Carol a lot and I liked the satisfying clarity of her realization that she owes her mentor Jude Law nothing, that she only needs to prove herself to herself and not to the men trying to dictate her world.

And I liked that the movie lived in a technicolor world of bright shades and sparkles, it was a really joyful visual ambiance from start to finish.

And the movie made me have Nextwave feelings so I made this.




And the vid I have already started to plan is a multi-movie Tesseract vid to Tom Lehrer's "I Got it from Agnes" because the movie added a bunch of people who handled the Tesseract including a perfect lyrical match for "She then gave it to Daniel/ Whose Spaniel has it now" with Fury--> Goose!

Comments

[ambyr]

And the vid I have already started to plan is a multi-movie Tesseract vid to Tom Lehrer's "I Got it from Agnes" because the movie added a bunch of people who handled the Tesseract including a perfect lyrical match for "She then gave it to Daniel/ Whose Spaniel has it now" with Fury--> Goose!

A++ would watch.

[aurumcalendula]

Ooh! That vid sounds fun!

[seekingferret]

Unfortunately the quality of the video in the Captain Marvel torrents I found last night is such shit that I'm going to have to wait for better quality source before I can vid it.

[laurashapiro]

I AM SO EXCITED TO SEE YOUR VID! The song is perfect!

[seekingferret]

Unfortunately the quality of the video in the Captain Marvel torrents I found last night is such shit that I'm going to have to wait for better quality source before I can vid it.

[laurashapiro]

Alas. Hopefully it'll be available soon.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I want to point out that our pictured young Lt. there is now an adult and I want her movie next. =)

Am I the only one that thought the MiB was strong? Also, where did Howard's Tesseract go?

[seekingferret]

I'm not sure I follow your comment about 'Howard's Tesseract'... There's only one Tesseract. After Red Skull was killed, Stark recovered it and along with the newly formed SHIELD, which he helped co-found, he began to study it/exploit it. Fifty years and much research later, a SHIELD-affiliated researcher (who was actually secretly a Kree) using the Tesseract in an experiment was involved in a fatal plane crash while testing an experimental lightspeed drive and the Tesseract was believed lost... until 6 years later SHIELD recovered it.

What I do think is interesting is that Howard Stark was assassinated by the Winter Soldier in the intermediate 6 year period... I wonder what connection, if any, there is between the desperate search Stark and SHIELD must be conducting for the Tesseract and Stark becoming a target for HYDRA.

I think it likely that the ascension of Nick Fury and the rise of the Avenger Initiative are associated with the power vacuum left when Howard Stark was killed... when you consider that TWS establishes that Fury's rise is associated with his alliance with HYDRA agent Pierce, it raises interesting questions about the connection between HYDRA's vision for Fury and HYDRA's desire for the exploitation of the Tesseract.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It was unclear to me that this was yet another way station of the hot potato, that Howard's retrieval of the Tesseract and Fury's use of it for HYDRA style weapons powered via it were not as seamless as previously presented.

What are your thoughts on how what on the surface seems to be a stripmall break-in and burglary managed to call out SHIELD?

I like your thoughts about the motivation of the assassination more than Howard being so unwise as to transport five bags of Serum while Maria was in the car with him. I have to consider that the video presented could be designed to rewrite history. Clearly Howard cannot contest it, and Barnes is unlikely to be listened to.

[seekingferret]

What are your thoughts on how what on the surface seems to be a stripmall break-in and burglary managed to call out SHIELD?

Ha, the subject of what SHIELD was doing pre-Iron Man I is something I have had many thoughts about over the years and I have evolved/reconfigured my headcanons as more canon appears.

See one early version of my thoughts: https://archiveofourown.org/works/425527 back when my thinking was that pre-Iron Man SHIELD was oriented as a sleepy think tank tasked to plan for future security threats, of which there weren't many. They developed impractically expensive futuristic weapon systems, gameplanned for what to do if there's an alien invasion or a mecha attack, and basically did nothing useful. In other words, Fury's line at the end of Iron Man I is almost total bluff. And then all of a sudden Iron Man shows up and the rest of the Avengers in quick succession and suddenly all the impractical and useless weapons system plans get instantly ramped up into reality.

That is no longer consistent with what we've seen of SHIELD in Agent Carter, The Winter Soldier, and Agents of SHIELD. Clearly SHIELD had a 50 year history having been spun out of the SSR, and it seems to have spent a good fraction of that time being reasonably active in the field fighting against periodic outbreaks of rogue technology... where rogue technology of course means any technology whatsoever not under their control. The SHIELD we have seen is a pretty substantial powerhouse even pre-Avengers era, although that requires us to believe that there has been a constant stream of outrageous security threats for them to deal with, which kind of takes some of the luster away from the Avengers.

Under my first version of SHIELD you can kind of understand why they showed up for the Blockbuster break-in...the FBI was called, they didn't want to go because the security guard sounded kind of crazy, so they passed the buck to SHIELD, who they regarded as mostly a joke.

But under the second version of SHIELD, it's less obvious. Perhaps they didn't come responding to the security guard, perhaps SHIELD even in 1995 had satellite surveillance and they saw this UFOish thing crash into the Blockbuster and that's what brought them to the site. That's about the only answer I can fanwank that makes sense.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Yeah, it would have to be on basis of "not a usual mo" to go through the roof via reentry of Earth's atmosphere speeds. Add to that very peculiar phreaking from the same stripmall...

The remit Fury at one point stated was pretty much countered by Agents of SHIELD showing SHIELD field agents scattered around the world. I would think it's not a constant stream of outrageous security threats. More like a regular stream of X-Files monster of the week incidents with a chance of opportunistic bad guys and 084s being discovered. The sort of thing that even with credible witnesses reporting it, normal agencies would leave alone until Cincinnati dropped half a mile into the ground.

By Agent Carter, half of SHIELD's early business was keeping things Howard invented from getting used in by people never intended. And the other half was HYDRA camouflage. They should have realized their funding went through too easily.

[seekingferret]

You don't build a fleet of helicarriers to fight a stream of X-Files monsters of the week, though! The scale of SHIELD as we see it argues against there not being that many threats. The whole idea of pre-Iron Man SHIELD is pretty hard to reconcile with its possible missions.

And what to make of Nick Fury being a level 3 agent in this movie when even, like Grant Fucking Ward is Level 6 or 7 in Agents of SHIELD Season 1?

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Ah, but what happens In World between 1995 and when the Helicarriers first leave dry dock? That, clearly not Monsters of the Week, unless we're talking Smoky Backroom Arc Instead. ;) Never underestimate someone's hidden agenda smoothing your own way to bite you when most inconvenient.

Watsonianly, SHIELD has gotten very Water Buffalo Lodge and changed their Level Numbering System. Doyle-ist, stares at How Worldbuilding Didn't Happen behind the scenes at AoS.

New Guy Phil Coulson in 1995, doesn't make much sense of Recruited Straight out of College and 1964 birth year. (It would make even less sense if the pre-retcon straight out of High School was in play.) Now, for Rippet Good Fic/Unravel My Sweater*, recruited straight from being a High School Principal, sure, weirder things have happened than a young white man being put in charge and then getting an even stranger 'promotion'.

*I'm still auditioning replacements for "crack fic". Devo, knitting, and Weezer are in my lane.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Okay, I've come across something that may make some sense of this.

Comic book S.H.I.E.L.D. may be a 'nod' to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the work I found this in wasn't about Marvel, so an anecdote not a footnoted fact); Marvel does love to pour premises from the comics into the MCU whether it makes sense for the characters or not. (The Inhuman known as Lash, was not originally [Season 3 spoiler]. Giving characters original names to do surprise reveals and then switch them 'back')

So, say MCU's remit before Iron Man, Hulk and Thor was mad engineers, cartels, cabals and other conspiracies that more standard alphabet soup agencies wouldn't be able to buy into the explanation before Dire Event Doomed.

Skye infiltrating Ian Quinn's island, that's classic Man from U.N.C.L.E. just with the MacGuffin stepped up a few notches.

The helicarriers are pretty much overkill for that too, but, they were cool to draw. Man from U.N.C.L.E. admittedly was when flying commercial wasn't so vexing.

[lokifan]

That Tesseract vid sounds HILARIOUS.