Thoughts on Captain Marvel
Mar. 11th, 2019 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAs 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!
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!