Starring: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Lee Pace and McKenna Grace
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios
Runtime: 124 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2019
| 
| 
This action-adventure, sci-fi fantasy is based on the Marvel Comics character, Carol Danvers, and is the twenty-first film in the Marvel Universe. The original Captain Marvel was created for the comic books in 1939, when Billy Bateson turned into Captain Marvel by saying the word “Shazam”. A second Captain Marvel created for Marvel Comics emerged who met a woman called Carol Danvers, and eventually a woman by that name took on the mantle of Captain Marvel. The gender of Captain Marvel has changed from comics to film, and across time.
In this film, Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races – the Kree (see “Guardians of the Galaxy”), and the Skrulls (see “Fantastic Four 2”). The efforts of the Skrulls to inhabit Earth make them a formidable enemy, and in the ensuing conflict, Captain Marvel, emerges as a powerful superhero figure. The movie’s storyline loosely borrows elements from Roy Thomas’s 1971 comic book, “Kree-Skrull War” in the Avengers series.
This film is the first female-driven superhero movie (in the Marvel Universe). The story focuses on Danvers coming to grips with her limitations and vulnerabilities. She is dismayed that she has incredible powers, and she struggles to understand her emotions, and her past.
In the film, Danvers (Brie Larson), a former US Air Force pilot, joins an elite Kree military team called Starforce, and proves her mettle as a galaxy hero. Her transformation was made possible by a freak accident that caused her DNA to be fused with that of a Kree, which gave her superhuman strength, astounding energy and the ability to fly. A Kree scientist (Annette Bening) made her part-Kree genetically. Jude Law, the commander of Starforce, and a Kree warrior, trains Danvers on how to use her powers.
Committed to justice, Danvers tries to integrate her special abilities with her human flaws – such as as reckless decision-making, and a capacity for impulsive action. In this movie, she questions her identity in ways that tell us that her memory was affected by the accident. Danvers becomes a friend-in-action of Nick Fury (Samuel L.Jackson), the future director of S.H.I.E.L.D, and the film is set in the 1990s when Earth experienced the Skrulls invasion, led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), himself a Skrull, who worked undercover in S.H.I.E.L.D. as Fury’s boss. The Skrulls and the Kree are alien enemies, and in perpetual conflict with each other. Skrulls are especially impressive in the Marvel world with their paranoia-inducing tendency to alter their shape, and the end of the movie shows a twist in social justice that helps to explain the conflict.
The special effects in this movie are highly sophisticated, as one has come to expect from Marvel Universe films. They feature thrilling and fast-paced action, and demonstrate outstanding visual effects. On screen, the effects merge with the multilayered features of Danver’s complex personality. Brie Larson rises to the challenge of her role, following her Oscar award as Best Actress in 2016 for her acting in “Room”. In this movie, she doesn’t fully understand her abilities and how she got them, but keeps her potential confusion, and memory lapses, constantly before the viewer in a dramatically effective way. Her vulnerability firmly anchors the film as a character study of a Marvel superhero(ine), despite the gender confusion in the way that the history of Captain Marvel, as a man and as a woman, has unravelled over time.
The film is mindful of the Marvel history of the fantasy movies that have preceded it, and the Marvel sophistication remains intact. The Marvel Comic Universe is obviously a shared universe; and the movie’s special effects live up well to their technological promise. Obviously, more focused adventuring lies ahead, when Brie Larson returns to the Marvel universe, with her identity intact, and the epilogue to the film promises that Captain Marvel will return in “Avengers: Endgame”, which is scheduled for release in April, 2019.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
12 Random Films…
