“Captain Marvel” is a fun return to the past
Every once and a while I scratch an itch by re-watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though in recent attempts its sprawling size has meant I’ve taken an approach more akin to sampling. I can already tell that “Captain Marvel,” the newest Marvel movie, will slip right in between “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Iron Man” the next time I sit down to watch.
This is because “Captain Marvel” is set in the 1990s, before the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it feels like a 1990s action movie, with a twist that isn’t too twisty, and a story that does well by a narrative we’ve seen a hundred times before.. I give directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck a lot a credit for presenting this story as something you certainly don’t need any familiarity with the MCU to understand. The movie acts in a lot of ways like it was released in 1995, introducing us to a world and a set of characters who are likeable, fresh, and fun. If this movie had been released in 1995 - just the way it is - we would remember it fondly alongside “Terminator 2,” “Independence Day,” and “Jurassic Park”. It’s that kind of movie. And it does a far better job than “Terminator: Genisys,” “Jurassic World” or “Independence Day: Resurgence” have done in recent years at capturing that blockbuster feel.
“Captain Marvel” is a throwback to the 1990s, and I know that will make a lot of folks happy. But, strangely, it harnesses a lot of nostalgia for an era of Marvel movies made not so long ago. In a lot of ways, “Captain Marvel” fits perfectly into the first phase of the MCU, the kind of thing I fell in love with between “Iron Man” in 2008 and “The Avengers” in 2012. I am a big fan of Marvel films like “Thor: Ragnarok” or even “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” because those movies feel like comic-book stories in an ongoing saga. They don’t have to stop and introduce us to new technology or do much world-building. Instead they throw you right in the middle of a superhero adventure, assuming (after 20 years of superhero movies) that the audience knows what’s going on. But I’ve missed the hints and teases of those early years. I’ve missed the movies where the mention of Project Pegasus was enough to send me into a thrill, the movies where little hints at worldbuilding connected the Tesseract across six films. (This movie has the Tesseract in full force, just like a Phase One movie should!)
“Captain Marvel” feels like a ‘90s action flick; it also feels like a late-2010s Marvel flick, but with all the things Disney and Marvel and Hollywood have learned since then. Carol Danvers is so fun, and Brie Larson so likeable, while feeling exactly like the Carol Danvers of Marvel Comics. If Chris Evans perfectly captures what makes Steve Rogers tick, Larson does the same for Carol. She’s best when she’s letting loose and having fun, and this movie gets that, giving her moments of pure joy. It does what Marvel has been doing since the beginning: getting the characters right and surrounding them with big action and good-enough stories. Marvel has learned since the early days that it is okay to introduce audiences to aliens and strange worlds, and to let characters have powers from moment one in a film, and it all works here. Lessons from “Guardians of the Galaxy” are on full display, and it pays off. Maybe audiences are more willing to accept the strangeness of superhero films, or Marvel is more confidant, but the movie benefits from setting much of its action in outer space. And Marvel uses their new favorite trick, the digital de-aging technique they’ve been playing with since “Ant-Man” to give us a young Nick Fury played by Samuel L. Jackson who manages to be both believable and not-creepy for an entire film.
Along the way “Captain Marvel” does an admirable job of trying to be something more than just a movie where the superhero happens to be a woman. Carol’s relationships with other women are the most powerful in the film, and she’s cool and powerful because she’s confident in who she is, not because she’s acting like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Will Smith. A lot of that is pulled from the most recent runs of “Captain Marvel” in the pages of Marvel Comics, where Kelly Sue DeConnick (who has her own cameo in the film) redefined who Carol was and what Captain Marvel means. The average viewer won’t pick up on the delicate balancing act between the DeConnick run and the classic Carol Danvers origin, but the screenwriters and directors manage to pull the two stories - told decades apart and about very different versions of Carol Danvers - into a fantastic harmony. I came out of the film very impressed at the adaptation skills of all involved, which is not something you can say about every superhero film.
“Captain Marvel” is not the best Marvel movie ever. But, neither was “Thor” or “Doctor Strange.” Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers is a fresh face for the future of the MCU while still fitting in with the other heroes, and I’m glad, like I was last year with “Black Panther,” that we’ll get to see her very soon in this year’s “Avengers.” And the next time I’m watching the MCU all the way through, I’ll try and forget this was released in 2019 and imagine a world where it came out in 1995, or better yet, 2011. It fits right there in my best childhood memories of “The Avengers,” and that’s a wonderful thing into itself.