Power to Marvel madness
CAPTAIN MARVEL (8) Directed by: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck Starring (voices): Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn
“You’ll believe a man can fly” was the tagline for Richard Donner’s Superman, which, on its release in 1978, became the first comic-book blockbuster of the modern age.
Hollywood, quick off the mark as ever, has taken 41 years to realise a woman can too.
Captain Marvel is not the first female-led superhero film: even if you gloss over the embarrassments of Supergirl, Catwoman and Elektra, 2017’s terrific Wonder Woman beat it to the punch.
But the latest Marvel Studios production still feels as thrillingly revolutionary, in its own way, as Donner’s cloud skimming pop cinema opus.
There is a moment towards the end when Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) shoots off to save the day and an 11-year-old girl, played by Akira Akbar, looks up at her in amazement as she literally blazes a trail across the sky like a departing comet.
Corny? Absolutely – and proudly so. But as you watch, and perhaps realise this image might mean as much to the next generation of women as the shots of a soaring Christopher Reeve did to chaps my age, you can almost feel the cinema expanding around you, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice after a swig from the Drink Me flask.
All of which leaves the Men’s Rights trolls who are noisily vowing to spurn the film for its allegedly feminist overtones looking all the more ridiculous.
To quote Chris Rock’s immortal line about Jada Pinkett Smith’s furious boycott of the 2016 Oscars: “It’s like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited.”
That said, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film seems likely to break box-office barriers regardless, since this 21st chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and penultimate instalment of the series’ apocalyptic Phase Three, niftily sets up an entire second decade of Marvel madness.
Something that has always set the Disney subsidiary’s films apart from the competition is their ability to explain exactly who their heroes are in just a single gesture or joke.
This proves particularly crucial in Captain Marvel, since its title character herself has no idea.
An interplanetary war is raging between two alien civilisations, the technologically advanced Kree and the shapeshifting Skrulls, whose goblinlike forms are a blank canvas for endless chameleonic disguises. Carol fights for the former side as a member of an elite Swat team under the smug command of an overweening mentor played by Jude Law, who calls her “Veers”, and seems determined to make her prove herself on his terms.
Yet tantalising fragments of a previous life keep breaking through: fighter jets, boozy karaoke nights, Annette Bening.
This opening section plays like earnest science-fiction in the Star Trek mould and often feels oddly perfunctory – until you realise certain details have been glossed over deliberately, setting up a delicious first-act twist.
This blasts Carol to an unprepossessing rock known as Planet C53 – Earth to you and me – where it’s the 1990s, and low-level Shield agent Nick Fury (a digitally botoxed Samuel L Jackson) has been dispatched to investigate her bumpy arrival.
What Boden, Fleck and their co-writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet have made here is subtly but vitally different: a story about someone discovering who they were in the first place.
Call it Aristotelian entelechy or (yuck) self-actualisation, the Superman parallels are there for all to see. But since our hero this time is a heroine – and one whose life to date has been largely delineated by men, from jeering Air Force bros to an overbearing father glimpsed in flashback – it has a very different and fresh emotional resonance that’s seized upon by Larson, whose terrific lead performance can be understated and self-questioning, yet also big on girl-boss attitude when it counts.
(One faithfully mid-90s fight scene unfolds to the strains of Just a Girl by No Doubt.)
What Carol lacks in gutsy set-pieces to rival Wonder Woman’s jaunt across No Man’s Land – clear, stylish, memorable action has rarely been a Marvel strong suit – she makes up for in surprising emotional depth.
Carol’s sparky buddy chemistry with Jackson is a given, but her connection with Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), a fellow pilot and mother of the little girl mentioned above, is the best-drawn, most affecting female friendship I can recall in a comic-book film. (Not a long list, but still.)
Marvel films are all about anticipation: they’re designed to make you crave the next helping before you’ve even swallowed the current one.
But this is the first in a while that I’ve found myself immediately hungry to revisit. – The Telegraph