SYMBOL OF CHANGE
Captain Marvel smashes barriers
The writers of Captain Marvel could not have scripted a better ending for its star-studded media conference.
In Beverly Hills two weeks ago, the final question came from a 12-year-old girl reporting for Scholastic Kids Press Corps.
She asked actress Brie Larson, who plays the titular superhero, what she hoped kids like her would take from Captain Marvel.
“I’m more curious to know what you thought of the movie,” Larson said. “I mean, we made it for you. That’s what this is all about.”
The film was amazing, the young reporter answered, adding she loved that Larson was playing an “empowering female” role model.
It was the perfect topper to the media conference. While it elicited the obligatory “aww’s” from the assembled cast, journalists and bloggers, it also fit nicely into what seems to be the dominant conversation about Marvel’s latest cinematic outing.
Like the Oscar-nominated Black Panther before it, Captain Marvel has become a symbol of a sea change in the industry when it comes to diversity and representation.
Trumpeting Larson’s Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel as its first “stand-alone, female-franchise title character” has become a key plank of Marvel Studio’s promotional campaign. Larson herself has expressed a desire to use her growing clout to help diversity in the movie industry.
The actress made headlines weeks before the film was released, attracting an onslaught of trollish attacks on the reviews-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. They were believed to be a backlash to comments she made about film journalists being overwhelmingly white and male. Rotten Tomatoes has since announced it will now prevent commenters from registering reviews before a film’s release date.
Still, whatever historical ground Captain Marvel may be breaking or important conversations it may be prompting, Larson admits she was worried at first about playing the galaxy-traversing Captain Marvel, or any other superhero. Known for playing complex characters, including her Oscar-winning turn as Joy in the harrowing 2015 drama Room, Larson did not want to play a one-dimensional protagonist. So she was delighted with what she saw as nuance and flaws in the character.
“The whole character arc and turn of this is watching her be this major risk-taker, which means it’s not always going to work out the best,” said Larson, who trained for nine months to prepare for the physical demands of the role. “Those are the defining moments of her character, where she doesn’t (lie) down. She gets back up. That’s everything. That’s for everybody. There isn’t a person who can’t relate to that.”
As with its past blockbusters, Marvel opted to give this unwieldy mega-budgeted behemoth to indie directors who are untested working with movies on this scale. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are best known for such low-budget, character-driven dramas as Half Nelson (2006) and Mississippi Grind (2015).
Still, as with most Marvel films, Captain Marvel does not shy away from spectacle, offering dazzling special effects and production design, massive outer-space battle scenes, fast-paced hand-to-hand combat and a complex origin story for our titular hero.
We first meet her as a warrior-in-training, part of an elite squad of intergalactic heroes battling shapeshifting aliens on various planets. She possesses considerable powers — including the ability to shoot photon beams from her hands and travel through space — but is still being instructed on how to harness and control them by her commander and mentor, played by Jude Law. She also has no real recollection of who she is, with only fleeting images of the traumatic events that gave her powers and made her part of this intergalactic war. When the alien battle brings her back to Earth in the 1990s, she begins to remember parts of her past. That includes rekindling a friendship with Maria Rambeau, played by Lashana Lynch, and her daughter Monica. Carol and Maria were once best friends and surrogate sisters, bonding over their attempts to become fighter pilots in a male-dominated military that didn’t allow females to take on that role.
Celebrating women in the military, single mothers and female mentors are among the subplots in Captain Marvel, all rarities for superhero blockbusters. But the heart of the film may be the deep bond between Carol and Maria.
“I have relationships like this, this is what I live every single day,” Lynch told Postmedia. “To be able to play the love between two sisters instead of romantic love on screen was a real pleasure, because we rarely get to see that.”
Lynch, Larsen and Boden all went to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas to get a glimpse of life as a fighter pilot. It was both thrilling and poignant, Lynch says. Thrilling because she actually went up in a F-16. Poignant because she was able to meet female pilots, including Jeannie M. Leavitt, who became the United States Air Force’s first female fighter pilot in 1993.
Lynch says Marvel blockbusters have become unlikely vehicles for challenging stereotypes about what women can and can’t do.
It’s a monumental shift from what films have historically done, she says. “Which is the woman being silent, the woman being an accessory, the woman having to answer to a man, the woman not taking complete ownership of herself or having to rely on a romantic relationship to give her power,” she says. “We are just allowing women to live in their truth and be their authentic self daily.”
The Marvel Universe can be a mysterious, bewildering place for those entering it for the first time.
In the interests of keeping plot secrets airtight, many who audition are not given much if any information about the role they are auditioning for, which tends to make deep preparation difficult.
Take Gemma Chan. The British actress — best known for her roles as the android Mia on the TV series Humans and in movies as the wealthy but warm-hearted Astrid Teo in Crazy Rich Asians and Bess of Hardwick in Mary Queen of Scots — was brought it to read from segments of a fake script during the early days of auditioning for Minn-Erva, the blue-skinned sniper who serves on an elite squad of warriors fighting a galactic war in Captain Marvel.
“Because everything is so cloakand-dagger and very secretive, I didn’t know what part I was auditioning for,” says Chan. “I auditioned using dummy (lines) because they don’t let you read the script, and then sent the tape off. I didn’t know it was Minn-Erva I was being considered for. I did a couple of rounds of that.
“Then I talked with the directors (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) and they pitched me the character but they still didn’t say the name. I didn’t get to read the script until after I accepted. So it’s kind of an unusual process — but understandably given the hunger for information about Marvel.”
Granted, Minn-Erva would likely have remained a little mysterious even if Chan had been given a thorough breakdown of the character. As with many of the heroes and villains entering Marvel’s expansive cinematic universe for the first time, Minn-Erva did have a previous life in comic books. So Chan dutifully set about doing some homework, eventually realizing the character’s history was anything but straightforward.
“Once I did know who it was that I was playing, I did a little bit of research and looked at the evolution of the character, because obviously she has come in various different iterations and had various different allegiances and relationships through the comics. Then I looked and worked on our script and our story — because again it’s a bit of a shift from the Minn-Erva of the comics.”
What was clear was that even if she did get under the blue skin of Minn-Erva, she would still need to undergo significant preparation for the physical demands of the role. While perhaps not as intense as Brie Larson’s vigorous, nine-month training to play the titular character, Chan put in three months of priming to play Minn-Erva.
“I started doing some strength training to start with, because they to said you needed to train for the suit,” she says. “It’s like wearing a resistance suit, it kind of wants to snap you back into a superhero pose. Even to lift your arms takes a lot of effort. You can’t walk like you would normally walk. I had to work on my core strength for that and then started doing boxing and kick-boxing, which I’ve never done before, that we had to do for the fight choreography.
“I started doing that in London. Then when I came over to L.A., I started working the stunt team doing sniper-drill kind of work and learning how to handle lots of different weapons. I don’t think MinnErva is ever without a weapon.”
Minn-Erva is the most physical role Chan has played in her career and worlds away from Astrid Teo. But the one element that Captain Marvel and Crazy Rich Asians share is that they have both sparked conversations about diversity and representation on screen. Much of the early chatter around Captain Marvel has been on these subjects, with Marvel Studios promoting Larsen’s Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel as the first “stand-alone, female-franchise title character.”
Beneath the spectacle and storyline about two alien races engaged in an intergalactic war are themes of empowerment and female friendship and nods to single motherhood and women who serve in the military.
For Chan, it’s a continuation of a conversation she has been a part of since Crazy Rich Asians became an unexpected hit and the first major-studio release with an all-Asian cast since the Joy Luck Club 25 years earlier. The conversation continued with the colour-blind casting of an actress of Asian descent as the white Bess of Hardwick, a confidante of Queen Elizabeth I, in the historical drama Mary Queen of Scots.
“For me, it’s all about what the story is, what the characters are, why that story needs to be told,” says Chan. “If, in some way, that project can also shift or move along the conversation or start a new conversation, then that makes that project more exciting to me.”
Crazy Rich Asians made headlines again after this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, with some commentators suggesting the academy’s complete snub of the critically acclaimed box office champ showed Hollywood is still not as evolved as it should be when it comes to recognizing the power of diversity on screen. It was, however, nominated for four Critics Choice Awards and took home that trophy for best comedy.
“Obviously, it would have been amazing to be nominated for the Oscars, but at the same time I’m so happy for the recognition that it has had,” Chan says. “It was a complete surprise to win the Critics Choice Award, genuinely. I know people always say ‘Oh I wasn’t expecting it.’ But we really weren’t expecting to win. I feel that, in some ways, that recognition is enough.”