Although it is a muddled and superficial film, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of which is among the most watchable movie stars working today. Their tandem charms and relative comfort working within the Marvel aesthetic make the experience almost tolerable.
Directed by indie journeymen Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Marvel’s latest chapter in its never-ending story is almost unwatchable in its first reel. The titular character has about three names, thus we can stick with “Captain.” We meet Captain on her home planet, where she’s haunted by memories she can’t quite snap into focus. It’s a warrior society, and in its first third the film borrows from everything from Green Lantern to Superman to The Matrix and grows more tedious with every purloined almost-idea.
There’s an early covert mission Captain goes on with her fellow alien freaks that’s a mess of too-dark cinematography and meandering, uninspired direction. The formal maneuver of representing Captain’s repressed/erased memories of a past life through extremely on-the-nose editing gets old instantaneously. It’s also annoying. There was an opportunity here to do something interesting with the are-we-our-memories philosophical underpinnings of the story, the feminist subject matter, and the 1990s setting. But these elements are never explored, just simply presented.
It would have been great, for example, to see the 90s setting used to some thematic effect rather than simply mined for its obnoxiously obvious playlist. A Marvel movie that actually mimicked a 90s movie aesthetic would have been… well, it would have been as good as any idea in Captain Marvel. The film’s one actually worthwhile major theme — that Captain Marvel had been fighting on the wrong side of a war because she didn’t know who she truly was (literally) — is rendered in such an incurious fashion that the notion is wasted.
Larson navigates the character’s intensity and, remarkably for an alien, penchant for wry comedy more or less skillfully. Of course, the problem with a hero who literally doesn’t know her true identity is that whatever personality traits she might exhibit seem random. Which they are. Oh, is she also a swordsman of sarcasm? Sure, why not?
Larson gets by on her instincts, never really seeming to know, well, who this character is. (Compare with Robert Downey Jr.’s handling of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films; this is less a testament to Downey’s talents than it is to the fact that Tony Stark has character traits that make him recognizable in a literal crowd of superheroes.) Predictably, her best scenes are ones that resemble her own indie background — e.g., sitting at a kitchen table and reminiscing with an old friend, or engaging is semi-barbed banter with Nick Fury (Jackson).
To the extent that Marvel films exist as long-form trailers for the next Marvel film, Captain Marvel is about as effective as it gets. It has the perfunctory boisterousness and pointless swagger that only the finest (worst) trailers can effect. Sitting in the theater, one realizes that the reason the fans come out is the post-credits sequences, in which it becomes clear that the main attraction is never the film you’re watching but the one you’re meant to watch next.
Captain Marvel — TWO STARS
Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Rated PG-13
Marvel Studios
Walt Disney Studios
124 min.
Lewis On Film 