"Captain Marvel"

A full eleven years after Iron Man inaugurated a whole new era of superhero-dominated blockbuster filmmaking, Marvel Studios have finally released their first female-led film with Captain Marvel. Coming at a point where western feminism finds itself caught between mainstream cultural assimilation and widespread political backlash, the film bears the unenviable weight of having to both fulfil traditional fan expectations and live up to the feminist credentials implied by the very context of its existence.

In the latter regard, its 1995 setting cannot help but carry significance; four years after the Anita Hill hearings and two years before the Monica Lewinski scandal, the amnesic Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) crashes back in her native USA at a time where systemic sexism and power imbalances were kept buried under the façade of economic progress by triumphant pre-9/11 cultural neoliberalism. Her subsequent journey of self-discovery and empowerment doesn’t just echo many women’s individual feminist awakening, it also mirrors our culture’s loss of innocence – and the course correction subsequently undertaken in response.

That journey’s thematic stakes are made clear in the film’s opening sequence when Kree mentor Yon-Rogg (a yellow-eyed, teeth-gritting Jude Law) exhorts Carol (aka “Vers”) to control the mysterious photon energy powers within her by suppressing her emotions. It’s a familiar character arc setup, whose eventual subversion showcases the centrepiece of the film’s feminism: a rebuttal of traditionally masculine notions of power through control and dominance in favour of embracing one’s emotions, expressed in a context where doing so grants the female protagonist an inherent advantage

By astutely constructing 90s Girl Power fantasy as a response to current patriarchal manifestations (exemplified by an obnoxious biker’s remark that Carol should “smile more”) and echoes of complex real-world injustices, directors and co-screenwriters Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck effectively fuel millennial activism with nostalgia. They prove less adept, however, at overcoming the intellectual and aesthetic limitations imposed by the film’s commercial roots.

Consider the third act power-up, where Carol achieves self-actualization after reaching her lowest point, fuelled by male peer discouragement and past feelings of inadequacy. It’s a conceptually empowering, if fairly conventional beat, the impact of which is dampened by editing choices that make it look like a commercial using progressive visual language to promote corporate interests. Moments like these restrain the viewer’s imagination as well as the character’s evocative potential by replicating pre-existing feelings and ideas rather than conjure organic ones.

These creative lapses extend to the fight scenes, which Boden and Fleck mostly film in tightly-framed close quarter shots that cut up the actors’ bodies into digestible morsels of sound and impact instead of following complete movements. They don’t express action so much as punctuate it in such a manner that it registers in our minds without connecting to any emotion beyond pavlovian responses.

Still, the duo display sufficient visual imagination to make up for these lacunas, as demonstrated when Carol gets her mind probed by shape-shifting Skrull rebels and a fleeting memory of her interacting with the mysterious Dr. Lawson (Annette Bening) gets played again and again in an attempt to retrieve information. In takes digitally edited together to look like a continuous shot, Bening and Larson repeat the same dialogue from different angles and positions, each exchange conjuring a different emotion – familiarity, strangeness, pain – through the changes in shot scale as well as in the actors’ expressions.

The actors are indeed a huge factor in what makes the film ultimately work; if there’s one thing the Marvel Studios understands, it’s that superheroes have effectively replaced movie stars and that actor and character personas should thus be indistinguishable, which makes Brie Larson both ideal and atypical. As famous for her outspokenness as for her acting, she’s more everywoman than star, performing with a sensitive inwardness not usually associated with the wisecracking glamour of superheroics. Yet it’s precisely what makes her Carol Danvers work: she exudes a life-worn toughness that commands empathy more than awe, lending her character a socially conscious authority that matches her arc perfectly.

Her earnestness is beautifully supported by the grounded levity Samuel L. Jackson brings to Nick Fury. Always a slightly frustrating fixture in the MCU, Jackson’s role had until this point largely limited itself to looking cool and providing exposition and motivation. Here, he’s finally allowed to let loose and play Fury as a fully realized character, more nerd than badass, a vet-turned-office jockey thrown into a whole new world where he is both out of his depth yet strangely at home. His chemistry with Larson is complemented by the hitherto-underseen comic chops Ben Mendelsohn displays as Skrull antagonist Talos, whom he plays with a casual kind of Aussie charm that offsets the ground-teethed villainous hamminess we’ve come to be familiar with.

Captain Marvel’s adherence to Marvel formula restrains its creative possibilities but within those confines, it finds room to visualize enough ideas and emotions to make its viewing worthwhile. Less inventive than the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies, with which it shares side characters and a knowing soundtrack, it nonetheless knows, like James Gunn’s duology before it, how to mine nostalgia for modern relevance. And in an industry that too often relies on it as a crutch, that may be just good enough.