Captain Marvel and the Battle Against Annoying Movie-Goers.
So yesterday we saw ‘Captain Marvel’ (2019) and it was… okay!
Nothing particularly amazing but I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I was expecting. Having said that, my expectations were spectacularly low resulting from a combination of mixed reviews, fan-boy strops, Rotten Tomatoes fights, bizarre statements regarding gender which I never follow or even understand etc especially as, ultimately, none of these apply or have any relevance to the film we watched which is, quite simply, a super-hero origin story. If there was any political or social agenda here I certainly didn’t spot it.
The film concerns an alien race who travel back in time and come to Earth to stop humans developing faster-than-light travel and… HANG ON!!! This is ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ (1996)!! Indeed, both my friend and I detected signs of Trek on a few occasions (a race of aliens wanting to find their own home felt like a Next Gen storyline as well as a few of the creature designs). Fortunately this wasn’t too distracting (unlike certain audience members but I’ll get to that later).
Anyway, I won’t go into too much detail, mainly because there’s never really too much to these Marvel movies to begin with so you might as well just watch the movie for yourself, but it serves as a decent enough introduction to Carol Danvers. The story is told non-linearly which starts off a little confusing but I ultimately found it oddly refreshing as it meant we didn’t have to sit through the typical, cookie-cutter plot structure that normally contains all the boredom and over-familiarity of an over-listened to R.E.M. song.
Brie Larson is fine, I guess, as Captain Marvel and her dialled-back sexuality retrospectively makes Wheedon’s take on Black Widow seem positively regressive in terms of having tits and ass out. Although it seems Larson’s charisma has also been covered up too as there’s not that much spark to her almost as though she’s wearing a personality sports-bra.
Samuel Jackson is reliable as Fury and Goose the cat is… there. What I can say? I’m not a cat person! My general attitude to them is — “Fuck ‘em!” — which is pretty much what they’d think about me too so that’s fine.
Even though there are no real highlights here I was surprised at how well (or, at least, how adequately) the film held my attention over the two hour run-time with no moments where I felt bored. I wasn’t blown away at any point either although when Danvers gets to unleash her full-on rainbow coloured powers I did enjoy the look, design, palette and the revelling-in-velocity-thrill-of-it-all of the sequence. It looked pretty.
So yeah, ‘Captain Marvel’ was perfectly okay and I certainly preferred it to, say, ‘Thor’, ‘Thor: The Dark World’, ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Iron Man 3’, ‘Ant-Man’, ‘Ant-Man and The Wasp’, ‘Black Panther’, ‘Doctor Strange’, ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and ‘Ghost Rider’ so that’s not too bad, I guess. Then again, most of the Marvel movies are just okay… apart from the films by the Russo brothers which are awesome and ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ is a god-damn masterpiece (I must write up something about that one day).
The only real fly in our cinematic ointment were the two women sitting behind us who didn’t talk during the film but did laugh ALL THE WAY THROUGH and AT EVERY SINGLE MOMENT whether it was funny or not! I’m not kidding, they laughed (harshly and loudly) at anything that happened, and I mean ANYTHING! Even if it wasn’t funny! At one point Nick Fury walks out of a room… and they laughed at that! Lines of dialogue that were perfunctory or banal got squeals of glee and delirium.
“Oh Christ,” I thought, “If they’re laughing this hard right now they’re going to fucking lose it when the cat appears.” And fucking lose it they did when Goose came on screen because if Samuel Jackson walking through a door could reduce them to tears then a cute cat spinning about in zero gravity almost made them explode with unsurpressed excessive and weaponisable mirth.
Because I once worked as a house manager in a cinema in the Lake District I have no problem ordering someone to stop making noise during a movie. Indeed, I actually get a perverse thrill from it as it’s the closest I get to engaging in any form of vigilantism (“Who was that mysterious bald man dispensing his particular form of justice and then disappearing back into in the dark?”). But how can you tell someone to not laugh during a colourful, fun movie?
Although my main concern was for my friend who is Italian and is, therefore, quite… well… Italian, and maybe doesn’t have my incredible and innate ability to keep her annoyance at things under wraps. As I saw her vibrating in her seat with rage out the corner of my eye I was seriously worried that she was going to leap over the seat and pummel them into the carpeting with her cup of tea. I’m not sure even Carol Danvers could withstand the might of my friend’s Italian Fury if she chose to unleashed the full extent of her powers. Fortunately, like Bruce Banner de-Hulkifying, cake and more tea calmed her down after.
So yeah, nothing amazing but nothing awful, ‘Captain Marvel’ keeps the Marvel juggernaut (behemoth? Rough beast?) slouching towards its ‘Endgame’.
