I’m trying to make the best use out of disney+ and am working my way through marvel! nearly getting to watching all of them mwa ha ha
I want to talk mainly about Captain Marvel, but want to reference She-hulk a little as well. Yes, like some reviews I saw at the time Capt. Marvel was released, the characters are flat, the story is flat. But my limited exposure to those reviews made me assume that this story was bad because it focused too much on the main character being a ‘female.’ I disagree. I don’t think the problem was with the focus on being female, it was on not knowing how to portray people like her.
When I saw the movie, I saw a bit of myself in Captain Marvel too. She is ‘dry’, ‘emotionless’. I get that part! When I process my options, observe my surroundings etc, I’m going to have to put that information in my head. That makes me withdrawn & consequently seem as emotionless to other people. It felt like Carol was emotionless because she is processing, rather than reacting. It feels like a natural reaction to being a soldier. You don’t have time to show how you feel to other people if you have a mission to complete. But in my opinion, if you have a character that is emotionless at times, than the times when that character becomes emotional needs to be a spilling out of emotion. an outburst. I feel like Carol’s outburst was overtly subdued. When she is confused about her memories, she can be confused, but we can assume that her training has kicked in. She’s trying to get out first and think about those issues later. But when she realizes that her memories are real at Earth, we need to have a point when she breaks down. I feel like we didn’t have this point, and that’s what makes her final acceptance of her identity weak. Because we are never really shown how these events take a toll on her. Sure she looks at a bunch of photos, says a bunch of words, but they didn’t really strike me. You don’t have to get emotional in every movie of course, but if identity is what you want to talk about, I feel like it would be hard to get unemotional. I feel like with realizations, you have to have a climax somewhere. Realizations may come slow, but they also come in with a bang. (I think that’s what movies tend to lean towards anyhow, time constraints are trouble). So that sort of realization might have helped the audience understand Carol’s situation and empathize with her using our own problems with identity, which I’m sure everyone would have. Where do I belong, who am I are universal questions.
That brings me to the next point, which is the question that the movie is operating on. I think the question was “who is Carol Denvers.” Many other Marvel stories start up with this question. It’s a good question. But to make a story out of that question, we need to be shown who she is first and then show how she changes. Ironman. (It’s been some time since I saw this, and I’m not an expert but) the story is that he’s a millionaire. he’s arrogant. But he goes through these kidnapping events, and has another sense of purpose. With Carol, I’m not sure the initial definition of who she is is given well. With Earth-based characters, we can get a few keywords and we can draw a picture of who that person is in our minds. It’s harder for space-based characters. In the beginning of the movie, we are given a fancy spacecraft. We are not given what kind of work she does in this spacecraft. We don’t get a sense of who she is, what kind of values she has. Instead we are immediately thrown into confusion. She has a false memory for some reason, and she’s confused, but we’re also confused. Scratch that, we don’t even care that she’s confused because we’re confused. We don’t really get a chance to see why the confusion is important to her. So I think we needed more scenes either in the beginning, or with even a flashback perhaps, of what relationship she has with her leader etc. Maybe she could have even wanted more affirmation from her leader, which he did not give her, etc. So the storyline becomes very abstract. There should be two storylines most of the time: the (1) expected storyline - that’s with the fighting, shapeshifters came to Earth, it’s dangerous the surface story, and (2) the underlying story, about trying to find who she really is. But she very easily kills her opponents. the (1) storyline is not very captivating. we know she’s going to win. (2) storyline then becomes what sells or kills the story. This is dangerous on its own because the second storyline must rely on the first storyline, the events storyline, because it is supposed to be a reaction to the (1) storyline. It feels like the story struggled because the distinction between the two storylines were not made well. Compare this with She-hulk. She-hulk is a lawyer. She likes being a lawyer, she doesn’t like being in the spotlight. What does Carol like, and doesn’t like? I’m not sure. Maybe flying? She-hulk’s surface story is that she is working on a case. She-hulk’s underlying story is that she has to deal with her newfound fame and not lose herself in it. (so far at least.) The case is interesting! And She-hulk is a very much female-issues centered story that talks about female harassment. Captain Marvel doesn’t deal with those everyday issues. She just happens to be female. I don’t think it really mattered in the storyline she’s in anyway. So for me Captain Marvel’s failure is not because it was aware that it was a female character, it was because the storyline was the problem.
Last words on Marvel. But there are still parts I appreciate from Marvel. Captain Marvel, for all its falls, had ok foreshadowing telling that the enemy wasn’t really the enemy. I liked the part when she said “I don’t need to prove myself.” At the same time, I know that Marvel is a difficult story to tell, because so much about it is told and decided before the actual storytelling part begins. I understand, but at the same time appreciate and love how Marvel stories, operating under rules, becomes a even better story because it was constrained. like sonnets!
and yeah I can be wrong. writing this reminds me of the saying that there’s a lot of reasons for something to go bad, but one reason for something to stay good
my notes: stiff characters —> emotionless at first, when you get to know her off duty becomes playful etc changed // when she has struggles she keeps it in, but it takes a toll she has a breaking point, emotion a lot
