NPCs Panicking As They Run Out of Nice Ways to Say Captain Marvel Is a Bad Movie

Flashback to the Onion, February 2003: Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.

This review by Kyle Smith in the National Review seems to echo every criticism that has been directed at SJW Marvel -- the comics publishing side of the business, which has now infected the movie making side of it.

Captain Mary Sue

By KYLE SMITH

Two years ago, Wonder Woman proved a female-led superhero movie could reach the highest levels of the genre, with Gal Gadot proving robust and redoubtable, yet also charming and feminine. I spent Captain Marvel waiting for Gadot. What I got was Brie Larson: charmless, humorless, a character so without texture that she might as well be made out of aluminum.

Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that's crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can't control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We've just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.

Just to be completely, unerringly, let's-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence. Superheroes are defined by their limitations -- Superman's Kryptonite, Batman's mortality -- but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson's Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn't an arc, it's a straight line.

Sounds like someone saw the Mary Sue Star Wars movies and excitedly said, "Hey, let's do that!!!"

...

Carol looks up an old friend, a fellow feminist fighter pilot named Rambeau. As played by Lashana Lynch, she is another Mary Sue, boringly capable, flawless, and stalwart. Rambeau is a single mom with a daughter, but when she considers leaving the planet to join Carol's war with the aliens, the idea of abandoning her kid is played for laughs, not drama. The directors are afraid that suggesting women tend to put their children above all else will get them called out as retrograde by the Jessica Veryangrys on Twitter. They don't realize that treating every potential obstacle as no problem whatsoever makes for a very dull movie.

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The trap the filmmakers set for themselves is this: They set out to make a girl-power statement -- but feared acknowledging any differences between men and women. Despite Larson's sylphlike build, there is no suggestion at any point that she might be overmatched by a guy who is 80 or 100 pounds larger, like Djimon Hounsou. If being female is defined as "exactly like a male, only more resilient," how interesting is that?

Well, according to Slate, the very fact that this Force is Female movie is boring, misconceived, incompetent and embarrassing is actually a triumph for women, as it proves that women can make awful movies, just like men.

posted by Ace of Spades at 11:51 AM

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