By Grace Deng
As a superhero flick, “Captain Marvel” is fun but not extraordinary. As a feminist film, “Captain Marvel” is essential.
As expected from an Oscar winner, Brie Larson stuns as Captain Marvel, an alien warrior of the Kree race who crash-lands directly into a Blockbuster—perhaps the quickest way to tell an audience the movie is set in the ‘90s—and finds the secrets of her past hidden on Earth. She gets help from a young Nick Fury played as always by Samuel L. Jackson, who sports some surprisingly good CGI de-aging.
If you’re an avid Marvel fan who remembers the Kree from past films, many of the twists in “Captain Marvel” probably won’t come as a surprise to you. The most surprising and yet somehow also anticlimactic twist is probably how Fury loses his eye. Captain Marvel’s fight scenes aren’t very suspenseful either—she’s so overpowered, you’re never really at the edge of your seat. Somehow, a cat named Goose is the most entertaining part.
While most fights in “Captain Marvel” may not be remarkable, the fight against gender cliches certainly is. In scene after scene, “Captain Marvel” shows it has something to say about female empowerment. In one scene, we see flashes of Captain Marvel’s past—falling down again and again from girlhood to womanhood, only to get back up and beat a man telling her she’s inferior. In another, she tells a man trying to goad her into a fight that she has “nothing to prove” to him.
Some critics apparently think the obvious female empowerment messaging is something to shame. Mashable called “Captain Marvel” a “shallow take on feminism” and an opinion editorial in the Chicago Tribune said “Captain Marvel” exemplifies “today’s exhausting feminism.” Before “Captain Marvel” even came out, men angry Brie Larson called for more inclusivity started trolling review websites, trying to make the film bomb.
But “Captain Marvel” isn’t for jaded movie critics and online misogynists. It’s for little girls who want to be a hero on Halloween without dressing up in a skimpy leotard (see: Wonder Woman costumes). It’s for women who want a story that places female friendship at the center of the protagonist’s origin story, rather than a male love interest. It’s for anyone who wants to see an entertaining movie that better reflects the world around them—a world made better by the diversity of the people in it.