Having been a Marvel fan for over three-fourths of my existence on this Earth, I can admit to sometimes being as loud and obnoxious as some of the worst of them. After all, I've lived long enough to have actually seen on Betmax, some of the earliest Marvel movies, like disastrous Howard the Duck, as well as the direct-to-video debacles that were 1989's Punisher and 1990's Captain America. I'm old enough to have felt agony seeing Batman movie after Batman movie getting made, while Spider-Man languished in development hell. In short, these days, in which we are virtually guaranteed that every year at least two quality movies based on Marvel Comics characters are released, are the days for which I, and many, many others like me have yearned for decades, and I'll be damned if I don't enjoy them while they're here.
In this context, when I learned that movies based on Marvel's Captain Marvel and DC's Shazam (who used to be called Captain Marvel) would be released within a month of each other, as a die-hard Marvel fan, I knew which movie I would be rooting for when they came out. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Personally, I'd wanted to see a movie featuring Carol Danvers some time ago.
Flash forward to a few years later and I find myself scratching my head, having seen both Captain Marvel and Shazam and having enjoyed the latter much more than the former. I suppose it was bound to happen; having been consistently enamored of Marvel movies for the last few years, it was inevitable that one of their films would fail to click with me. Conversely, given that Warner Brothers and DC have been aggressively retooling their approach to adapting their properties in the wake of the failure of Zack Snyder's ultra-dark approach to set the box office on fire, there was a fair chance that I would like the light-hearted Shazam.
Looking past what I thought of the two movies, though, there was something I observed about their respective performances at the box office that got me thinking: How did Captain Marvel, with its lukewarm reviews (78% on rottentomatoes.com, with an average score of 6.77/10), and its alleged army of haters, manage to gross over a billion dollars at the global box office, while Shazam, with its glowing reviews (90% on RT, average score of 7.3/10) and the love of "everyone" will be lucky to finish with even half of that? The answer I came up with is hardly scientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if data bore it out, and it's that Captain Marvel has tapped into an audience that has been starved for movies in the last ten years of the current cinematic superhero hegemony.
Since 2011, there have been an average of three or four comic-book based movies in a year, most of them based on characters from Marvel Comics. Spider-man has gone from being stuck in development hell to having eight movies in the last eighteen years. My cup ran over quite some time ago, if I'm honest, and the Marvel geek from the 80s who wept in frustration has been satisfied many times over. With all these movies, however, it was inevitable that a pattern emerged; their lead characters were almost exclusively white and male.
This wasn't an issue when these movies first started breaking out and we fans were just overjoyed to see them, but with each box office hit that came and went there was a part of me that wondered when we'd start to see prominent Avengers characters like Black Panther, the Wasp and Captain Marvel, to name a few. That was just me as a casual fan; I wasn't one of the black Marvel fans who wondered where Black Panther was, or the female fans who wondered where Captain Marvel was.
As it turns out, there were quite a few people who wanted to see the beloved Marvel brand do a black superhero, as Black Panther proved to the tune of 1.3 billion dollars at the global box office last year. One might argue that it was the quality of that film, that garnered critical acclaim and three Oscars, which put fannies in the seats, but then one now has to add Captain Marvel to that conversation, a movie that nobody is tipping for Oscar glory and which has conclusively debunked the years-old myth pushed by bitter DC fans that film critics are on Disney's payroll, given that the reviews have been lukewarm at best. Whatever I may have thought of Black Panther and Captain Marvel (loved the former, didn't much care for the latter), what mattered was that they served audiences that had been neglected for years, in the same way that the first Spider-man movie did for Spidey fans back in 2002. I reckon that the people who have propelled Captain Marvel to over a billion dollars in global grosses are audiences starved for content, the ones who made Jennifer Lawrence's (mostly mediocre) Hunger Games movies a nearly Three Billion Dollar global box office phenomenon, and who powered Wonder Woman to $821 million in 2017. My pet theory is that Captain Marvel's success is only vaguely related to its quality, as subjective as that may be. I can think of at least three, possibly five movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that are quite arguably better than Captain Marvel when measured up by objective criteria like story cohesiveness, but which grossed far less than its 1 billion global take. None of these movies, however, were any sort of significant departure from MCU's usual fare.
Viewed from that lens, Shazam doesn't have much to set it apart from the plethora of superhero movies we've had in the last decade or so, with its Caucasian protagonist, cookie-cutter villain and fairly standard storytelling, right down to the generic CGI. Sure, it's entertaining, but the stakes aren't particularly high, and it isn't anything that hasn't already been done before; the die-hards and a few casuals have come out in force (it'll probably manage half a billion when all is said and done) but that's about it.
Superhero fatigue isn't quite a thing yet, but given enough repetition, people are more likely to see something they haven't seen yet than something that they have. Consider that, as good as last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was, audiences almost gave it a pass until they realized that it wasn't just another Spider-Man movie.
Whatever I or anyone else may think, therefore, about the quality of Captain Marvel, it remains an important movie because it underscores just how potent underserved audiences can be. In fact, if it can actually be argued that the movie is objectively mediocre, it becomes even more important as a cultural touchstone of sorts because it shows that this particular audience segment is so starved for strong female lead characters that they'll embrace any movie that features them, even mediocre ones, or for that matter, terrible ones (coughcoughAlitaBattleAngelcoughcough). They deserve characters like Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs or Ellen Ripley from Aliens or even Mattie Ross from the 2010 remake of True Grit, and given that superhero movies are basically the most commonly-consumed cinematic staple today, audiences should be able to find their capable female/person of color hero in these movies. Notably, though, the Hunger Games movies demonstrated diminishing returns as did the new Star Wars films, and it's not too much to speculate that future Marvel movies that just coast on their brand name will be similarly afflicted.
While it is just about set in stone that we'll get sequels to Black Panther and Captain Marvel, I sincerely hope Marvel took notes from the legitimate complaints that were raised about both movies (e.g. bad CGI in Black Panther, bad writing in Captain Marvel) and come up with sequels that can stand among their best work like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or the first Avengers movie. Also, given that Marvel's next avowed goal is to bring LGBTQ+ characters into the spotlight with The Eternals, they might want to consider focusing on crafting a strong story before highlighting the sexual orientation/gender/race of any given character. That way, they won't have to ride off the massive reservoir of audience goodwill they've accumulated over the last decade, and will be able to keep the hits coming for decades to come.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
A Bit Infirm: A Review of Five Feet Apart
directed by Justin Baldoni
written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
When The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance film about cancer patients, made a mint at the box-office some years ago, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would dip into the well of life-threatening-illness-as-a-backdrop-for-romance before very long, and sure enough, five years later, we now have Five Feet Apart, a movie that swaps out Cystic Fibrosis for cancer, replaces one gangly towering matinee idol (Ansel Elgort) with another (Cole Sprouse), and finally replaces one up-and-coming ingenue (Shailene Woodley) with another (Haley Lu Richardson).
Five Feet Apart is the story of cystic fibrosis patients Stella Grant (Richardson) and Will Newman (Sprouse), who meet while receiving treatment at St. Grace's Hospital. Stella, who follows her treatment regimen religiously, has, by her own admission, control issues, and when she sees Will being somewhat lackadaisical about his own treatment it triggers her. After a lot of banter and semi-hostile exchanges, Stella convinces Will, who is suffering from a much rarer strain of CF that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant (unlike Stella) and requires experimental treatment, to take his regimen more seriously and to take his meds at the same time she takes hers. Inevitably, as they get to know one another, they fall for one another, but because CF patients cannot come within six feet of each other, a rule constantly enforced by the nurse in charge Barbara (Kimberly Gregory), they cannot so much as touch one another. Having lost much in her life, Stella, frustrated by these setbacks decides to rebel in her own little way: she declares that instead of staying six feet apart at all times they are near each other, Will and she will, instead, stay five feet apart, hence the movie's title.
It had been a while since I'd seen a young adult romance film prior to this; the last one I saw, coincidentally, also had a distance-themed title ("The Space Between Us") and fortunately, while this was was, like that film, similarly riddled with narrative tropes dating back to the 80s and probably even before then, it manages to be slightly more coherent as narrative.
As with most movies like this, the film stands or falls on the chemistry of its lead actors, and while their leaden dialogue is weighed down by the obvious prime directive of the plot (i.e. they have to fall in love) Richardson (vaguely resembling Keira Knightley in her youth) and Sprouse manage to strike up a fair bit of sparks in a few scenes. There is something off, though, about how glamorously healthy their faces look considering that their characters are both supposed to be quite ill.
Anyway, for all the cliches the filmmakers indulged in throughout this film, some of which made the movie quite predictable, it was gracious enough to eschew some of the more egregious tropes in movies about grave illness. I don't enthusiastically recommend the movie, but fans of this genre might find something to like here.
6/10
written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
When The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance film about cancer patients, made a mint at the box-office some years ago, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would dip into the well of life-threatening-illness-as-a-backdrop-for-romance before very long, and sure enough, five years later, we now have Five Feet Apart, a movie that swaps out Cystic Fibrosis for cancer, replaces one gangly towering matinee idol (Ansel Elgort) with another (Cole Sprouse), and finally replaces one up-and-coming ingenue (Shailene Woodley) with another (Haley Lu Richardson).
Five Feet Apart is the story of cystic fibrosis patients Stella Grant (Richardson) and Will Newman (Sprouse), who meet while receiving treatment at St. Grace's Hospital. Stella, who follows her treatment regimen religiously, has, by her own admission, control issues, and when she sees Will being somewhat lackadaisical about his own treatment it triggers her. After a lot of banter and semi-hostile exchanges, Stella convinces Will, who is suffering from a much rarer strain of CF that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant (unlike Stella) and requires experimental treatment, to take his regimen more seriously and to take his meds at the same time she takes hers. Inevitably, as they get to know one another, they fall for one another, but because CF patients cannot come within six feet of each other, a rule constantly enforced by the nurse in charge Barbara (Kimberly Gregory), they cannot so much as touch one another. Having lost much in her life, Stella, frustrated by these setbacks decides to rebel in her own little way: she declares that instead of staying six feet apart at all times they are near each other, Will and she will, instead, stay five feet apart, hence the movie's title.
It had been a while since I'd seen a young adult romance film prior to this; the last one I saw, coincidentally, also had a distance-themed title ("The Space Between Us") and fortunately, while this was was, like that film, similarly riddled with narrative tropes dating back to the 80s and probably even before then, it manages to be slightly more coherent as narrative.
As with most movies like this, the film stands or falls on the chemistry of its lead actors, and while their leaden dialogue is weighed down by the obvious prime directive of the plot (i.e. they have to fall in love) Richardson (vaguely resembling Keira Knightley in her youth) and Sprouse manage to strike up a fair bit of sparks in a few scenes. There is something off, though, about how glamorously healthy their faces look considering that their characters are both supposed to be quite ill.
Anyway, for all the cliches the filmmakers indulged in throughout this film, some of which made the movie quite predictable, it was gracious enough to eschew some of the more egregious tropes in movies about grave illness. I don't enthusiastically recommend the movie, but fans of this genre might find something to like here.
6/10
Thursday, April 11, 2019
It's a Kind of Magic: A Review of Shazam!
directed by David F. Sandberg
written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke
Around this time last year, when the lights came on after Avengers: Infinity War, my daughter told me that she had observed a little boy of around eight or nine years crying into his dad's shoulder, presumably because one of his favorite heroes had turned to dust (I'm betting it was Spider-Man). Being the 40-plus-year-old man-child who's been reading comics for the better part of three decades, of course I had a laugh, knowing that most of the "deaths" in Infinity War probably have all the permanence of the tide, as did both of my older, more comics-savvy kids. Thinking about it afterwards, though, I came to realize how a great many of these comic-book based movies nowadays really aren't for kids anymore, or at least, not primarily for kids but rather for that coveted late-teens to mid-thirties segment of the market (more colloquially known as men-children) that make enough money to watch movies over and over again.
It was a long-running debate among one segment of fandom, for example, that Marvel movies are for kids while DC movies are for adults, a notion inspired in part by Christopher Nolan's decidedly dark, noir-inspired take on the Batman movies and Zack Snyder's poor attempt to channel that vibe into his own take on the Superman mythos and the eventual DC Extended Universe. I could go on as to why the proponents of that argument are wrong (and maybe I will, someday) but in truth, it's all become moot and academic now since the executives at Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC have apparently gone and said, "what the hell, let's just eighty-six all that dark crap and make movies that are more kid-friendly."
The drastic shift in overall tone of DC movies from "dark" to "light" started as early as last year's colorful adventure Aquaman, and arguably even 2017's Justice League but while the latter was basically a sloppy retrofit mandated by studio execs who basically wanted their year-end bonus, Aquaman was a from-the-ground-up change in approach to the way Warner Brothers made superhero movies and an effective abandonment of Snyder's overall tone. I can't comment one way or the other on what I thought of Aquaman because I was at that point so disenchanted with Warner Bros' DC movies (thanks to Justice League) that I didn't even bother to watch it.
In the case of Shazam, however, I was hooked from the very first trailer, because this movie looked pretty darned funny.
Teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has one goal in life: to find his mother (Caroline Palmer), from whom he was separated as a toddler while they were at a fair. To this end, he has fled one foster home after another, and even gone to the extent of hijacking police databases just to find people with his last name. His last attempt to find his mother ends with him being placed in a group foster home run by Victor and Rosa Vasquez (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) where he meets foster kids Pedro (Jovan Armand), Eugene (Ian Chen), Darla (Faithe Herman), Mary (Grace Fulton) and Freddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), all of whom he views as a distraction while he continues his search. However, when he is recruited by an aging wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to fight against the Seven Deadly Sins, an ancient cabal of evil that has escaped into the world and taken control of the deranged Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), Billy will have to take on the mantle of Shazam (Zachary Levi) a hero with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Before all of that, though, Billy, together with his new guru and expert on all things superhero Freddy, intends to have a little fun first.
This may seem strange, coming from a "Marvel guy" like myself, but in all honesty, I haven't seen a movie embrace its campy comic book origins this gleefully since the first Spider-Man movie way back in 2002, and it is great fun to watch. Zachary Levi, last seen in a comic-book-based movie getting murdered in Thor: Ragnarok, is the perfect embodiment of the super-powered man-child and even though he still hasn't totally convinced me that his suit isn't even just a little padded, his exuberant performance makes me extremely glad Dwayne Johnson chose to play Black Adam instead of this character. He's basically pure joy to watch, and his pairing with Jack Dylan Grazer's uber superhero nerd Freddie is the stuff of comedic genius, particularly in the scenes in which the two of them are testing out Billy's newly-gained superpowers. If anything, Angel's iteration of Billy is the weak link here, not because he's not a good actor, (and in fact, he is quite appropriately earnest in his performance and gives the movie its heart), but because the seriousness with which he vests his performance creates a slight disconnect between his Billy and the musclebound adult-bodied counterpart that Levi plays. It's a minor quibble, though, if I'm perfectly honest, because the team of Levi and Grazer is simply dynamite. While comparisons to the similarly irreverent Deadpool make some sense I submit that this movie is very much its own thing. There is a bit of a jarring shift in tone in one especially violent scene involving the film's antagonists and a bunch of executives in a board room, but director Sandberg and his writers, for the most part, make a properly lighthearted movie.
Another minus for this movie is the computer-generated imagery, which is a bit on the weak side by today's standards but which is nonetheless forgivable given the relatively frugal budget and the fact that the movie is basically just embraces its glorious camp in much the way Deadpool did. The CGI is mostly poured into the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the climactic fight scenes and is really nothing to write home about, but the storytelling is so effective that it's easy to forgive the filmmakers this little misstep.
It also helps that the film steers clear of the world-ending stakes and keeps things relatively intimate, like the message at the film's heart about the importance of finding one's family, including in places where one might not expect to find it.
Finally, one of the film's biggest assets, in my opinion, is that it is basically a spiritual remake of the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall comedy Big, which I loved as a kid, and which the movie directly references during on the fight scenes between Shazam and Dr. Sivana. Sure, Marvel has had great success with (most of) its Spider-Man movies, which also feature a kid as a hero, but there's nonetheless something genuinely refreshing about this take on the kid-as-superhero concept, and if I'm honest, I'm ready for a whole lot of more of these, for as long as they keep those belly laughs coming.
8/10
written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke
Around this time last year, when the lights came on after Avengers: Infinity War, my daughter told me that she had observed a little boy of around eight or nine years crying into his dad's shoulder, presumably because one of his favorite heroes had turned to dust (I'm betting it was Spider-Man). Being the 40-plus-year-old man-child who's been reading comics for the better part of three decades, of course I had a laugh, knowing that most of the "deaths" in Infinity War probably have all the permanence of the tide, as did both of my older, more comics-savvy kids. Thinking about it afterwards, though, I came to realize how a great many of these comic-book based movies nowadays really aren't for kids anymore, or at least, not primarily for kids but rather for that coveted late-teens to mid-thirties segment of the market (more colloquially known as men-children) that make enough money to watch movies over and over again.
It was a long-running debate among one segment of fandom, for example, that Marvel movies are for kids while DC movies are for adults, a notion inspired in part by Christopher Nolan's decidedly dark, noir-inspired take on the Batman movies and Zack Snyder's poor attempt to channel that vibe into his own take on the Superman mythos and the eventual DC Extended Universe. I could go on as to why the proponents of that argument are wrong (and maybe I will, someday) but in truth, it's all become moot and academic now since the executives at Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC have apparently gone and said, "what the hell, let's just eighty-six all that dark crap and make movies that are more kid-friendly."
The drastic shift in overall tone of DC movies from "dark" to "light" started as early as last year's colorful adventure Aquaman, and arguably even 2017's Justice League but while the latter was basically a sloppy retrofit mandated by studio execs who basically wanted their year-end bonus, Aquaman was a from-the-ground-up change in approach to the way Warner Brothers made superhero movies and an effective abandonment of Snyder's overall tone. I can't comment one way or the other on what I thought of Aquaman because I was at that point so disenchanted with Warner Bros' DC movies (thanks to Justice League) that I didn't even bother to watch it.
In the case of Shazam, however, I was hooked from the very first trailer, because this movie looked pretty darned funny.
Teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has one goal in life: to find his mother (Caroline Palmer), from whom he was separated as a toddler while they were at a fair. To this end, he has fled one foster home after another, and even gone to the extent of hijacking police databases just to find people with his last name. His last attempt to find his mother ends with him being placed in a group foster home run by Victor and Rosa Vasquez (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) where he meets foster kids Pedro (Jovan Armand), Eugene (Ian Chen), Darla (Faithe Herman), Mary (Grace Fulton) and Freddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), all of whom he views as a distraction while he continues his search. However, when he is recruited by an aging wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to fight against the Seven Deadly Sins, an ancient cabal of evil that has escaped into the world and taken control of the deranged Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), Billy will have to take on the mantle of Shazam (Zachary Levi) a hero with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Before all of that, though, Billy, together with his new guru and expert on all things superhero Freddy, intends to have a little fun first.
This may seem strange, coming from a "Marvel guy" like myself, but in all honesty, I haven't seen a movie embrace its campy comic book origins this gleefully since the first Spider-Man movie way back in 2002, and it is great fun to watch. Zachary Levi, last seen in a comic-book-based movie getting murdered in Thor: Ragnarok, is the perfect embodiment of the super-powered man-child and even though he still hasn't totally convinced me that his suit isn't even just a little padded, his exuberant performance makes me extremely glad Dwayne Johnson chose to play Black Adam instead of this character. He's basically pure joy to watch, and his pairing with Jack Dylan Grazer's uber superhero nerd Freddie is the stuff of comedic genius, particularly in the scenes in which the two of them are testing out Billy's newly-gained superpowers. If anything, Angel's iteration of Billy is the weak link here, not because he's not a good actor, (and in fact, he is quite appropriately earnest in his performance and gives the movie its heart), but because the seriousness with which he vests his performance creates a slight disconnect between his Billy and the musclebound adult-bodied counterpart that Levi plays. It's a minor quibble, though, if I'm perfectly honest, because the team of Levi and Grazer is simply dynamite. While comparisons to the similarly irreverent Deadpool make some sense I submit that this movie is very much its own thing. There is a bit of a jarring shift in tone in one especially violent scene involving the film's antagonists and a bunch of executives in a board room, but director Sandberg and his writers, for the most part, make a properly lighthearted movie.
Another minus for this movie is the computer-generated imagery, which is a bit on the weak side by today's standards but which is nonetheless forgivable given the relatively frugal budget and the fact that the movie is basically just embraces its glorious camp in much the way Deadpool did. The CGI is mostly poured into the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the climactic fight scenes and is really nothing to write home about, but the storytelling is so effective that it's easy to forgive the filmmakers this little misstep.
It also helps that the film steers clear of the world-ending stakes and keeps things relatively intimate, like the message at the film's heart about the importance of finding one's family, including in places where one might not expect to find it.
Finally, one of the film's biggest assets, in my opinion, is that it is basically a spiritual remake of the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall comedy Big, which I loved as a kid, and which the movie directly references during on the fight scenes between Shazam and Dr. Sivana. Sure, Marvel has had great success with (most of) its Spider-Man movies, which also feature a kid as a hero, but there's nonetheless something genuinely refreshing about this take on the kid-as-superhero concept, and if I'm honest, I'm ready for a whole lot of more of these, for as long as they keep those belly laughs coming.
8/10
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Seeing an Elephant Fly...And Not Much Else: A Review of Dumbo
directed by Tim Burton
written by Ehren Kruger
Of all of the beloved animated feature films that Walt Disney Studio has chosen to adapt into live-action form for modern audiences, Dumbo was arguably the one most in need of a complete overhaul. The story of a circus elephant named Dumbo with ears so big he is able to fly with them, the film was riddled with racism (it featured a murder of crows played by white actors pretending to sound like black men, led by a character named "Jim Crow" for Pete's sake), inebriation, and quite a bit of animal-on-animal cruelty. Like its more-or-less contemporary films Bambi and Pinocchio, the original Dumbo was extremely dark in tone, and was further hamstrung by blatant racism. It's no surprise, therefore, that Disney threw the old script out.
The new one, however, while free of racism and talking animals, isn't any better as far as narratives go.
Max Medici (Danny DeVito) runs the Medici Brothers Circus, a traveling attraction in America featuring the usual circus fare such as trained animals, clowns and acrobats. One of his star performers, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from Great War in Europe less one arm, only to find that his wife has died, all of the horses he used to ride for the circus have all been sold, and the circus itself is basically on its last legs. Medici, however, has bet all his money on one last gambit: Mrs. Jumbo, a pregnant elephant, and the beautiful baby elephant she is sure to deliver. No longer having horses to ride, Holt must now care for the elephants, which he does with his science-geek daughter Milly (Nico Parker) and his dutiful son Joe (Finley Hobbins), and in doing so they stumble upon Jumbo's newborn elephant calf, which has enormous ears. Jumbo Jr. is made part of the show, but after the audience unexpectedly jeers the poor elephant calf, and after one of Mrs. Jumbo's cruel handlers causes her to go wild, destroying the tent, Mrs. Jumbo is sold back to the person from whom Medici bought her, and Medici is at a loss as to what to do next. That is, until Farrier's children discover that Dumbo can fly. An overnight sensation, Dumbo captures the imagination of the whole country, including that of wealthy industrialist V.A. Vandermere (Michael Keaton) who runs a theme park called Dreamworld and who thinks Dumbo, when ridden by the star of his show Colette Marchant (Eva Green) will make a sensational new addition to his show. His plans, however, aren't necessarily in Dumbo's best interests.
Like the original Dumbo this film purports to be about personal triumph in the face of oppression. In the original film, the talking elephants in the circus constantly ridiculed the giant-eared Dumbo, but without talking animals, it's basically up to the human characters to stand in as the bad guys, and it is here that this film fails somewhat miserably. Sure, Tim Burton fills his cast with actors whose credentials range from stellar to basically competent, and in particular replaces Dumbo's talking mouse friend from the first film, Timothy, with a whole bunch of humans whose shortcomings, insecurities and fears are supposed to make them gravitate towards Dumbo and relate better to the audience. To be fair, most of these actors do pretty much the best they can with their roles (though Colin Farrell's Southern drawl made me wince at times), but it's ultimately the writing that lets them all down.
In the scene in which Dumbo (or Jumbo Jr., as he's called at that point in the story) is paraded before a 1920's era circus crowd, the lot of them begin screaming that he's a fake, and ridiculing him in lieu of the mean elephants from the original film. For me, that moment rings distinctly false, as does much, if not most of the film after that. If people nowadays swallow things like fake news hook, line and sinker, the level of credulity back then was arguably that much higher, and the notion that so many people would instantly react to seeing something extraordinary like a giant-eared elephant with skepticism and jeers felt distinctly inauthentic and basically set the tone for the rest of the movie. People's motivations, from that of the cruel animal handler to Michael Keaton's cut-and-paste evil tycoon, felt less like the things real people would say or do and more like plot contrivances to compensate for the characters that were cut out from the original because, ironically enough, they would not have been believable to modern audiences. It's not that there wasn't such a thing as animal cruelty in those days; the fact that animals were made to perform for humans and then kept captive shows the horrible things people were capable of back then. The problem is that Kruger and his presumed ghost writers are just so obsessed with having humans stand in for the evil cartoon characters of the original film that the humans become nothing more than cartoons themselves.
Not only that, but Kruger fills his world with far too much baggage that doesn't really go anywhere, and basically doesn't add anything to the characters. Farrell's Holt loses his arm in the war and his wife to sickness, so he's clearly supposed to be a tragic character, but what specifically is his journey here? Does his having one arm represent an obstacle he has to overcome? Not really, it seems. DeVito's Max Medici inexplicably, packages his circus as "Medici Brothers" when he doesn't even have a brother, and the script basically does next to nothing with that, other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Vandemere. I'd say spoiler alert, but that little detail contributes nothing to the plot. Speaking of Vandemere, he feels a distinct step down from the last heavy Michael Keaton played; the working class Vulture, who actually made a pretty compelling argument to Spider-Man about who were good guys and who were bad guys. Eva Green's Colette, Burton's apparent new goth-girl muse, isn't anything more than yet another narrative cliche. Not every detail has to have a reason for being there, but when one's characters are as paper-thin as the ones with which Kruger has populated this world, seemingly insignificant details start to matter, as does their overall pointlessness.
Saddled with this limp script, Burton leans on his tried-and-tested tropes; quirky supporting characters, a choir belting out Danny Elfman's score, which we've heard in numerous other movies either by Burton or Sam Raimi, and some echoes of the visual panache that shot him to the A-list back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, one other aspect he brings to the film from his past work is an inordinately dark color palette, which is distinctly out of place in a Disney film. As much as I hated Burton's other Disney live-action regurgitation, Alice in Wonderland, at least it was appropriately colorful. Here, despite the fact that the story is set in a circus, most of the action looks like it's taking place at night, probably in an attempt to mask any flaws in the computer generated visual effects.
Fortunately, for all of its flaws, the film at least gets one thing right: Dumbo himself, especially when he's flying. I may be jaded about a lot of things, including movies, but even I can admit that these sequences, basically the "money shots" of the film felt uplifting, with the visuals, sound-editing and score all melding together in perfect unison. Sure Burton kind of started leaning on it a little bit, but given that it was the one thing about the movie that really worked, I can't really blame him. It's somewhat ironic (again) that some of the early comments that surfaced about the trailer were about how creepy the CGI version of Dumbo looked. In my opinion, that's one of the few things that Burton and his crew got right.
My younger kids enjoyed the film, and I can understand why, but to families with a limited budget for movies I'd recommend saving up for Aladdin and The Lion King instead.
5.5/10
written by Ehren Kruger
Of all of the beloved animated feature films that Walt Disney Studio has chosen to adapt into live-action form for modern audiences, Dumbo was arguably the one most in need of a complete overhaul. The story of a circus elephant named Dumbo with ears so big he is able to fly with them, the film was riddled with racism (it featured a murder of crows played by white actors pretending to sound like black men, led by a character named "Jim Crow" for Pete's sake), inebriation, and quite a bit of animal-on-animal cruelty. Like its more-or-less contemporary films Bambi and Pinocchio, the original Dumbo was extremely dark in tone, and was further hamstrung by blatant racism. It's no surprise, therefore, that Disney threw the old script out.
The new one, however, while free of racism and talking animals, isn't any better as far as narratives go.
Max Medici (Danny DeVito) runs the Medici Brothers Circus, a traveling attraction in America featuring the usual circus fare such as trained animals, clowns and acrobats. One of his star performers, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from Great War in Europe less one arm, only to find that his wife has died, all of the horses he used to ride for the circus have all been sold, and the circus itself is basically on its last legs. Medici, however, has bet all his money on one last gambit: Mrs. Jumbo, a pregnant elephant, and the beautiful baby elephant she is sure to deliver. No longer having horses to ride, Holt must now care for the elephants, which he does with his science-geek daughter Milly (Nico Parker) and his dutiful son Joe (Finley Hobbins), and in doing so they stumble upon Jumbo's newborn elephant calf, which has enormous ears. Jumbo Jr. is made part of the show, but after the audience unexpectedly jeers the poor elephant calf, and after one of Mrs. Jumbo's cruel handlers causes her to go wild, destroying the tent, Mrs. Jumbo is sold back to the person from whom Medici bought her, and Medici is at a loss as to what to do next. That is, until Farrier's children discover that Dumbo can fly. An overnight sensation, Dumbo captures the imagination of the whole country, including that of wealthy industrialist V.A. Vandermere (Michael Keaton) who runs a theme park called Dreamworld and who thinks Dumbo, when ridden by the star of his show Colette Marchant (Eva Green) will make a sensational new addition to his show. His plans, however, aren't necessarily in Dumbo's best interests.
Like the original Dumbo this film purports to be about personal triumph in the face of oppression. In the original film, the talking elephants in the circus constantly ridiculed the giant-eared Dumbo, but without talking animals, it's basically up to the human characters to stand in as the bad guys, and it is here that this film fails somewhat miserably. Sure, Tim Burton fills his cast with actors whose credentials range from stellar to basically competent, and in particular replaces Dumbo's talking mouse friend from the first film, Timothy, with a whole bunch of humans whose shortcomings, insecurities and fears are supposed to make them gravitate towards Dumbo and relate better to the audience. To be fair, most of these actors do pretty much the best they can with their roles (though Colin Farrell's Southern drawl made me wince at times), but it's ultimately the writing that lets them all down.
In the scene in which Dumbo (or Jumbo Jr., as he's called at that point in the story) is paraded before a 1920's era circus crowd, the lot of them begin screaming that he's a fake, and ridiculing him in lieu of the mean elephants from the original film. For me, that moment rings distinctly false, as does much, if not most of the film after that. If people nowadays swallow things like fake news hook, line and sinker, the level of credulity back then was arguably that much higher, and the notion that so many people would instantly react to seeing something extraordinary like a giant-eared elephant with skepticism and jeers felt distinctly inauthentic and basically set the tone for the rest of the movie. People's motivations, from that of the cruel animal handler to Michael Keaton's cut-and-paste evil tycoon, felt less like the things real people would say or do and more like plot contrivances to compensate for the characters that were cut out from the original because, ironically enough, they would not have been believable to modern audiences. It's not that there wasn't such a thing as animal cruelty in those days; the fact that animals were made to perform for humans and then kept captive shows the horrible things people were capable of back then. The problem is that Kruger and his presumed ghost writers are just so obsessed with having humans stand in for the evil cartoon characters of the original film that the humans become nothing more than cartoons themselves.
Not only that, but Kruger fills his world with far too much baggage that doesn't really go anywhere, and basically doesn't add anything to the characters. Farrell's Holt loses his arm in the war and his wife to sickness, so he's clearly supposed to be a tragic character, but what specifically is his journey here? Does his having one arm represent an obstacle he has to overcome? Not really, it seems. DeVito's Max Medici inexplicably, packages his circus as "Medici Brothers" when he doesn't even have a brother, and the script basically does next to nothing with that, other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Vandemere. I'd say spoiler alert, but that little detail contributes nothing to the plot. Speaking of Vandemere, he feels a distinct step down from the last heavy Michael Keaton played; the working class Vulture, who actually made a pretty compelling argument to Spider-Man about who were good guys and who were bad guys. Eva Green's Colette, Burton's apparent new goth-girl muse, isn't anything more than yet another narrative cliche. Not every detail has to have a reason for being there, but when one's characters are as paper-thin as the ones with which Kruger has populated this world, seemingly insignificant details start to matter, as does their overall pointlessness.
Saddled with this limp script, Burton leans on his tried-and-tested tropes; quirky supporting characters, a choir belting out Danny Elfman's score, which we've heard in numerous other movies either by Burton or Sam Raimi, and some echoes of the visual panache that shot him to the A-list back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, one other aspect he brings to the film from his past work is an inordinately dark color palette, which is distinctly out of place in a Disney film. As much as I hated Burton's other Disney live-action regurgitation, Alice in Wonderland, at least it was appropriately colorful. Here, despite the fact that the story is set in a circus, most of the action looks like it's taking place at night, probably in an attempt to mask any flaws in the computer generated visual effects.
Fortunately, for all of its flaws, the film at least gets one thing right: Dumbo himself, especially when he's flying. I may be jaded about a lot of things, including movies, but even I can admit that these sequences, basically the "money shots" of the film felt uplifting, with the visuals, sound-editing and score all melding together in perfect unison. Sure Burton kind of started leaning on it a little bit, but given that it was the one thing about the movie that really worked, I can't really blame him. It's somewhat ironic (again) that some of the early comments that surfaced about the trailer were about how creepy the CGI version of Dumbo looked. In my opinion, that's one of the few things that Burton and his crew got right.
My younger kids enjoyed the film, and I can understand why, but to families with a limited budget for movies I'd recommend saving up for Aladdin and The Lion King instead.
5.5/10
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
James Gunn and Salt in Trolls' Wounds
There's a lot in common between Marvel's latest box-office smash Captain Marvel and once-disgraced director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films James Gunn. They're both part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "cosmic" corner, which came to prominence in last year's Avengers: Infinity War and will again be crucial in this year's Avengers: Endgame and certainly the films after it. Both of them employed Nicole Perlman, who wrote the screenplay for both Captain Marvel and the first Guardians movie. Another commonality they have is that both of them were targeted for destruction by trolls and finally, both of them came out on top.
Captain Marvel's success at the box office despite the dogged efforts of alt-right personalities like Jack Posobiec and even actor James Woods has been extensively written about so there's really no point in discussing it again, but with Disney making public its decision to reinstate James Gunn as director of Guardian of the Galaxy 3 after firing him in the middle of last year for social media posts made back in 2009, for which he had already apologized before Disney even hired him, it's worth revisiting how Gunn's public takedown came about.
Unlike Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey or even Louis CK, James Gunn wasn't exposed by someone he had abused. He wasn't exposed for raping or physically or even psychologically molesting any particular person. He wasn't even exposed for anything he had done in the last ten years. No, James Gunn was exposed through the efforts of two fanatical supporters of Donald Trump (one of whom was Jack Posobiec, the other I will not bother to name anymore) who took strong exception to Gunn's vocal criticism of Trump, and what was exposed were years-old tweets of terrible jokes making light of sensitive topics like pedophilia, rape and even the 9/11 tragedy.
On its face, these could have been regarded as fairly serious evidence of a deeply perverse mind, but there were extenuating circumstances, such as the fact that these tweets were, at least in part, a by-product of Gunn's tenure at Troma films, an independent film company known for its schlocky, in-your-face and downright offensive films, as well as the fact that Gunn had long ago acknowledged and apologized for these tweets well before Marvel had hired him to work on Guardians of the Galaxy. Whether or not Gunn's gestures were sufficient to absolve him of these utterly insensitive tweets, Disney made the decision to hire him with this information fully available to them.
As a result, Disney's decision to fire Gunn following the revisiting of the tweets by Posobiec and his co-conspirator was not at all well-received, whether by Gunn's cast on the GOTG films, all of whom signed a letter of support for him, or by a significant portion of fandom. Even conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who frequently takes opportunities to roast liberal personalities like Gunn on a spit, disagreed with Disney's decision, distinguishing it from the earlier decision to fire the resurgent Roseanne Barr from her popular show as a result of brand new racist tweets. Unlike Barr (or Trump, for that matter) Gunn did not deflect, deny or gaslight; he showed what appears to be genuine repentance, and even though he had already acknowledged his past, he apologized anew, and accepted Disney's verdict. Rival studio Warner Brothers had no problem with the revelations, and in fairly short order, they hired Gunn to write, and later on to direct, a reboot of 2016's Suicide Squad, titled simply The Suicide Squad.
Apparently, Disney didn't have that much of a problem rehiring Gunn either, because even though it was only recently revealed that Gunn would be returning to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3 as soon as he had wrapped up work on The Suicide Squad, apparently the decision was made months ago.
What, then, was the reason for the timing? Well I'm sure Marvel has their reasons, but it's plain to see that they were riding on a high after Captain Marvel, cleaned up at the box-office, despite the pathetic efforts of right-wing personalities like Posobiec, who promoted the ludicrous #alitachallenge, to take it down.
In my humble opinion, the timing of Marvel's announcement regarding Gunn, especially on the heels of its auspicious success with Captain Marvel, was meant as a clear message to its haters like Posobiec, whose #alitachallenge campaign against Captain Marvel had failed quite spectacularly. To my mind, this wasn't just about welcoming a beloved director back into the fold, which they'd already done months before; it was about telling the trolls, and anyone else looking to tear them or their family down, that they're not going to bend over for anybody. When one looks at it, the pop-culture crusade of the alt right's personalities has never really been about one particular movie, be it Captain Marvel or Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It was ever and always about emphasizing how much they mattered. They could cause a beloved director to lose his job. They could crater a movie's box-office performance with their online venom. The sun rose and set on what they liked and what they didn't, and because their hero is in the Oval Office right now, they figured that, more than box-office figures and global audiences, they matter.
To me, announcing James Gunn's reinstatement as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise months after the deal was sealed, and on the heels of Captain Marvel surpassing all but the most optimistic box-office predictions was Marvel's way of telling Posobiec and his ilk, "No, you don't."
Captain Marvel's success at the box office despite the dogged efforts of alt-right personalities like Jack Posobiec and even actor James Woods has been extensively written about so there's really no point in discussing it again, but with Disney making public its decision to reinstate James Gunn as director of Guardian of the Galaxy 3 after firing him in the middle of last year for social media posts made back in 2009, for which he had already apologized before Disney even hired him, it's worth revisiting how Gunn's public takedown came about.
Unlike Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey or even Louis CK, James Gunn wasn't exposed by someone he had abused. He wasn't exposed for raping or physically or even psychologically molesting any particular person. He wasn't even exposed for anything he had done in the last ten years. No, James Gunn was exposed through the efforts of two fanatical supporters of Donald Trump (one of whom was Jack Posobiec, the other I will not bother to name anymore) who took strong exception to Gunn's vocal criticism of Trump, and what was exposed were years-old tweets of terrible jokes making light of sensitive topics like pedophilia, rape and even the 9/11 tragedy.
On its face, these could have been regarded as fairly serious evidence of a deeply perverse mind, but there were extenuating circumstances, such as the fact that these tweets were, at least in part, a by-product of Gunn's tenure at Troma films, an independent film company known for its schlocky, in-your-face and downright offensive films, as well as the fact that Gunn had long ago acknowledged and apologized for these tweets well before Marvel had hired him to work on Guardians of the Galaxy. Whether or not Gunn's gestures were sufficient to absolve him of these utterly insensitive tweets, Disney made the decision to hire him with this information fully available to them.
As a result, Disney's decision to fire Gunn following the revisiting of the tweets by Posobiec and his co-conspirator was not at all well-received, whether by Gunn's cast on the GOTG films, all of whom signed a letter of support for him, or by a significant portion of fandom. Even conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who frequently takes opportunities to roast liberal personalities like Gunn on a spit, disagreed with Disney's decision, distinguishing it from the earlier decision to fire the resurgent Roseanne Barr from her popular show as a result of brand new racist tweets. Unlike Barr (or Trump, for that matter) Gunn did not deflect, deny or gaslight; he showed what appears to be genuine repentance, and even though he had already acknowledged his past, he apologized anew, and accepted Disney's verdict. Rival studio Warner Brothers had no problem with the revelations, and in fairly short order, they hired Gunn to write, and later on to direct, a reboot of 2016's Suicide Squad, titled simply The Suicide Squad.
Apparently, Disney didn't have that much of a problem rehiring Gunn either, because even though it was only recently revealed that Gunn would be returning to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3 as soon as he had wrapped up work on The Suicide Squad, apparently the decision was made months ago.
What, then, was the reason for the timing? Well I'm sure Marvel has their reasons, but it's plain to see that they were riding on a high after Captain Marvel, cleaned up at the box-office, despite the pathetic efforts of right-wing personalities like Posobiec, who promoted the ludicrous #alitachallenge, to take it down.
In my humble opinion, the timing of Marvel's announcement regarding Gunn, especially on the heels of its auspicious success with Captain Marvel, was meant as a clear message to its haters like Posobiec, whose #alitachallenge campaign against Captain Marvel had failed quite spectacularly. To my mind, this wasn't just about welcoming a beloved director back into the fold, which they'd already done months before; it was about telling the trolls, and anyone else looking to tear them or their family down, that they're not going to bend over for anybody. When one looks at it, the pop-culture crusade of the alt right's personalities has never really been about one particular movie, be it Captain Marvel or Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It was ever and always about emphasizing how much they mattered. They could cause a beloved director to lose his job. They could crater a movie's box-office performance with their online venom. The sun rose and set on what they liked and what they didn't, and because their hero is in the Oval Office right now, they figured that, more than box-office figures and global audiences, they matter.
To me, announcing James Gunn's reinstatement as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise months after the deal was sealed, and on the heels of Captain Marvel surpassing all but the most optimistic box-office predictions was Marvel's way of telling Posobiec and his ilk, "No, you don't."
Saturday, March 9, 2019
(SPOILER ALERT AND STRONG LANGUAGE) So...How About Those Twists? (Captain Marvel Edition - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)
(SPOILER ALERT)
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(LAST CHANCE)
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(Okay you've been warned)
So, according to Captain Marvel, Skrulls aren't bad guys.
Holy fucking shit, Kevin Feige. What in the name of the late, great Stan Lee have you done?
I have absolutely no problem with any of the other liberties that were taken with the characters in this film. I don't really care that Nick Fury lost his eye because an alien that looks like a cat scratched him and not in a more badass incident like a bomb explosion or something. I don't give a shit that Mar-Vell went from being a man to being a woman because that character, who's been dead in the comics for 37 years, was never much more than an excuse for Marvel to hang onto the name "Captain Marvel" in the first place. I don't even give a flying fuck that the Kree-Skrull War takes place outside an Avengers movie, even though it would have made a pretty solid follow-up to the Thanos mega-arc.
But through this business of basically stripping one of the most long-standing rivalries in your comics of any nuance whatsoever, you have done both the comics and your future movies a huge disservice.
By allowing the makers of Captain Marvel to cash in on one of your usual story tropes, i.e. the third-act story twist, using this egregious deviation from the mythology of the characters, you may have shot yourself in the foot on a level that only the people over at Warner Brothers have done so far.
Truly, this twist makes your Mandarin-related twist over in Iron Man 3 look like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Here are a number of reasons why this ham-handed attempt to shock the audience really is just a bad idea:
1) Not only do fans of the comic books (who apparently don't matter at this point) already know that the Kree are capable of mayhem, mass murder and supreme displays of egotism, but fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thanks to Ronan the Accuser's antics in Guardians of the Galaxy, know it as well, so the "revelation" that the Kree are bad guys isn't much of a twist at all. Hell, my eight-year-old daughter saw Ronan the Accuser show up and said, almost instantly: "Isn't he a bad guy?" You weren't really fooling anyone, in short.
2) The story doesn't work hard enough to earn the reversal. There is little to no camaraderie between "Vers" and the Star Force, just a few quips that don't really work all that well, and a brief exchange with Yon Rogg in the beginning this is equal parts flirtation and violence. Apart from a few lines of dialogue there is very little to really cement the notion that Vers really believes in what she is doing as a member of Star Force, especially because she is given very little reason to believe in it, quite honestly. Finally, there is something really off about the way Yon Rogg acts all throughout the film that telegraphs the twist way before it is eventually unveiled. This is truly a far, far cry from the masterful twist in Spider-Man: Homecoming that basically pulled the rug out from under almost everyone who wasn't paying close attention.
3) To go back to your printed universe, your twist actually does quite a disservice to the Skrulls themselves, who have long evolved past mere villains and have acquired plenty of character nuance through the work of Marvel's talented writers and artists. In fact, there are quite a few Skrulls who are either heroes like Hulkling of the Young Avengers or Xavin of the Runaways or, at the very least, sympathetic characters like Lyja. The fact that these and other characters have to transcend the sins of their race makes them all the more interesting, and re-casting the Skrulls as plain-vanilla "refugees" or "victims" deprives characters such as these of potential journeys in the MCU. Talos has a throwaway line about having dirty hands because of war, but it really isn't enough to give him the moral ambiguity he deserves.
4) Finally, declaring that Skrulls aren't bad guys takes a number of landmark stories off the table, like Secret Invasion, or the Fantastic Four's encounters with Kl'rt, the Super Skrull. I imagine that Captain Marvel was already deep in development, if not already shooting, by the time you found out you were getting the Fantastic Four back, but really, to totally rule out the possibility of the FF fighting one of their most formidable villains feels uncharacteristically short-sighted of you.
I gave this movie a decent rating, no matter how much the twist infuriated me because 1) I honestly enjoyed the movie; I thought it was good, though quite a long way from greatness and 2) This twist, while a central part of Captain Marvel's narrative, can be easily undone by shifting the larger narrative, making Talos and his sympathetic group of Skrulls outliers, and introducing Veranke, the Skrull Queen, and her followers as the true representatives of the Skrull Empire. Imagine, if you will, the Avengers going up against Veranke and her armada, or even Carol Danvers going toe-to-toe with an enhanced Veranke herself. You can't tell me the possibility of this happening hasn't crossed your mind. Tweak the writing; make it clear that while there are some good Skrulls, there are nonetheless very, very bad ones who are very much at large.
Please consider this last suggestion, Kevin (and Nate, Victoria, Louis, and whoever else is in charge). I had faith that Captain Marvel wouldn't be the clusterfuck that all of its pre-cooked haters already knew it would be when it was announced, and by and large I feel my faith was justified. You're no Kathleen Kennedy, in that you've always put story over some heavy handed advocacy, and unlike her, you have managed to produce excellent movies that actually contain meaningful, socially-relevant themes rather than be "woke" just for the sake of it.
To recap, the twist involving the Skrulls was to my mind (and to those of many fans, I'm sure) a huge mistake, but not an irreparable one. You already course-corrected the Mandarin twist over in Iron Man with a well-received short-film revealing a different, true Mandarin, so maybe you can consider rectifying this error, too, and pave the way for some pretty awesome stories as you embark on the next Phase of Marvel movies.
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(LAST CHANCE)
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
(Okay you've been warned)
So, according to Captain Marvel, Skrulls aren't bad guys.
Holy fucking shit, Kevin Feige. What in the name of the late, great Stan Lee have you done?
I have absolutely no problem with any of the other liberties that were taken with the characters in this film. I don't really care that Nick Fury lost his eye because an alien that looks like a cat scratched him and not in a more badass incident like a bomb explosion or something. I don't give a shit that Mar-Vell went from being a man to being a woman because that character, who's been dead in the comics for 37 years, was never much more than an excuse for Marvel to hang onto the name "Captain Marvel" in the first place. I don't even give a flying fuck that the Kree-Skrull War takes place outside an Avengers movie, even though it would have made a pretty solid follow-up to the Thanos mega-arc.
But through this business of basically stripping one of the most long-standing rivalries in your comics of any nuance whatsoever, you have done both the comics and your future movies a huge disservice.
By allowing the makers of Captain Marvel to cash in on one of your usual story tropes, i.e. the third-act story twist, using this egregious deviation from the mythology of the characters, you may have shot yourself in the foot on a level that only the people over at Warner Brothers have done so far.
Truly, this twist makes your Mandarin-related twist over in Iron Man 3 look like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Here are a number of reasons why this ham-handed attempt to shock the audience really is just a bad idea:
1) Not only do fans of the comic books (who apparently don't matter at this point) already know that the Kree are capable of mayhem, mass murder and supreme displays of egotism, but fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thanks to Ronan the Accuser's antics in Guardians of the Galaxy, know it as well, so the "revelation" that the Kree are bad guys isn't much of a twist at all. Hell, my eight-year-old daughter saw Ronan the Accuser show up and said, almost instantly: "Isn't he a bad guy?" You weren't really fooling anyone, in short.
2) The story doesn't work hard enough to earn the reversal. There is little to no camaraderie between "Vers" and the Star Force, just a few quips that don't really work all that well, and a brief exchange with Yon Rogg in the beginning this is equal parts flirtation and violence. Apart from a few lines of dialogue there is very little to really cement the notion that Vers really believes in what she is doing as a member of Star Force, especially because she is given very little reason to believe in it, quite honestly. Finally, there is something really off about the way Yon Rogg acts all throughout the film that telegraphs the twist way before it is eventually unveiled. This is truly a far, far cry from the masterful twist in Spider-Man: Homecoming that basically pulled the rug out from under almost everyone who wasn't paying close attention.
3) To go back to your printed universe, your twist actually does quite a disservice to the Skrulls themselves, who have long evolved past mere villains and have acquired plenty of character nuance through the work of Marvel's talented writers and artists. In fact, there are quite a few Skrulls who are either heroes like Hulkling of the Young Avengers or Xavin of the Runaways or, at the very least, sympathetic characters like Lyja. The fact that these and other characters have to transcend the sins of their race makes them all the more interesting, and re-casting the Skrulls as plain-vanilla "refugees" or "victims" deprives characters such as these of potential journeys in the MCU. Talos has a throwaway line about having dirty hands because of war, but it really isn't enough to give him the moral ambiguity he deserves.
4) Finally, declaring that Skrulls aren't bad guys takes a number of landmark stories off the table, like Secret Invasion, or the Fantastic Four's encounters with Kl'rt, the Super Skrull. I imagine that Captain Marvel was already deep in development, if not already shooting, by the time you found out you were getting the Fantastic Four back, but really, to totally rule out the possibility of the FF fighting one of their most formidable villains feels uncharacteristically short-sighted of you.
I gave this movie a decent rating, no matter how much the twist infuriated me because 1) I honestly enjoyed the movie; I thought it was good, though quite a long way from greatness and 2) This twist, while a central part of Captain Marvel's narrative, can be easily undone by shifting the larger narrative, making Talos and his sympathetic group of Skrulls outliers, and introducing Veranke, the Skrull Queen, and her followers as the true representatives of the Skrull Empire. Imagine, if you will, the Avengers going up against Veranke and her armada, or even Carol Danvers going toe-to-toe with an enhanced Veranke herself. You can't tell me the possibility of this happening hasn't crossed your mind. Tweak the writing; make it clear that while there are some good Skrulls, there are nonetheless very, very bad ones who are very much at large.
Please consider this last suggestion, Kevin (and Nate, Victoria, Louis, and whoever else is in charge). I had faith that Captain Marvel wouldn't be the clusterfuck that all of its pre-cooked haters already knew it would be when it was announced, and by and large I feel my faith was justified. You're no Kathleen Kennedy, in that you've always put story over some heavy handed advocacy, and unlike her, you have managed to produce excellent movies that actually contain meaningful, socially-relevant themes rather than be "woke" just for the sake of it.
To recap, the twist involving the Skrulls was to my mind (and to those of many fans, I'm sure) a huge mistake, but not an irreparable one. You already course-corrected the Mandarin twist over in Iron Man with a well-received short-film revealing a different, true Mandarin, so maybe you can consider rectifying this error, too, and pave the way for some pretty awesome stories as you embark on the next Phase of Marvel movies.
New But So Very Familiar: A Review of Captain Marvel
directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
written by Boden, Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve
Much has been said about the new film Captain Marvel, and so in reviewing this movie I found myself having to tune out a great deal of noise. All told, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
Vers (Brie Larson) is a loyal and particularly powerful soldier of the Kree, a race of warriors who live on the planet of Hala. Even though she's troubled by dreams she doesn't understand about what may or may not have been her past, she serves the Kree Star Force under the command of Yon Rogg (Jude Law) whose primary mission is to destroy the threat posed by the Skrulls, a race of shape-shifting conquerors and the mortal enemies of the Kree. Vers possesses great power she does not quite understand, and recounts her dreams to the Kree Supreme Intelligence, an A.I. that manifests as a woman (Annette Bening) whom Vers supposedly admires and yet cannot quite remember even having known.
When a mission to rescue a Kree spy from Skrull-occupied territory goes awry, Vers is captured and wakes up, hanging upside down in a Skrull contraption meant to read her mind, with a Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) presiding over the attempts to extract the information. Using her considerable power, Vers breaks free, commandeers an escape pod, and crash-lands on the nearest planet, which happens to be Earth. With the Skrulls in hot pursuit, Vers turns to earthbound allies, like S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson) and retired U.S. Air Force pilot Maria Rambaeu (Lashana Lynch) whom she may have known in a past life. Vers realizes that it is up to her to stop the Skrulls from finding what they're after, especially since her friends in the Star Force are too far away to help her in time. In the process, she finally uncovers the truth about her mysterious past, which is not at all what she expects.
As the political statement it has far too often (and somewhat incorrectly) been described as, this film is a strangely nebulous animal; it's too feminist for the right, and not nearly feminist enough for the left. It's best, then, to take it as a bit of entertainment, which it is first and foremost. As such, it never quite scales to heights of greatness, especially not next to the more pedigreed of its stablemates in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it definitely qualifies as good. I was expecting something along the lines of the first Thor movie walking in, and I had my trepidation considering that, to me at least, that 2011 Phase I movie has not aged well at all, and so it was with a sigh of relief that I noted that this movie was better than that one in many key aspects. It certainly wasn't as goofy as that film could get at its worst moments.
That notwithstanding, the film is unmistakably a Marvel movie, and leans quite heavily, often to its detriment, on quite a few "Marvelisms" or storytelling devices that have helped make the majority of their now-21 movie catalog box office smash hits, foremost of which the humor. This is easily one of the "quippiest" Marvel movies of recent memory, and while not all of the jokes, verbal and otherwise, work, enough of them do, largely thanks to some real onscreen chemistry between Larson's Vers and Jackson's Fury and to a treasure trove of jokes about what life was like in the 90s, with computers that take forever to load, grunge bands and actual video rental shops. As someone who came of age in that decade, this film felt like slipping into comfortable old shoes. It also makes heavy use of another narrative trope in Marvel movies that I cannot discuss at length without venturing into spoiler territory. In truth, this particular aspect I found problematic, for reasons I won't discuss here. Also, the film, like most of its predecessors leaned quite heavily on computer-generated imagery.
This is one aspect that stands out; the computer-generated imagery, which was a major pitfall of the now Oscar-winning Black Panther was, to my considerable surprise, done quite cleanly in Captain Marvel. The seams show here and there, but considering that this was an effects-heavy movie with a significant portion set in space, it was no small relief that directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck managed to pull off the more fantastical scenes, especially since this is their first-ever big-budget outing. Even the smaller touches, like the CG that de-aged both Jackson and Clark Gregg who shows up as a young Phil Coulson, worked supremely well.
What didn't work all that well, for me at least, was the somewhat generic music score by Pinar Toprak. Sure, it underscored the action well enough, but after Ludwig Goransson treated us to a delightful blend of earthy African rhythms and soaring orchestral fanfare in Black Panther I was kind of hoping for something a little more special. It was the song selection, which consisted of an interesting selection of 90s tunes, that basically carried the movie.
The writing also had a number of issues, some of them serious, which I unfortunately cannot go into because they involve disclosing quite a few spoilers. Suffice it to say that, after the sublime script that Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler crafted for Black Panther, where just about everything made sense, both as a reflection of how people actually behave, and within the context of its own logic, this one was distinctly disappointing. I'll have to stop there.
Marvel has always hired actors whose talent ranges from competent at worst to sublime at best, and whatever noise she may have generated with her off-screen comments, Brie Larson was a decent choice for the role. She manages to strike the right emotional balance between someone who is both confident in her own abilities and who is fraught with doubt as a result of flashes of a past she cannot quite grasp. Also, not that it matters, but she cracks plenty of smiles throughout the movie, yet again proving the age-old adage that it's best to watch a movie before judging it for what its star is or isn't doing in the marketing materials. Apart from the rock-solid, buddy-comedy chemistry Larson gets from playing off Jackson, she gets more than able support from other players in the cast, like Jude Law, Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau, Akira Akbar as her daughter Monica, who actually assumed the Captain Marvel mantle in the comics many years ago, and in a surprising turn, Ben Mendelsohn as the lead Skrull Talos. Mendelsohn's sort of been Hollywood's go-to bad guy of late, and having found him generic in films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Ready Player One I thought Marvel had fallen into their old trap of generic villains, but Mendelsohn's performance was a pleasant surprise, even though I found it distinctly strange that he was the only Skrull with an Australian accent (no, really).
That's another, admittedly minor quibble I have with this film; Asgardians all have British accents, while the residents of the Guardians of the Galaxy's corner of the galaxy all have American accents (including the Scottish Karen Gillan), but for some reason, Jude Law manages to be the only Kree thus far with a British accent, while Talos bears the odd distinction of being the only Skrull to have an Australian accent. It makes for some oddly inconsistent storytelling, though I was gratified that the scriptwriters finally made mention of a "universal translator" to address the issue of aliens being able to speak perfect English to Earthlings.
One final note: altering the Marvel Studios logo to feature solely the late Stan Lee as an homage was a really nice touch, as was featuring him reading a script of the 1995 film Mallrats, in which he had a cameo role. We'll soon see the last of his cameos this year, either in Avengers: Endgame or in Spider-Man: Far From Home, but it's still sad to be reminded that he's gone.
Carol Danvers' inclusion in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been long overdue, and while this film has its issues, this was definitely a decent big-screen debut for the character. Comparisons to DC's Wonder Woman will be inevitable, and if I'm honest, Patty Jenkins still made a better movie overall, notwithstanding WW's completely messed-up climax and the spotty CG, but selling Captain Marvel was always a bit of an uphill battle (against their own boss, no less, before Disney gave Ike Perlmutter the boot) and I think Marvel have given us a worthy enough addition to their ever-growing library.
6.5/10
written by Boden, Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve
Much has been said about the new film Captain Marvel, and so in reviewing this movie I found myself having to tune out a great deal of noise. All told, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
Vers (Brie Larson) is a loyal and particularly powerful soldier of the Kree, a race of warriors who live on the planet of Hala. Even though she's troubled by dreams she doesn't understand about what may or may not have been her past, she serves the Kree Star Force under the command of Yon Rogg (Jude Law) whose primary mission is to destroy the threat posed by the Skrulls, a race of shape-shifting conquerors and the mortal enemies of the Kree. Vers possesses great power she does not quite understand, and recounts her dreams to the Kree Supreme Intelligence, an A.I. that manifests as a woman (Annette Bening) whom Vers supposedly admires and yet cannot quite remember even having known.
When a mission to rescue a Kree spy from Skrull-occupied territory goes awry, Vers is captured and wakes up, hanging upside down in a Skrull contraption meant to read her mind, with a Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) presiding over the attempts to extract the information. Using her considerable power, Vers breaks free, commandeers an escape pod, and crash-lands on the nearest planet, which happens to be Earth. With the Skrulls in hot pursuit, Vers turns to earthbound allies, like S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson) and retired U.S. Air Force pilot Maria Rambaeu (Lashana Lynch) whom she may have known in a past life. Vers realizes that it is up to her to stop the Skrulls from finding what they're after, especially since her friends in the Star Force are too far away to help her in time. In the process, she finally uncovers the truth about her mysterious past, which is not at all what she expects.
As the political statement it has far too often (and somewhat incorrectly) been described as, this film is a strangely nebulous animal; it's too feminist for the right, and not nearly feminist enough for the left. It's best, then, to take it as a bit of entertainment, which it is first and foremost. As such, it never quite scales to heights of greatness, especially not next to the more pedigreed of its stablemates in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it definitely qualifies as good. I was expecting something along the lines of the first Thor movie walking in, and I had my trepidation considering that, to me at least, that 2011 Phase I movie has not aged well at all, and so it was with a sigh of relief that I noted that this movie was better than that one in many key aspects. It certainly wasn't as goofy as that film could get at its worst moments.
That notwithstanding, the film is unmistakably a Marvel movie, and leans quite heavily, often to its detriment, on quite a few "Marvelisms" or storytelling devices that have helped make the majority of their now-21 movie catalog box office smash hits, foremost of which the humor. This is easily one of the "quippiest" Marvel movies of recent memory, and while not all of the jokes, verbal and otherwise, work, enough of them do, largely thanks to some real onscreen chemistry between Larson's Vers and Jackson's Fury and to a treasure trove of jokes about what life was like in the 90s, with computers that take forever to load, grunge bands and actual video rental shops. As someone who came of age in that decade, this film felt like slipping into comfortable old shoes. It also makes heavy use of another narrative trope in Marvel movies that I cannot discuss at length without venturing into spoiler territory. In truth, this particular aspect I found problematic, for reasons I won't discuss here. Also, the film, like most of its predecessors leaned quite heavily on computer-generated imagery.
This is one aspect that stands out; the computer-generated imagery, which was a major pitfall of the now Oscar-winning Black Panther was, to my considerable surprise, done quite cleanly in Captain Marvel. The seams show here and there, but considering that this was an effects-heavy movie with a significant portion set in space, it was no small relief that directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck managed to pull off the more fantastical scenes, especially since this is their first-ever big-budget outing. Even the smaller touches, like the CG that de-aged both Jackson and Clark Gregg who shows up as a young Phil Coulson, worked supremely well.
What didn't work all that well, for me at least, was the somewhat generic music score by Pinar Toprak. Sure, it underscored the action well enough, but after Ludwig Goransson treated us to a delightful blend of earthy African rhythms and soaring orchestral fanfare in Black Panther I was kind of hoping for something a little more special. It was the song selection, which consisted of an interesting selection of 90s tunes, that basically carried the movie.
The writing also had a number of issues, some of them serious, which I unfortunately cannot go into because they involve disclosing quite a few spoilers. Suffice it to say that, after the sublime script that Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler crafted for Black Panther, where just about everything made sense, both as a reflection of how people actually behave, and within the context of its own logic, this one was distinctly disappointing. I'll have to stop there.
Marvel has always hired actors whose talent ranges from competent at worst to sublime at best, and whatever noise she may have generated with her off-screen comments, Brie Larson was a decent choice for the role. She manages to strike the right emotional balance between someone who is both confident in her own abilities and who is fraught with doubt as a result of flashes of a past she cannot quite grasp. Also, not that it matters, but she cracks plenty of smiles throughout the movie, yet again proving the age-old adage that it's best to watch a movie before judging it for what its star is or isn't doing in the marketing materials. Apart from the rock-solid, buddy-comedy chemistry Larson gets from playing off Jackson, she gets more than able support from other players in the cast, like Jude Law, Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau, Akira Akbar as her daughter Monica, who actually assumed the Captain Marvel mantle in the comics many years ago, and in a surprising turn, Ben Mendelsohn as the lead Skrull Talos. Mendelsohn's sort of been Hollywood's go-to bad guy of late, and having found him generic in films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Ready Player One I thought Marvel had fallen into their old trap of generic villains, but Mendelsohn's performance was a pleasant surprise, even though I found it distinctly strange that he was the only Skrull with an Australian accent (no, really).
That's another, admittedly minor quibble I have with this film; Asgardians all have British accents, while the residents of the Guardians of the Galaxy's corner of the galaxy all have American accents (including the Scottish Karen Gillan), but for some reason, Jude Law manages to be the only Kree thus far with a British accent, while Talos bears the odd distinction of being the only Skrull to have an Australian accent. It makes for some oddly inconsistent storytelling, though I was gratified that the scriptwriters finally made mention of a "universal translator" to address the issue of aliens being able to speak perfect English to Earthlings.
One final note: altering the Marvel Studios logo to feature solely the late Stan Lee as an homage was a really nice touch, as was featuring him reading a script of the 1995 film Mallrats, in which he had a cameo role. We'll soon see the last of his cameos this year, either in Avengers: Endgame or in Spider-Man: Far From Home, but it's still sad to be reminded that he's gone.
Carol Danvers' inclusion in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been long overdue, and while this film has its issues, this was definitely a decent big-screen debut for the character. Comparisons to DC's Wonder Woman will be inevitable, and if I'm honest, Patty Jenkins still made a better movie overall, notwithstanding WW's completely messed-up climax and the spotty CG, but selling Captain Marvel was always a bit of an uphill battle (against their own boss, no less, before Disney gave Ike Perlmutter the boot) and I think Marvel have given us a worthy enough addition to their ever-growing library.
6.5/10
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