Earlier this year, Marvel finally produced their first female-led superhero movie with
Captain Marvel.
And the good news is that it was pretty awesome.
Unfortunately, however, it's not quite flawless — and there are a few aspects of the movie
that are bound to provoke a little head-scratching.
Here are some of the dumbest parts of Captain Marvel.
The first Thor movie makes a point of explaining Arthur Clarke's Third Law: that any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
"Your ancestors called it magic.
And you call it science.
Well, I come from a place where they’re one and the same thing."
The Kree fall right in line with that rule.
As a futuristic space-race, the Kree have all kinds of magical technology at their disposal,
most of which is beyond anything Earth's soldiers could ever dream of using.
But the one thing they don't seem to have down is a reliable walkie-talkie system.
During the opening mission, a whole lot of Skrull ambushing goes down when Carol's team
can't get their darned cell phones to work.
"Minerva…"
"Does anybody copy?"
And yeah, it's not like Earth had the best wireless coverage in 1995 either.
But it does seem like comms are something you should prioritize if you're going to a
world crawling with shapeshifters — and you still insist on splitting up.
After Carol takes a wad of purple sleep zap to the face, the Skrulls take her back to
their ship and start poking around in her memories.
Like all great film and TV heroes who find themselves under the knife, she quickly realizes
she's being messed with and busts out of there, smashing her way through half a dozen guards
in the process.
That's when the toady standing closest to Talos does what any great henchman would do
in a situation like that: He points his gun at her.
And then Talos does what all great supervillains do.
"Not yet!"
But… why?
Obviously the Skrull couldn't kill Carol, since his boss still needed the information
in her head — not to mention the fact that Marvel Studios still needed her for, conservatively,
around 14 more movies.
But were they all out of their sedatives?
Or did Talos just know that killing Carol there and then would have made for a far less
interesting movie?
MacGuffin trouble is the worst kind of trouble.
In case you're unaware, a MacGuffin is the plot-necessary object that everybody in a
story wants.
It's the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark...
and Mar-Vell's lightspeed engine technology in Captain Marvel.
But why does anyone actually care about traveling at lightspeed?
Every space-faring species in the MCU already has access to mind-bogglingly quick intergalactic
travel, and that includes the Kree and the Skrulls in this movie.
In practically no time, they move from one side of the galaxy to the other.
To put it in perspective, traveling at lightspeed, it would take a little over four years to
travel from Earth to the closest neighboring star.
That's a hell of a commute compared to punching in a few coordinates and getting across the
universe in the space of a day.
But for some reason, it's also bafflingly presented as a technology that could quickly
end future wars — meaning the whole thing feels a little like the present-day United
States sabotaging China's plans to develop advanced horseback riding because that tech
would be dangerous in the wrong hands.
That train sequence early on in the movie might have looked cool, but a whole lot of
it didn't make much sense.
So what's the problem?
Well firstly, that train that Carol and the Skrull are fighting on is the Los Angeles
Metro Blue Line.
The Blue Line runs on a 22-mile stretch of track between downtown LA and Long Beach with
22 station stops in between, which the mathematically inclined might notice averages out to one
stop per mile.
The train moves at an average speed of 55 mph, meaning that it should pull into a station
about once per minute.
But does it stop while Carol and the Skrull are tussling?
No, not once.
Now, if you're being generous, you could point out the system might have been different in
1995 — or even just accept that this is one part of the movie that requires a little
suspension of disbelief.
Even if you do that, though, it's much harder to believe that not a single person on that
train pulled the emergency cord when a lady in full body armor started beating the hell
out of a suspiciously athletic old woman.
When Coulson was first introduced in Iron Man way back in 2008, he was an affable enough
government official — clean-cut, nonthreatening, and adamant in his desire to meet with Tony
Stark on behalf of his employers, the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics
Division.
The name was long and rambling and it was a pretty great joke for him to insist on using
the full title every time.
"That's quite a mouthful.”
“I know.
We’re working on it."
Luckily, someone clearly realized that they had been sitting on a pretty badass acronym
the whole time, and in subsequent appearances the group was referred to as S.H.I.E.L.D.
But while S.H.I.E.L.D. has been around in some form or another since the 1940s, Captain
Marvel gives us the earliest instance of somebody actually using the term 'S.H.I.E.L.D.'
So why did Coulson imply they hadn't come up with that acronym yet in Iron Man?
Did they go by S.H.I.E.L.D. for a while, then abandon it in favor of the longer name at
some point during the late '90s or early 2000s?
Or was it just that none of Coulson's colleagues told him that they had come up with a better
name for the organization over twenty years ago?
Superhero origin stories kind of work like double deckers.
On the bottom layer, you have the meaty personal tale that explains just why the character
became a force for good in the world.
Spider-Man's loss of Uncle Ben is a big one, or the death of Batman's parents.
The top layer, however, has all the fun stuff: how they got their powers.
Think Peter Parker getting bitten by that spider or Batman doing push-ups over and over
until he could punch people so hard that they wouldn't do crime anymore.
This part isn't usually the most realistic part of the movie, but hey, if you're willing
to extend your disbelief enough to accept that a guy can run faster than a jet, you're
not going to hop off just because he got that power from getting struck by lightning.
Still, Carol getting her powers by exploding herself is still a heck of a leap.
Not to get all "but in the source material" on you, but in the source material, Carol
got her powers when an alien device blew up and melded her DNA with a nearby Kree.
From what we saw in Captain Marvel, she was granted her powers by the grace of lucking
out and, to put it in comic book terms, getting bitten by a radioactive kaboom.
It's not a terrible origin, it's just that, as ways to get your powers go, this one's
a little less Superman and a little more What Women Want.
You know what most military organizations love about their uniforms?
The fact that they're uniform in the first place.
Is this a huge deal?
No.
But it seems peculiar that the Kree, maybe the most elite military force in the universe,
gave their soldiers battle armor that could swap out color palettes easier than a MySpace
home page theme.
"Fresh."
And that goes doubly when you consider how Jude Law's Yon-Rogg sees Carol's new duds
and immediately gives her hell for it.
Why give your soldiers customizable Halo multiplayer armor if making the hues a little more summery
is some kind of ultimate offense?
And on that subject, how come Carol still wore the Kree insignia on her chest after
redesigning her outfit?
She made such a big deal about not wanting to wear Kree colors anymore, but still couldn't
help rocking their logo after she defected.
It's free advertising, Carol!
You're supposed to hate those guys!
When the Star Wars prequels first came out, one of their biggest problems was the inherent
difficulty in telling the origin story of a badass, iconic character.
Darth Vader was a powerful, mysterious figure in the original trilogy, and while characters
like that are practically begging for a backstory, it's often hard to show how somebody became
an iconic nightmare without showing them as a less interesting, less scary dude first.
That's how you end up with Anakin.
The point is, Samuel L. Jackson should've known better.
As fun as Jackson himself is in Captain Marvel, Nick Fury is played as sort of a joke.
For all his talk of field work and Cold War skullduggery, he's mostly just a goofball
with a shockingly short memory when it comes to whether the animal he's holding is an actual
monster.
We don't see the Machiavellian super spy who was willing to bazooka one of his own men
out of the sky in The Avengers.
Instead, we see a guy who keeps a tentacle demon full of superweapon in his office after
it's already killed like, eight guys.
And who couldn't even come up with the word "Avenger" on his own.
You can only assume that the next decade or so on the job got him seriously jaded.
Carol Danvers is shown to have a wide array of powers in Captain Marvel, but none are
more impressive than her ability to craft an interstellar communications device out
of '90s electronics.
It's even how she closes out the movie: handing Fury a tricked-out space pager before bouncing
back to outer space.
Carol pretty much insists that the pager is just for emergencies when she gives Fury the
gadget, and you have to assume that he's going to take that seriously.
The guy is a professional, after all.
But nobody could possibly have guessed he was going to take it way too seriously.
What constitutes an emergency, Nick?
The time a Norse god rained laser hell on New York, maybe?
Because he did that using the Tesseract, which might as well be known as the Captain Marvel
Box.
Or how about when an army of robots tried to drop a city on the world?
Or one of the dozens of times that Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk and decided to smash
literally everything in sight?
Frankly, you'd be hard-pressed to think of a potentially world-ending event that took
place in the ensuing years that wouldn't have been worth Carol's time.
People love to whine about Marvel movies for the same reason they like ripping on McDonald's
french fries: because they're popular.
But you know what?
Make fun of them all you want, but they're still going to get your money eventually,
because the worst thing you can say about either of those things is that they're occasionally
just a little too familiar.
Oh, and the sodium in the fries, but that's not such a problem with Marvel movies.
But herein lies the biggest problem with Captain Marvel.
Even with its inspiring underlying message, so much of it just felt like a Marvel movie
greatest hits Mad Lib.
They nabbed the Guardians of the Galaxy-esque era-specific soundtrack.
They even had their own Groot in Goose the Cat, complete with hallway tentacle-slam slaughter.
Elsewhere, the one-liners popped up in the middle of action sequences right where you
knew you would find them.
And man, even that part where Yon-Rogg tries to monologue Carol into a fight and then gets
clobbered was lifted straight out of another movie; it was copied almost beat-for-beat
from the scene where the same thing happens to Loki in Avengers.
None of this is movie-ruining stuff, obviously, and most people know exactly what they're
in for when they sit down for an MCU origin story.
But it still would have been nice if they'd spend a little more time trying to find their
voice.
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