Captain Marvel, Marvel’s first major female superhero movie, and its answer to DC’s Wonder Woman, has finally hit cinemas.

The film is an ode to dreaming big, second chances, hope and female strength. It is a movie that says to us that whatever sex, race or creed we belong to we can rise to the challenge, touch the stars and change the world.

There is a catch though. Captain Marvel is not the average Joe, she is the farthest thing from it.

How meaningful is it though that Captain Marvel is a female superhero when she is too powerful and too perfect, even for a movie protagonist?

Captain Marvel can fly, survive virtually any fall or pressure, absorb most types of energies and shoot blasts from her hands. At her most powerful, she can radiate power that can only be matched by exploding stars. She is not a goddess, but she is the closest thing to it that Marvel has ever come up with. Often touted as the most powerful being in the comic book universe, she does not even have a kryptonite.

This raises two problems. The most glaring arises out of the fact that this movie takes place in the mid-1990s, when Captain Marvel, as Vers (Brie Larson), meets Agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, sent her an intergalactic text to come and save the universe from Thanos, the main Marvel bad guy.

Evidently, Fury did not think the world-shaking events of Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron were problems big enough to bother her about. Indeed, Captain Marvel’s abilities make Thor’s powers look like child’s play by comparison but imagine the lives that could have been saved though.

It is crucial to note that a serious investment in Marvel’s female version of Superman could not have preceded Wonder Woman’s unexpected critical and commercial success. It is only after that box office hit that the studio executives would have compelled filmmakers behind the cinematic universe to go out of their way to include a back-story that introduces Captain Marvel. Sadly, the inclusion makes nowhere as much sense, as far as storylines are considered, as this movie is going to be making money.

The other problem has to do with stakes.

With all of the powers that Captain Marvel has, what sort of plot would make it seem as if Captain Marvel is really in trouble?

There is no need to look for answers in the movie, which fails to provide the character a plot to match the scale of her powers.

All Vers knows when the movie begins is that she is a member of an elite force that serves an alien race known as the Kree. Their sworn enemies are the Skrulls, another alien race that can shapeshift to assume the body and voice of any other being.

After being captured by the Skrulls, she manages to escape with such ease that it is hard to believe the Kree even have to care much about them. And this is even before Vers learns of the full scale of her powers to become Captain Marvel.

It turns out that the Skrulls, after capturing her, were taking her to Earth. She crash lands, where else but in the US, and begins to realise that she might have had a life there in the past that she has since forgotten.

The movie contains such an obvious plot twist that it would be doing a disservice to the phrase ‘spoiler alert’ to refer to what I am about to do as such. It turns out the powerless Skrull are actually the good guys, and the slick and highly militarised alien race of Kree are the enemies. But even the latter’s entire civilisation pales in comparison to the powers Captain Marvel boasts, which she unleashes with unflinching relish.

Larson’s performance did not help the case for the lack of stakes in the movie. She plays the character with such smugness, such lack of effort one would almost think this was by design.

Here is a movie that has a superhero too powerful for the villains to ever pose a threat to, and here is an Oscar-winning actress playing an overtly one-dimensional character that will do nothing to advance her career as far as the values of the profession itself are considered.

None, neither the actress nor the fictional hero she plays, have a reason to be subtle.

PUBLISHED ON Mar 16,2019 [ VOL 19 , NO 985]

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