Missed the Mark - Captain Marvel
Captain Marvel (specifically Marvel Comics’ Carol Danvers) is a character who has been much maligned for more than half a decade now, and for good reason.
In the comics, Carol Danvers has a deep and interesting legacy. To name just one example, she had her original Kree-granted superpowers ripped away from her during a traumatic encounter with Rogue of the X-Men (back in the early days when Rogue was part of the Brotherhood of Mutants), only to later be granted the power set we now know thanks to an experiment. She also had several name changes, including a stint where she went by Warbird. It was in this context that I was first exposed to her back in the early 2000s. I first read about her via her character sheet in the Avengers sourcebook for the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game (the one from 2003 that’s abbreviated as MURPG, not the more recent system). Later, in an issue of Uncanny X-Men, she popped up as a representative of the Avengers to bail out the then-UN sanctioned X-Men team during a tense encounter with a small-town mob. I’ll admit that she didn’t strike me as a particularly standout character in either case, but she seemed like a fine addition to the Avengers roster, a veteran hero with experience, power, and authority to help bail other heroes out when they were in over their heads.
Then the MCU decided to exploit her.
THE GAMES THE MCU PLAYED
For those not aware, the MCU was built on a foundation of B-list characters. The film rights to any characters that were actually profitable - Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Daredevil, Blade, and all their supporting rosters - had been sold off many years earlier. It’s a testament to the quality of the early phases of the MCU that any character from those films is now popular.
By the time we got to Captain Marvel, the MCU has all but exhausted the B-list and begun digging into the C-list. It’s not that Captain Marvel and other characters introduced around this time (like Black Panther) were bad. It’s not that they didn’t have an audience. It’s just that the audience they had wasn’t deemed strong enough to make for worthwhile investments, not unless the MCU had exhausted the safer options.
But then something happened that made Captain Marvel seem more appetizing: identity politics became trendy. At the very least, it became something that rated well on an ESG scorecard, which is important if a entertainment company doesn’t want its credit lines to be frozen. So they grabbed Captain Marvel and tried to give her the same treatment that they were already giving Black Panther. However, while Black Panther’s film told a story filled with struggle, sacrifice, and personal growth, Captain Marvel was bled dry for lazy virtue signaling.
The Strong Female Character
The Captain Marvel of the MCU (hereafter referred to as “Carol”) is outclassed only by Rey in terms of making the phrase Strong Female Character into a stigma
Marvel plugged how Carol was the “most powerful hero in the MCU”, as if that somehow made her an interesting character. They talked big about how she was going to lead the Avengers going forward as if she had earned it, despite the fact that we hadn’t even gotten through her first movie yet and that fact that she was coming into this established team late in Phase 3. What Marvel didn’t do was market anything about her that would actually make her a compelling character. Her entire identity was Woman, her entire struggle was Men Bad, and her entire appeal with Power. Their chosen actress didn’t help matters. I don’t think it’s fair to lay all blame for bad press on Brie Larson’s shoulders - were I in her position, I might lose some situational awareness, too - yet the fact remains that she’s slipped up and delivered some comments that really didn’t make her or the character all that appealing.
I think that, on some level, Marvel didn’t really believe in Carol or Captain Marvel. They crowbarred the movie in between Infinity War and Endgame and made it seem like we had to see it to understand Endgame (which we really didn’t - even Carol’s limited role in the latter film makes sense without understanding her origin story). At least Black Panther got a subplot in Civil War to make us care about the character and thereby interest us in his solo film. Carol and her film were just a pill we were told to swallow with the promise that the stuff coating it was sugar.
Perhaps this might have been forgiven if Carol were a likeable, or at least relatable, character. This was another thing done right with Black Panther. Instead, Carol is a textbook example of a Strong Female Character who is written as a man. Any positive aspects of femininity are stripped away and replaced by the worst aspects of masculinity. She is arrogant, violent, smug, and emotionally detached. Her character arc boils down to her realizing that she has the power to bully others into doing what she wants. The closest thing we get to moments of vulnerability are the moments of the script that seem to exist to remind us that sexism is bad, which feels less that character development and more like a PSA. I’d say that she embodies the “feminine rage” trope that keeps getting used to market books and manuscripts, but that would imply some human emotion behind the character.
Just a Plain Bad Movie
As for Captain Marvel … it’s bad on its own merits.
Removing Carol from the equation for a moment, I don’t think this movie is terrible. If anything, it feels like a Phase 1 or even Phase 2 project, one that’s on shaky legs because Marvel is still figuring out how to do a superhero story. It’s the overall quality of Phase 3 that makes Captain Marvel look bad by comparison. I feel like this film would have gotten less backlash if it had been released years earlier.
However, this is Carol’s origin story. We can’t properly assess the film without her. When added back into the mix, Carol makes Captain Marvel into a bad film. This is a story about a bland yet toxic person who is smug towards everyone she meets and freely uses her power to abuse those around her. She is never truly challenged, either externally or internally: her powers allow her to easily overcome external challenges, and her brush with a crisis of identity is resolved so quickly that it feels like it’s being handwaved. She goes from being an unstoppable warrior who breaks the rules to a physical god who is above the rules, and she does so without sacrificing or learning anything. (Learning that she was always a physical god doesn’t count. I’m referring to learning a moral lesson.)
In short, Carol is a textbook case of a Mary Sue, and that destroys any potential for her story. That is a terrible shame. The film had so much potential.
What was Lost
Captain Marvel’s thematic messaging boils down the laziest of takes on modern feminism. All men are either overtly evil, deserving of punishment, or else bow down before the heroine’s greatness. We get loads of complaining about how men hold women back. Carol is the physical embodiment of entitlement, starting the story with all the power she needs to overcome problems and growing more and more powerful until she casually swats aside anyone who tries to oppose her will through either force or reason. It is a power fantasy every bit as unhinged as Violet’s journey in The Empyrean, though here, we are mercifully spared the inner monologue and the thirst for sexual gratification.
Because of this noise, it’s easy to miss a deeper thematic idea: that society asks women to discard their femininity to obtain that which society deems to be “success”.
This idea does exist in the current film, albeit in a very weak form. It’s used to bookend Carol’s ascent to godhood. For those who didn’t see the film, Carol spends the whole film wearing this inhibitor chip that the Kree stuck on her neck. It doesn’t hold her back in any way during the story. Then, during the climax, she accepts that she’s a god, and the chip just burns out and lets her be a god. It’s an embodiment of the thesis statement that women would be all-powerful if men didn’t hold them back. Additionally, Carol’s Kree mentor (Jude Law’s character) repeatedly tells Carol that she needs to stop being emotional and use logic. This invokes how women might be valued less than men in stressful situations because women are written off as being “too emotional”. However, the film never actually proves Jude Law’s character wrong. Carol simply upgrades to godhood and blasts him aside. At best, the film is saying, “If someone thinks you are too emotional, throw a violent tantrum until you get your way.” How inspirational.
There was an opportunity here. We could have gotten a superhero story about a heroine who is asked to sacrifice a portion of her humanity (namely, something strongly associated with femininity) because she was taught that it was the only way she could succeed. She starts the story believing that this humanity would weaken her at best and corrupt her into something terrible at worst. She could have then been put into a scenario which threatened to prove this anti-theme, being tempted by the worst incarnation of the thing she was told to sacrifice. In stepping away from this dark incarnation, she finds her true self, and thus is able to find the strength to stand against those who once dehumanized her. She may have let go of the thing she once desired, but she has found something far more important.
At least, we could have gotten that. The Mary Sue power fantasy of feminine rage is currently in the way. Marvel was so desperate to pander to feminist identity politics that it glossed over a chance to actually tell a meaningful feminist narrative.
Let’s fix that.
GROUNDWORK
Much like with Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I do not believe that the entire Captain Marvel film needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the the ground up. The plot can remain more or less the same. The changes we need to make instead focus on characterization and worldbuilding.
The Inhibitor Chip
While I despise the inhibitor chip in its current incarnation, it will be pivotal to the rewrite. The key change that we are going to make with the chip is that it will actually hold Carol back throughout the entirety of the story.
In the original film, the inhibitor chip’s only goal is to keep Carol from unlocking her god mode. One would think that, if the Kree trusted her so little, they wouldn’t dare deploy her for frontline combat as a member of their Star Force. The chip could be damaged in battle, or else removed while Carol is away from the home base, or simply short out when Carol thinks really hard (which is exactly what happens in the climax). If they trust her enough to put her in the field, they why would they not want her to use her god mode?
We’re going to change the purpose of the chip. In this new version, the chip will exist to shut off Carol’s powers whenever she gets emotional. So long as she does what Jude Law says and remains logical, she gets to use her powers. When she becomes emotional, though, she is reduced to a mundane human (perhaps with slightly heightened physiology, to explain why she doesn’t get killed by slamming into things). This will allow the Kree to utilize her full potential as part of their genocidal campaign against the Skrulls.
Part of my inspiration here is “Prime Factors”, the tenth episode of Star Trek: Voyager. In that episode, Tuvok goes behind Janeway’s back and violates the Prime Directive, believing that doing so is the only way for both Voyager to safely return home without Janeway violating her principles. He tells Janeway that this was the logical decision. Janeway responds with a line that has struck with me for years.
“You can use logic to justify almost anything. That’s its power … and its flaw.”
Much like in the original film, Carol’s memories will have been blocked. Subconsciously, she will still recognize things, and that will trigger emotional reactions, but the Kree have been able to fabricate her conscious reality. They had indoctrinated her into a logical framework where the genocide of the Skrulls is necessary and the supremacy of the Kree is unquestionable while also convincing her that rising through the ranks of the Star Force is what she wants most. So, though her emotions try to warn her that something is wrong, Carol will push them down in order to hold onto her power.
Carol’s Powers
Carol’s godlike power contributes to her status as a Mary Sue, but it’s not the cause of it. You can have an insanely overpowered character without writing a Mary Sue. It’s all about writing the story so that said character still has meaningful conflicts, ideally ones that power alone can’t resolve.
When I saw this film, I honestly had no idea that Carol didn’t have her god mode powers until the climax. I assumed Carol was not exercising her full power merely because it wasn’t necessary. I assumed she held back in the first fight because it was beneath her; I assumed that she stole a motorcycle to get around because flying would draw unnecessary attention. It wasn’t until her entering god mode was treated as this big reveal that I realized, “Wait, she couldn’t have done that the whole time?”
A big issue in the original film is that Carol’s powers and limits are never defined. We know she can do photon blasts, but the marketing showed that she could do a lot more than that. So, when she’s only ever faced by challenges that she can easily overcome with just the photon blasts and has good reason not to flex beyond that, it doesn’t feel like she’s being held back. Add to this the fact that she has zero learning curve when it comes to all of her god powers - she flies without issue and tears through a space armada with ease - and she functionally has no limits of any kind.
This rewrite will correct that. Carol will have god mode from the start. It will be why Star Force deploys her on missions. They have indoctrinated her to serve as their weapon of mass destruction, with Jude Law and the rest of her squad being handlers to preserve her psychological well-being and manually trigger the inhibitor chip if she gets out of line. We will see both the full scope of her power and her mastery with it in the first fight scene.
Carol’s Characterization
This will be the lynchpin of the rewrite.
Carol’s current movie characterization will not be erased in this version. Rather, her Strong Female Character persona will be who she is while allied with the Kree. This is who the Kree have indoctrinated her to be. This will be her starting point: an embodiment of a woman who has discarded any positive feminine traits in favor of the worst interpretation of masculine traits.
Carol’s endpoint will be something … I want to say “more feminine”, but I feel that would be a tad too simplistic. It’s more accurate to say that she accepts the positive value of feminine traits. She’ll become nurturing, empathetic, protective, and most important of all, emotional. By this, I’m also not referring to destructive and negative emotion (though that will be a step within her journey). Instead, she will be someone who is able to view the world through an emotional lens without completely losing sight of reality.
In short, Carol’s journey within this film will be from the defeminized form of femininity pushed by the Strong Female Character trope to the destructive inferno of “feminine rage” to a state of self-accepting femininity. Her powers will be an incentive for her throughout this journey. In the first two stages, they are something she aggressively pursues to the extent of self-destruction. When she finally accepts herself and her emotions, she will reach a point where she no longer needs her powers, at least not to serve her own goals. The powers will instead become a gift that she shares with the universe by protecting the weak.
THE REWRITE
Act One
The story begins on Hala. We get the same scenes of Carol having her nightmare and waking up Jude Law for a sparring match. However, in this iteration, it is made clear that this is more a meditative exercise than instruction. Jude Law goads her throughout the fight, repeatedly beating her into the mat. It’s only when she wrestles down her emotions that she is able to hurl him back with a photon blast. This is treated as a good thing - a sign that she has once more thrown away her emotions.
Carol will be sent on the Star Force mission to attack the Skrulls. This time, though, we’ll see her in her full glory. We’ll watch her hurling down from the heavens, tearing through Skurll “warships” before descending to obliterate the “troop transports” on the ground. Jude Law and the rest of the team will drop from orbit to do cleanup, with Carol flying overhead as a sentinel. However, as Jude Law and the others breach a Skull bunker, Carol is left outside. A Skrull uses a device to hack Carol’s inhibitor chip, changing the settings so as to shut down her powers completely. She is then easily overpowered and abducted.
The scenes aboard the Skrull ship, with Carol being plugged into the memory extraction machine, progress much the same way. This includes all of the flashbacks of Carol being put down by men and her efforts to push back. This time, though, what holds Carol back from using her powers is the inhibitor chip, which is still programmed to fully suppress her abilities. As she struggles to escape, the memories she glimpsed while in the machine gnaw at her. This leads to an emotional outburst that overloads the chip, granting the burst of powers that allows her to wreck havoc on the ship and then fall to Earth as in the original film.
Act Two
Carol’s meeting with Fury and the chase scene with the Skrull will progress the same as in the original film, though this time, Carol is able to access her photon blasts because of the mounting confusion and resultant anger from being back on Earth. She’s not yet caught onto the fact that emotion is what lets her overload the chip. That moment of understanding comes when she assaults and robs the biker. Her initial efforts to brush off the biker and then command respect as a Star Force officer fail. As her frustration mounts, she notices that her hands begin to generate photons. As an experiment, Carol allows her Kree composure to slip deliberately, unleashing her full wrath on the biker. What began as a scene where an irritating man doesn’t respect boundaries becomes one of Carol brutalizing and robbing a mundane human purely as an exercise of her rage. It won’t be played as a karmic reversal; instead, it will be something disturbing.
Carol tries this same outburst of emotions when she meets Nick Fury, destroying the jute box in an attempt to intimidate him into helping. Fury, however, is both too experienced to be intimidated by her display and too level-headed to give her an excuse to hurt him. Carol is forced to back down and take a more cooperative position. However, when they get to the military base, she again indulges in her emotions to blow open doors and then again to fight off the Skrull-controlled SHIELD agents.
Carol and Fury eventually make it to the Rambeau house. It’s here that we get another major change from the original film. While Carol and Maria were friends and fellow test pilots at one point, they’d had a falling out prior to Carol’s abduction by the Kree. The reason that Maria was not present on the day Carol and Mar Vel were attacked was that she had requested a hardship discharge from the Air Force, choosing to prioritize her role at a single parent to her daughter over advancing her career. Carol had accused Maria of being anti-feminist and betraying everything the two of them had worked for; even now, hearing this re-explained to her, Carol can’t understand how Maria could have made the choice she did, since no member of the Kree Star Force would make the same choice Maria did. Maria would repeat the argument she had made to Carol back then: that she had joined the Air Force to serve others, not to serve her own ambition, and that by sacrificing her career to care for her daughter, she had achieved that goal. Success and heroism are about more than conquering obstacles and collecting accolades. Maria would then take this opportunity to introduce the eight-year-old Monica to Carol (since, timeline-wise, Monica would have been only a toddler when Carol disappeared). We see Carol’s smug Kree persona slip a bit as she softens in the presence of someone she vaguely remembers from her past.
Talos would choose this moment to arrive and explain the truth of the Kree-Skrull War to Carol. The revelation is too much for Carol to handle. Her powers begin to explode out of her, and she has to flee the house and unleash the energy outside to avoid harming the humans around her.
Talos follows Carol outside and attempts to reason with her. We’d get a version of the, “I don’t know who I am,” scene, this time accompanied by blasts of Carol’s powers discharging. Talos explains to her how the inhibitor chip works, why the Kree installed it, and how he manipulated it in a bid to disable her powers. He explains that the chip was not designed to operate continuously; it was only meant to activate for brief spurts to ride out emotional outbursts. By having the chip inhibit her powers at all times, it has overtaxed the hardware, which is why emotional outbursts can overload it. He can remedy this on the station by simply removing the chip. Carol instead asks him to restore the chip’s original settings. The horror of all the innocents she’s harmed, coupled with realization of how her emotions almost killed more innocents, have convinced her that she can’t be trusted with her power if there’s even the slightest chance she might unleash it in a moment of passion. At least if the chip only activates in moments of passion, she can trust that she won’t use her powers without thinking things through.
Act Three
Carol, Fury, and the Skrulls (not Maria - it would somewhat undermine the idea she represents if she abandoned her daughter to go on a cool mission) fly up to the refugee station. The Skrulls have their reunion and reset Carol’s chip. It’s at this moment that Jude Law and his team arrive. Carol tries to defend the Skrulls, but with the chip reset, her present state of inner turmoil locks her out from using her powers. She is subdued and forced into the telepathic call with Master Control.
Here, Master Control offers Carol a choice. The Kree can free her of the trauma of the harm she’s done by erasing her memories of the true nature of the Kree-Skrull War, as well as memories of her past actions to destroy the Skrulls. Carol will be freed from the burden of her emotions; what’s more, she will be welcomed back into Star Force and be able to rise through the ranks once more. She will be a trailblazer, being the first human to ever reach the loftiest ranks of the Kree military.
Carol considers the offer, but then she remembers what Maria told her. She reflects on why she joined the Air Force. We get snippets of the scenes from the memory extraction scene, but also fragments of other moments where she aspired to service even if it meant being less successful. (One potential memory that comes to mind is Carol being denied the chance to fly combat because she’s a woman, something that is mentioned in the original film. In this memory, she accepts the ruling gracefully. She doesn’t care about being the one earning glory on the front lines so long as her skills can contribute to the success of the whole Air Force.) She reflects on what Maria said about self-sacrifice to serve others and realizes that she needs to sacrifice her self-image to save the Skrulls.
This epiphany grants Carol a measure of serenity. The inhibitor chip, not recognizing the difference between cold logic and inner peace, disengages. Carol accesses her powers, breaking free of the call with Master Control and tearing through Jude Law’s squad.
The broad stokes of the climax are the same. Carol defends Earth from Ronan the Accuser and tears through the Kree armada. In this iteration, she won’t be wildly whooping as she does it. She will start off the fight with only defending herself and the Earth, only destroying a Kree cruiser when the armada refuses to stand down. There will also be a final standoff with Jude Law. In this iteration, Jude Law will again express pride in Carol for learning to fight while keeping her emotions in check; however, since the end goal was to get her to master her powers, he will not challenge her to a fistfight, instead trying to die honorably with a suicidal charge against her. Rather than blow him away, Carol lets him wail on her, using her powers to weather the assault. Law hammers on her for hours before collapsing from exhaustion. Carol tells him that she’s not going to sacrifice her humanity any longer. The next time the Kree comes looking for a fight, she’ll give them one, but she will no longer be forced to be a weapon of mass destruction. She helps Jude Law stagger back to his escape craft so that he can fly back to Hala unscathed.
After that, the movie ends the same way. Carol gives Fury the pager to summon her. We’ll add a line by her that the pager has limited range, thereby closing the plot hole of why she hasn’t popped up in any prior MCU film (i.e. the implication being that Fury tried to call her to deal with Loki, Hydra, the Dark Elves, and Ultron, but she was always out of range). She then flies off to escort the Skrulls to safety.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My main goal with this rewrite was to provide Captain Marvel with a feminist narrative that subverts the Strong Female Character trope. These days, the trope of the female character excelling in a traditionally masculine role just isn’t groundbreaking anymore. Marvel missed a chance to do something genuinely surprising and heartfelt. Instead of telling women that they need to acquire loads of power and embody the worst attributes of men to get ahead in life, they could have acknowledged the dignity of other choices that women might choose to make for their lives.
I wish I could take credit for this idea, but the indie comic series Kamen America beat me to it. Carly Vanders - who, if you couldn’t guess by the name, is a satirical take on Captain Marvel - is a superhero struggling to remain true to both her values and her dreams while dealing with the additional complications imposed by her powers. At the start of the series, her agent wants to turn her into a Strong Female Character to sell merchandise, but she just wants to promote her personal fashion line and protect people wherever she can. A major theme of Volume 1 of the comic (one that is delivered with less subtlety than I’d like, but that’s true for all the messages in the series) is that it’s okay for women to still be into feminine things. It’s a feminist story in that it doesn’t demand that women throw away their identities to be heroes.
More broadly, I feel like this revision would just make Carol into a more interesting character. The original film doesn’t force her to change or grow. She just bulldozes through conflicts and faces no meaningful consequences. Having her story be about understanding and making the choice between ambition and service, between her humanity and cold logic, gives her an arc. It lets her be wrong so that we can cheer for her when she gets things right.
FINALLY, AN AWAKENING
Captain Marvel is a story of a Mary Sue who can be redeemed without reducing her power level.
I think the same can be said of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.
Yes, the time has finally come for a series I promised two and a half years ago.
The rewrite proposal for the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy will be an 11-part seies that will overlap with the Recent Reads series for Goblet of Fire and Onyx Storm, with breaks to facilitate additional book reviews. At this time, the planned timeline is as follows:
Part 1, due out on January 31st, will detail my overall thoughts on the existing Sequel Trilogy and its core issues.
Part 2, due out on February 14th, will give an overview of the changes I’ll be recommending.
Parts 3 through 5 will cover the rewrite for The Force Awakens. This will most likely begin in late March or early April.
Parts 6 through 8 will cover the rewrite for The Last Jedi. This will most likely begin sometime in July.
Parts 9 through 11 will cover the rewrite for The Rise of Skywalker. I am tentatively targeting September for the start of that rewrite.
Needless to say, there’s going to be more than enough to keep us busy for quite some time. I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride. Have a good week, everyone.