4-Color to 35-Millimeter: Captain Marvel

We kick off Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the chronologically earliest one of the bunch, Captain Marvel, which mostly takes place in 1995 (with bits in 1989 and 2019). The great superhero movie rewatch looks at the MCU’s long overdue first solo female-led film.

An excerpt:

This is a truly magnificent movie, an absolute delight from beginning to end. Great performances, great writing, great directing, plus a nice inversion of the origin formula that Marvel has used a bit too often. It took fourteen years for there to be a Marvel movie that starred a woman by herself as the solo lead, and indeed it was the failure of Elektra (a bad spinoff of a bad movie) and Catwoman the same year that was often cited as “proof” that women can’t lead superhero films. Strangely, the failures of Hulk and Daredevil two years earlier didn’t lead to similar complaints about men leading superhero films. Wonder why…

Many of the dopey complaints that have been made about this movie (I hasten to add, not all the complaints—there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the film) are pretty much just code for “I don’t wanna watch a movie with a girl.”