Captain Marvel passes the test

Captain Marvel may not be my favorite Marvel movie -- it's somewhere around the middle, probably -- but there was a lot riding on it last night.

As you know from yesterday's post, it was my son's tenth birthday yesterday, and also our first full day of having Apple TV and Disney+. Captain Marvel had been lined up for his surprise birthday evening viewing, something my wife officially agreed to it at some point after I wrote yesterday's post.

The questions I had before watching were many:

1) Will I have miscalculated terribly? Will this be too intense for my kids, if not the ten-year-old then certainly the six-year-old?

2) Will my wife shoot daggers at me throughout the movie for twisting her arm into something she never really wanted to do?

3) Will they like it?

Since I don't love Captain Marvel, the last one of those shouldn't matter as much. But when you show someone a Marvel movie, you're not just getting them to buy in to that particular movie. You're trying to sell them on more than 20 movies, and the viability of watching the rest of those movies hangs in the balance.

For the children, I didn't think that would be a problem. I mean, superheros punching each other, flying, and shooting laser rays out of their fists? What kid wouldn't like that?

But my wife has only seen maybe five of the Marvel movies, and kind of turns her nose up at them. In fact, the only ones I can say for certain she's seen are Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: Ragnarok. I'm sure she's seen one or two others, but they would have all been under my direction and without very much excitement.

I don't care if she likes these movies, really -- I've already seen them all so I don't need a viewing partner. But her liking them might also be instrumental in giving her blessing for the kids to keep watching them, which I do want them to have the chance to do. Especially now that we have D+.

Probably the more worrisome issue, though, wss whether anything in this movie would scar my kids, especially the younger one. I did a cursory check on the internet -- more than cursory, I guess, as I read the entire parental recommendation section on IMDB, as well as sought out counsel from my Flickcharters Facebook group. It didn't really seem like there would be anything too scary.

And in fact, there were only two moments when I thought the kids were actually disturbed, the first of which was previewed on IMDB.

That first was the autopsy of the dead Skrull, when you can see the flaps of his chest and abdomen held open with medical instruments. You don't see any actual alien guts, but apparently, the whole idea of looking inside the body of what had once been a living thing was a bit too much for my ten-year-old. I think he might have just thought it was gross rather than the kind of thing that chills him or makes him consider his own mortality. He looked away from the screen and asked us to tell him when it was finished.

Then the second thing was with my younger son -- who didn't care about the autopsy, it should be noted -- and was something that would never come up in a parental guidance report for Captain Marvel. When Carol Danvers is under a trance near the end and is "visiting" an incarnation of her mentor, Annette Bening's Mar-Vell, she tries to punch the vision in the face. The face, a projection as it is, subsumes the fist, so that the fist sinks into it up to the wrist, and the mouth disappears entirely. "That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen," said the six-year-old, who may have indeed dwelled on that for a few minutes after it left the screen.

Well did they like it?

"It's the best movie I've ever seen," said the birthday boy. He's prone to exaggeration -- what kid isn't? -- but I do think I've only heard him say it about five times before. So that means that Marvel beats DC, I guess, as he had previously favored Shazam.

"Yeah," said the younger one, who is not given to talking about and ranking favorites. I guess he takes after his mother in that regard.

"Oh yeah," said my wife, in a way that hits the word "yeah" and suggests "could there be any other reaction?" Captain Marvel was a strategic choice on my part, you see. First and foremost, it was something my son had mentioned. But as it's Marvel's first female-fronted movie, that had been a potential draw for my wife from back when it came out, to the extent that she may even have intended to see it in the theater. That doesn't mean she's going to automatically green light the other Marvel movies, but having sat with her kids and seen how they reacted -- both their attraction to the material, and perhaps more importantly, their lack of aversion to it -- can only help.

Me? I liked it a lot more.

I had been a bit cold on Captain Marvel from my first viewing -- not because I didn't think it was a good movie, but because, as with Black Panther, I just didn't think it was anything special. Well, I do find there to be special aspects to this movie on second viewing, and I don't just think I'm being influenced by my family's obvious affection.

Although I think the female empowerment messages are great, and I do like the performance of Brie Larson in the title role, I hate to say it, but it's the performance of the two lead men that really raises this up a notch. Samuel L. Jackon is in rare form here, even more charismatic than usual, and looking great with the aging down technology (which is more a compliment to the special effects than the performance, I realize). But I think it's Ben Mendelsohn who really clinches the tone that Jackson gets started. My wife pointed out that it's lovely that he got to keep his native Australian accent, and I think that helps sell his persona here. I'm having trouble putting it into words -- neither "flippant" nor "aloof" capture it perfectly. But his personality is key to selling the mid-movie transformation of our understanding of who this character is.

Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if this transformation played a role in why the kids like it so much. It made for a number of mid-movie questions about who was really the good guy, as they were surprised to have their expectations overturned like they may never have had them overturned before. But I think it also helped them understand a couple core lessons that we would like them to take away from any piece of art: Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't trust everything told to you by authority figures.

It reminded me a bit of my own blow-your-mind moment around this age, maybe a year or two older, when I saw the Dennis Quaid-Lou Gossett Jr. space movie Enemy Mine. If you don't recall the particulars of that one, it's the one where Quaid's human and Gossett's alien -- a Drac by species name -- get stranded together on a planet they are unable to escape. They are enemies in a raging war between their species. The film cleverly puts you in Quaid's shoes to start, so you assume he is fighting a just fight against a truly reprehensible enemy, and the fact that the Drac is "ugly" (by human standards) helps cement your core perspective. Of course, as the movie goes, you realize just how kind and worthy of our sympathy this Drac -- this enemy -- really is.

I'm not sure if the other Marvel movies have such useful messages to impart as female empowerment, racial tolerance and skepticism of authority, but hopefully, we'll get a chance to find out.

Its own worst enemy

This is the fourth in my series called Double Jeopardy, in which I reexamine movies that I liked more than other people, to see if they hold up. It runs on Tuesdays.

In my first three weeks of the Double Jeopardy series, I ended up feeling about as positively toward the movie in question as I had after my first viewing. That made me wonder if I'd seen them too recently to have had much of a change of heart.

So this week I decided to dig way, way back -- something I hadn't seen since the 1980s. But I may have had to stretch the definition of this series to do it.

See, I thought most people felt kind of positively about Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine, as I did. The website I write for told me otherwise. On the website, I noticed that the movie was assigned only two stars out of a possible five. Later, I discovered that it was one of those instances where the reviewer wrote a review that was out of synch with the star rating -- a consequence of the star rating having been assigned at a different time from when the review was written, and by someone other than the person who ultimately reviewed it. But I didn't read the positive review until later, and added Enemy Mine to my hit list based on that two-star assessment.

As it turns out, it was a good choice for this series. Enemy Mine is a lot cheesier than I remembered it. And it starts out on a very wrong foot.

Now, 1985 was no period of great achievement in special effects. But it was a full two years after Return of the Jedi, so I was expecting a modicum of sophistication in the opening spaceship battle between the humans and the Dracs. Uh uh. Super-imposed two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of spaceships swoop across the screen in perfect arcs, fixed at an equal distance from each other, in a way only possible if they are all part of a single graphic. They shoot light brite laser blasts at each other and erupt in the kind of flames you see grafted onto episodes of South Park (because that type of animation doesn't work for explosions). What's more, you're given only the flimsiest back story to comprehend these events, which can be summarized as "Humans hate Dracs and Dracs hate humans." The hammy yelling of Dennis Quaid makes the scene complete.

I like Dennis Quaid as an actor -- actually, I guess it's more that I think he would be a fun guy to hang out with, so therefore, I like him as an actor as well. But his hammy acting is a constant throughout the movie. When both he and the Drac, whom he calls Jerry, crash land on the planet, most of the story elements start to improve. But Quaid's acting isn't one of them. Quaid's Davidge sneaks up on the Drac crash site, where Jerry is enjoying some food by the fire. When Jerry plunges into the water for a swim, Quaid literally cackles like a maniacal villain, as Davidge gains the upper hand on his enemy. Wouldn't he be a lot more nervous, especially never having seen a Drac in person before, and not knowing what he/she (the Dracs are multi-gendered) might be capable of?

Enemy Mine proceeds as you would expect -- enemies become grudging allies, and then genuine friends, with a couple episodes of lingering mistrust thrown in to spice up the narrative. The developing friendship was what really got me when I was a kid. I was just the right age, with just the right brief history of seeing science fiction movies, to find it revolutionary that a human being would be able to forge a loving bond with an alien so grotesque as a Drac. That idea was certainly seen in numerous previous movies, if not actually, then at least metaphorically. But it was new to me, and I found it profound.

And how grotesque is that Drac? That's the thing I find interesting about Enemy Mine -- as bad as those toy spaceships at the beginning are, the makeup that turns Lou Gossett Jr. into a full-blown alien is that good. Just check out this picture of Jerry. Not only is the reptilian outer skin attached seamlessly, but just for effect, it has moving parts as well. Those small circular patches next to the sides of his mouth, and the veiny oblong shapes where his ears should be, both ebb in and out. Slightly easier, though still effective, is that when Jerry is seen from behind, he's got a partially exposed skull that is similar in appearance to the oblong ear-things. If Jerry had been just a Star Trek villain from the 1960s, basically a humanoid with green or blue skin, we wouldn't feel the sense of repulsion necessary to underscore the difference between humans and Dracs -- nor the sense of revelatory joy when we realize that these surface-level differences can be overcome. It should come as no surprise that Enemy Mine functions as an allegory for race relations on Earth, and an effective one, at that. It's probably no coincidence that Quaid is white and Gossett Jr. is black.

Adding to the effect is the Drac language, which involves a weird guttural trilling of the R sounds, making the species of alien all the more exotic and frightening. Gossett Jr.'s performance is soulful and understated, and it's clearly the best thing about the movie. How touched I was by Jerry was the clearest feeling that lingered with me from Enemy Mine.

Spoilers ahead ...

Once Jerry leaves the movie, the air goes back out of it again. Jerry's offspring, the little Drac named Zammis, is cute and all, but the third act goes to extremely obvious places. Zammis is captured by a bunch of marauding human pirates and made to work as a slave with other Dracs in their mining business. These reprehensible humans are led by Brion James, who played the replicant in the opening scene of Blade Runner, whose real battle with Quaid is to see who can chew the most scenery. The final 15 minutes of this movie contain some of the most perfunctory and poorly staged fight scenes you have ever seen, and involve Quaid running around screaming "Zammis!" repeatedly, looking for his surrogate son. You're still glad for the happy ending, but a little embarrassed about what it took to get there.

Even if it proceeds along somewhat predictable lines, and features certain conflicts that are there purely for the purposes of narrative structure, Enemy Mine has a good enough story that it should be better than it is overall. Unfortunately, the great makeup and the great performance by Lou Gossett Jr. are barely enough to overcome Quaid's acting and the terrible special effects.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Enemy Mine: I said "barely," which means the movie does overcome its shortcomings. It's still valuable as an allegory, but it may have been better off, to me personally, as a fond memory, rather than something to be held under the microscope a second time.