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.