Posts Tagged ‘marvel’

A REVIEW OF THE 2019 FILM AND A FEW OTHER OBSERVATIONS

In the last ten years, the urging of audiences around the globe have pushed the film industry to re-think the way it portrays people of color and women, folks who might not have been featured in stories (especially superhero stories) as headliners.

A number of different types of heroes have emerged victorious: Wonder Woman hit the scene big in 2017, the Black Widow in the Marvel universe has taken an elevated seat (will not spoil, but she plays an essential roll in Avengers: End Game, released this past month), and Black Panther, another Marvel character and storyline that incorporates not only one African character, but an entire culture.

All those films/characters broke open that hunger into full fledged box office $ and now, CAPTAIN MARVEL enters the scene.

Captain Marvel. First of all…I have to say. What fun! I loved this film and I noticed after emerging from the fog of the fictional dream what the credits indicated. I noticed how many women worked on the writing. The WRITING. I cannot emphasize this enough. Women were put into positions of power, able to make decisions about the story.

1. Directed by Anna Boden
2. Screenplay written by Anna Boden and a dude named Ryan
3. Story credits going to Anna Boden, Nicole Perlman, Geneva Roberson-Dworet, Meg Le Fauve, and yes…a dude named Ryan

Ms. Marvel

So…when there was a shouting match in the writer’s room about what the character is thinking and feeling and the actions she is about to take…Ryan might have been “out-shouted” by the women. That was a good thing for audiences everywhere.

Wonder Woman was an amazing film, but women were not in the writing credits. A woman was instrumental in the direction of the film, which is awesome, but women did not “create the character”. Here are the names of the writers:

1. Zach Snyder
2. Alan Heinberg
3. Jason Fuchs

I’m not saying these dudes were bad people, insensitive to female motivation and feminine issues of power and agency, but…they are three dudes and there are zero women in terms of the story creation.

What was it like to be in the writer’s room of CAPTAIN MARVEL versus Wonder Woman. I imagine there was a difference.

And for me, even before I saw the credits, CAPTAIN MARVEL struck a note about women differently than Wonder Woman did. I noticed how the character’s strengths and flaws made sense to me as a woman.

CAPTAIN MARVEL was not a perfect film and there are problems (as an author I foresee them) with how incredibly powerful the creators have made Carol “Captain Marvel”. What is to keep her from showing up every other day and solving the world’s issues? The implication from Avengers: End Game is that she is super dang busy with solving the universe’s problems, so she can’t bail us out every time Earth has an issue.

A problem a lot of great woman face, I suppose.  They want to help people, but have too much to do and not enough time on their hands…CAPTAIN MARVEL sounds like any number of Saints in the Catholic Canon. “If there were just more of us…” said one lady saint to another…

Indeed…I hope there will be more female heroes portrayed in the superhero universe in the coming years.

By the way…for those interested…there is a weird subtext to the Wonder Woman mythology. Click here to read an article about the man who conceived of the character:  The Creepy Creator of Wonder Woman

But don’t discount this creator/writer too quickly. He is said to have written this in a letter to the publishers of DC Comics:

“Look, if you had a female superhero, her powers could all be about love and truth and beauty, and you could also sell your comic books better to girls,” he said. “And that would be really important and great because she could show girls that they (girls) could do anything.”