Tenshot – Captain Marvel

Oscar Gordon

A Navy Turbine Tech who learned to spin wrenches on old cars, Oscar has since been trained as an Engineer & Software Developer & now writes tools for other engineers. When not in his shop or at work, he can be found spending time with his family, gardening, hiking, kayaking, gaming, or whatever strikes his fancy & fits in the budget.

Related Post Roulette

26 Responses

  1. pillsy says:

    I thought it was pretty much the median MCU movie.

    Since I’m an unabashed MCU fanboy, that means I had quite a bit of fun with it.Report

  2. Maribou says:

    Right there with you guys. A friend of mine saw it on opening and made sure I got invited along the next night when she went back with her family. It was exactly what I needed last weekend.Report

  3. Doctor Jay says:

    My favorite moment was “Mom! You have to go! What kind of role-model would you be if you didn’t go!”

    Apparently that little girl becomes a superhero in her own right in some comic book somewhere.Report

  4. Zac Black says:

    Saw this the night before last and had a lot of fun. The first ten or fifteen minutes is a little rough — a lot of it feels like Marvel Movie Cliche Bingo — but from when they get to Earth onward, my enjoyment steadily ramped up. It does drive me a bit nuts that that early scene with the Kree spec-ops team is predicated on a bad radio signal — that’s the world’s laziest screenwriting cliche, but it’s especially egregious here: you’re telling me they can instantly transit between planets but they haven’t yet mastered the radio? But that’s about my only real gripe in a movie I otherwise thought did a good job trying to juggle so much, having to be an origin story, a connective tissue film, a period piece and a sci-fi epic all rolled into one…hell, you could argue that that’s pretty meta-appropriate for the first lady-helmed MCU flick.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Zac Black says:

      I didn’t read that as comms trouble because the super advanced Kree can’t do radio, I saw it as someone actively messing with their comms. Now the fact that no one in the whole team seemed to see the comms issue as a giant red flag that someone knew they were there AND was actively messing with their comms (which shouldn’t be the case if they had successfully snuck in under the cover of the bombardment), that was amateur hour at the Spec Ops camp.

      Now I’m no Kree spec ops warrior, but if my secure comms are getting freaky, and there’s no known environmental issue as to why they are freaky, I’d start checking for blanket jamming (which is usually easy to spot even by lowly human tech, and these are the Kree, who can apparently easily modify a pay phone for interstellar real-time phone calls). If there was no blanket jamming, that means someone is inside the secure comms, which would very quickly mean that the local operative you have come to get is wholly compromised (since that’s probably how they got into your comms).

      Seriously, is this Yon-Rogg some REMF who got the job as team leader just so he could buck a promotion?Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        Maybe he bought his commission.Report

      • Maribou in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        Obviously it’s all the feels that they are suppressing, jamming their judgment.

        Duh.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        Seriously, is this Yon-Rogg some REMF who got the job as team leader just so he could buck a promotion?

        I like this idea and hereby declare it canon.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        I can’t recall if I’ve told this story before, but the first ship I deployed on, the captain was an officer who had spent the bulk of his career as an admin officer. He was, from all accounts, a very good admin officer, but had the bare minimum time doing anything on a ship. His command of the ship we deployed on was simply so he could get the necessary time in command of a sea going vessel so he could be promoted from O5 to O6 (Commander to Captain).

        His lack of experience with ships was pronounced in every decision he made, and the crew quite hated him for every one of those decisions.Report

  5. Oscar Gordon says:

    I’ll add a bonus 1:

    11) The Stan Lee opening was lovely, as was the cameo. The little smile she gives him, it’s almost as if she knew.Report

  6. DavidTC says:

    Haters can go soak their heads, there was no slap you in the face feminist messaging. The most ‘girly’ moments (insert eye-roll here) was Danvers reconnecting with Rambeau and her daughter. I roll my eyes because it was less ‘girly’ and more, ‘human’.

    It’s been somewhat hilarious to watch the haters try to react to this. They really thought there was going to be some huge feminist message in the movie, and it’s literally just a movie about a superhero who happens to be female. Her gender is basically irrelevant. Change Carol to a man, change some pronouns, drop a couple of lines about her and Rambeau getting up early to fly planes before the male pilots get there, and the plot is, technically speaking, exactly the same. (Although some of the implications would play a bit difference, especially with Yon-Rogg, and it would be extremely hard to not see read the relationship with Rambeau as romantic. Not that people already aren’t reading it that way.)

    But a bunch of the hate-crowd had all these anti-feminist screeds all ready to go about how the feminist message ruined the movie and it was a bunch of SJW propaganda and whatnot, and they can’t resist spewing it their canned rants. And thus they are completely exposed for the misogynists they are as people look at them in confusion, because literally the only feminist message in the movie is basically ‘women can be superheroes’. Which, yes, was their _actual_ objection, but they didn’t really want to say it out loud.

    Incidentally, the best part of the movie is when we hit the cliched ‘You’re not so strong without your powers, I bet you can’t take me in a fair fight’ taunt and Carol’s response to that, which literally the entire theater I was in cheered at.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to DavidTC says:

      I have to admit, I was very happy that the writers did not let her fall for that bit of goading.

      Fair fights are for organized competitions with rules and referees. If you aren’t in the ring… you use everything at your disposal.Report

    • Pinky in reply to DavidTC says:

      I haven’t heard any of the haters complain about the Rambeau scenes, or characterize them as feminist. They’ve been complaining about the whole “the Kree are suppressing your power and paying you 77%” bit.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

        Well pay is never mentioned, but the power suppression wasn’t about her being a woman, it was about the human having the potential to wipe them from the map, and they wanted a way to control that power. Ronan says as much just before he retreat from orbit.

        Again, the trope works just as well if Capt. Marvel is a man, hence you gotta squint really hard to see it as some kind of feminist trope.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          I was jesting about the pay gap. I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know if the power-suppression thing is supposed to be a feminist analogy or not, or if reading it that way is fair or not. I can tell you, though, that I’ve only seen praise about the Rambeau dynamics. I haven’t heard any of the complaints that you and David are talking about.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

            Thing is, there are lots of places where, if you want to, you can extract a strong, feminist message from the movie (how she gets her powers, how her powers are hobbled, how her agency is taken from her, etc.). But those same problems can exist for men, and they can also exist across race, class, etc. That’s messaging done right, when it can speak to wider audience than maybe you intended.

            The two spots in the movie that were more gender specific were the scene where Danvers and Rambeau are talking about how being female back then meant they weren’t allowed into combat and couldn’t fly what others saw as meaningful missions, so had to fly for the scientist; and the scene where they are reconnecting in a way that men probably wouldn’t. Neither scene is problematic in any real way, but those are the only two scenes that are really gender specific.

            Everything else, you can take a strong feminist message from it if you want, but no one is slapping you in the face with one.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              It’s interesting to note where the movie didn’t go. It _avoided_ a position it could have easily taken. With just a few changes to her personality, Carol could have been some ultra-competitive person, and maybe even ultra-competitive against men, trying to prove herself in male-cominated areas. It would have been very easy to go there. She was an Air Force pilot in the 80s, for Pete’s sake.

              I think a bunch of haters assumed that would be the movie, but it’s not. I think some people are still trying to pretend it’s the movie, but this is so far from what the movie actually is that, as I said, it’s exposing them for just being misgynists to anyone who watched it.

              I mean, Carol is indeed incredibly competitive. Except she basically only competes against herself. She doesn’t care what anyone else is doing, she doesn’t care what they think. She is proving herself to herself.

              This, honestly, is why everyone laughed when she rejected a ‘fair fight’, after what she’d just done. No spoilers, but let’s just say that Thor probably couldn’t have managed it.

              She didn’t need to prove anything to anyone at that point, but more importantly, didn’t particularly care anyway. Well, maybe when she had amnesia, but she rejected that. And it seemed she wasn’t particularly good at it back then.

              So I take back the claim this movie doesn’t have a feminist message. It just…has one that is a lot more subtle than the haters were expecting. One that is hilariously self-defeating to call out. ‘How dare that woman act as if she has nothing to prove to anyone!’ Calling that out would sound just…pathetic. It’s no wonder the haters are basically inventing their own movie to critize.

              And while I’m not familiar with the comics, from what I understand, this is _exactly_ her personality in the comics also.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to DavidTC says:

                Right. It’s feminist, because the person at the center of it is female. But everything else… as you said, if it’s Carl instead of Carole, it all still works and has a strong message of “Don’t be dicks to each other”.

                Even the flash back scenes, where the men she is training with in the USAF are telling her she doesn’t belong, I promise you that men get similar treatment during training (women just get it worse from the misogynists in the ranks). But the message in those scenes is just that she also belongs among the pilots (you saw the EXACT same messaging in The First Avenger).

                Which is why you can’t damn the movie for the messaging, because it’s the exact same messaging you see all across the MCU, and even beyond it, when men are at the center.

                ETA: Of note, Carole made it through training and became a pilot, while still a normal human. Steve Rogers, while being smarter and braver than his peers, really didn’t make it until he became Cap.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

                I was definitely waiting for her to go kick all the boys’ asses, and then she doesn’t really do that–except Jude Law at the end, where it’s clear that while maybe he’ll still win the game he plays, she’s moved on to another game entirely, and one where he isn’t even ranked.Report

        • I am so there for Tony Stark to get into an argument with Danvers in Endgame and have her shut him down with “Let’s see you use your powers like that to get 77% of the fame.”Report

  7. Saul Degraw says:

    I liked it pretty well. The opening was a bit disjointed. I’m not sure how I feel about the use of short, almost Pinteresque sentences in the dialogue especially for her. It felt intentional and like it fit her but was also kind of out of place in a Marvel movie.Report