For filmmakers reckoning with their past, distance can be a magnifying glass and a kaleidoscope. George Lucas was more than a decade removed from the early-’60s Modesto, California, high-schoolers coming of age in his 1973 feature American Graffiti. Two decades later, Richard Linklater put 17 years between the 1976 Austin teens and his 1993 classic Dazed and Confused. The mundanity of youth seems both more innocent and more dramatic in these movies. Period pieces made from within a filmmaker’s lifespan are bound by their own notions of authenticity and defined by the quest to capture the moment while also rendering it timeless. And there is no era more consumed by the idea of the authentic than the 1990s.
Captain Marvel is an intergalactic story built on a time-fractured structure with a jigsaw origin story, but it’s set largely in the ’90s. And as the first stand-alone female Marvel superhero movie, it’s acting in service of a machine that obsesses over authenticity. The Clinton years serve as a torch and a crutch for Marvel’s 21st feature film, which is notable not just for spotlighting its first female protagonist but for being made by its first female director, Anna Boden, who along with her codirector, Ryan Fleck, have made a different sort of comic book movie than we’ve seen lately. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing.
The past 18 months of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved feats that would have been unimaginable in the ’90s, when comic book movies like Batman Forever fused schlock and bad faith with a fumbling ineptitude. Black Panther earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse reset our expectations of what heroism can look like. Avengers: Infinity War dragged its load-bearing, concussive story into the top five at the box office among all releases in movie history. These movies did so with a canny combination of brand-based Stockholm syndrome and managed creative risk. Their producers—most notably chief Marvel executive Kevin Feige—gave broader rein to directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler to deliver a vision that was compromised by corporate continuity but not tone, humor, or even intent. For years, we heard director BS about the paranoid ’70s thrillers that influenced Captain America sequels. But Thor: Ragnarok—a deeply goofy movie that featured rock monsters, Led Zeppelin, and Jeff Goldblum in eyeliner—conferred a new level of oddity and color and wonder to comic book fare. Marvel movies are easy to dismiss as the bane of film’s future, the highly profitable death knell of a withering medium. But recent installments have found inventive and sometimes even profound new ways of telling familiar stories.
Captain Marvel carries with it an unreasonable burden, and so it is going to be judged in unreasonable circumstances. Too important to be outright dismissed and too cleverly designed to fail, it exists in a fascinating stasis of uncritical goo. The MCU is evolving, while its movies travel back in time. This isn’t a regression, exactly. It’s more like someone putting down a copy of The Lord of the Rings to watch the third Hobbit movie. That’s what happens when you reboot the cosmos this deep into a story. Boden and Fleck’s movie is not as moving or considered as Black Panther. It has none of the architectural technocracy that made Infinity War such a sweeping populist event. It doesn’t even have the happy-to-be-here verve of Ant-Man and the Wasp. It’s an origin story and a message movie, with all of the hokeyness that implies. Girl power is a theme rendered quite literally in this movie, but specifically in opposition to the male forces holding back our star. And because its lead figure, played by Brie Larson (purposefully blank, I think), is experiencing an amnesia of sorts, the movie needs to rely on narrative tricks and signifiers to tell its story.
When we meet Larson’s Vers, she is seen almost immediately in a flashback fight, blown to the ground by an explosion, teal alien blood oozing from her nose. This is a false memory, the first of many. Quickly, we learn, she is a Kree spy training with her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law, a hot dad) to do battle with the villainous, shape-shifting Skrull race. Captain Marvel uses all kinds of sliced fragments to confuse us, only to later smash those ill-fitting pieces together. These images are jerry-rigged with hyperkinetic editing and triumphal messaging; when they flash together, they resemble one long Nike ad. Inspiring, but you’ll never forget they’re corporate product. Later in the movie, we see Vers training as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, striding out onto the tarmac à la Top Gun. We see her as a young girl racing in a go-kart, battling the boys on the tracks. And we see her singing karaoke in a dive bar while wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The sight of the shirt, I’d argue, is the turning point of the movie. G-N-R were essentially past their sell-by date in 1992, but this is the first sign that we are watching a movie not just about a superpowered refugee warrior, but about a rebel girl from the ’90s. Marvel has positioned Vers—who is actually the fighter pilot Carol Danvers—as Kate Moss’s Grunge Period with a dash of Bruckheimer Action Star. It’s a curious choice.
In the midst of an escape from her alien rivals and also a pair of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents played by a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg, Vers realizes she needs to change out of her super-suit and blend in with the earthbound plebs. So she grabs a leather jacket and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt off a mannequin outside a local boutique, steals a motorcycle, and rides off into the great plains of Somewhere, U.S.A., in search of answers to her past. There is no clearer metaphor for the superficiality of Captain Marvel’s ’90s shtick than its star swiping an industrial hard-rock band’s T-shirt off of a lifeless piece of polycarbonate. Seeking cultural authenticity in a piece of pop entertainment is a fool’s errand. I’m not going to attempt to explain the true meaning of the ’90s in a review of a superhero movie, despite Captain Marvel’s loose assemblage of signifiers. A decade means many things to many people, but there’s never an indicator of what it means to Carol or the other characters in the movie either. It’s just kind of swingin’ on the flippity-flop. When I picture the ’90s, I see Blockbuster aisles (which appear here); slow-loading ISP connections on rickety desktop computers (ditto); and Winona Ryder, Giovanni Ribisi, and John C. Reilly cosplaying as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on an episode of MTV’s 120 Minutes (sadly absent).
What can I say, it was a weird time. But the shortest path to a period—as Linklater and Lucas knew—is music. So the movie is chockablock with noisy needle drops. A security guard listens to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man” in his car. A perfunctory chase scene is set to Elastica’s “Connection.” That motorcycle ride is soundtracked with Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains.” And the movie’s climactic fight scene is cheekily scored by No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.” They could have called this movie Alternative Alien Nation.
In recent years, smaller indie films like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Jonah Hill’s Mid90s have made earnest efforts at re-creating significant details, objects, and sensations native to this period. The skateboard deck, the Dave Matthews song, the pitiless ennui of teen boredom. The children of that time—my time, really—are coming of age and acquiring a level of creative might in their industries. And like every generation before them, they’re using it to reprocess their influences and obsessions. Boden and Fleck, both 42, are doing the same, in a way. They’re filmmakers with deep indie pedigree, having made earnest character studies like Half Nelson and Sugar, movies forged in the tradition of ceaselessly independent movies you might have seen … in the ’90s.
My personal favorite from Boden and Fleck is the modern-day riverboat gambler’s ode, Mississippi Grind. At one point in that film, Ryan Reynolds (a clever actor also subsumed by comic book arcana) says to his new gambling buddy, “I don’t care about winning.” That pal is played by the indispensable empathy machine Ben Mendelsohn, one of the best things about Captain Marvel, here playing a face-painted shape-shifting alien named Talos. Winning is a thorny theme for ’90s survivors. Selling out was once tantamount to soul death. That concept seems absurd now, though like many weathered late Gen Xers, Boden and Fleck have “graduated” to a bigger assignment, with a high degree of difficulty and an unreal level of scrutiny. Sometimes that’s what comes with the big job and the bigger salary and the head-smacking reality of the back half of your life. Don’t have a cow, man.
The emotional catharsis of Captain Marvel is set, almost comically, to Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” a song so obvious and familiar to me that the words have become a collection of meaningless syllables. Its bridge is more haunting than I’d remembered: “Take a rest as a friend / As an old … memory.” Captain Marvel is an old memory of a fondly remembered period, brightened by lost time and movie magic. It isn’t real, or even close to reality, but it’s a reminder about what we take with us—and what we use to tell the next generation what we stood for. In Dazed and Confused, it was beer bongs and bell-bottoms and gnarly bashes. In Captain Marvel, it’s a Right Stuff VHS cassette and a Des’ree song and a guileless tale of a fearless woman. It made me realize that the movies and music of my life are not those hallowed ’90s chestnuts or those signifiers. It’s the movies and music of right now, those to which we’ve committed emotional capital in our professional and personal lives. We await Marvel movies not simply because they’re all we have left, but because we are the ones we have been waiting for. Here we are now, entertain us.
