Knives Out was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars. It didn’t win. The Academy favored Parasite over Knives Out, and indeed, Parasite had a deservedly big night. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about its Best Picture win, and I broke down in detail the effectiveness of its screenplay and the complete Hero’s Journey contained therein. Parasite was a deserving winner, however the achievement of the screenplay for Knives Out should not be diminished or forgotten. Rian Johnson’s mystery movie harkens back to the great stories of Agatha Christie and pays homage to the great sleuths of cinema. Had I been an Oscar voter this year, I would have voted for Knives Out based on its mastery of, not only the Hero’s Journey and strong story structure, but also technical prowess. This is a technically savvy screenplay in which Johnson used all of the tools in the writer’s tool box to craft a story that was thoughtful, witty and entertaining.

Almost nothing in Knives Out happens in a vacuum. Nearly everything that happens has a direct or indirect effect on some other aspect of the story. Nothing is thrown away. There are no McGuffins, no non sequiturs.

Knives Out is a meticulously crafted film on every level and it starts with the screenplay.

Act I of the film opens with a prologue of sorts. Fran, the housekeeper, pours coffee into a cup that says, MY HOUSE, MY RULES, MY COFFEE. She carries a breakfast tray upstairs and we get the inciting incident of her discovering the body of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), the wealthy author, who died by apparent suicide of cutting his own throat. That kicks off a story that has a dynamic Hero’s Journey and a tight cinematic structure.

The Ordinary World picks up a week after Harlan’s death and we see various family members giving back story to the police. We are also introduced to Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a private investigator who has been hired by a client unbeknownst to anyone, including Blanc himself. The most important person, however, is Marta (Ana de Armas), who served as Thrombey’s private nurse, and has the unusual condition of vomiting whenever she tells a lie. Blanc, along with two police detectives interview the family members. None of them are particularly cooperative, and at least four of them had a reason to want to kill Thrombey.  Thrombey had fired his son Walt (Michael Shannon) from his position running Thrombey’s publishing house. He caught his son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) cheating on his wife and Thrombey’s daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis). He threatened to cut off the allowance to his daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Colette) after discovering that she’d been double dipping the college tuition for her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford). Finally, we see that he was planning on cutting off is grandson and the son of Richard and Linda, Ransom (Chris Evans), by cutting him out of his will.

There is a ton of exposition in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film, but you need to be paying attention because there is also a ton of foreshadowing. Johnson uses the technique of Planting and Payoff like crazy in this script, and several key elements are planted here that will payoff at stages throughout the film.

There are a couple of Calls to Adventure. The first one is revealed by Blanc telling the police he was hired by an anonymous person who sent him an envelope of cash, and a note asking to investigate Thrombey’s death. However, Thrombey himself gives Marta the true Call to Adventure when she thinks that she gave him a shot of a lethal dose of morphine rather than the less powerful pain killer she’s supposed to give him, and Thrombey presents her the plan of how to get away with accidentally killing him. She tries to Refuse the Call by begging him to let her call an ambulance, but he talks her out of it, knowing that there isn’t enough time. We get three examples of planting and payoff in this stage of the journey. The first is when part of the plan involves climbing the lattice outside the house to sneak into his room. As she’s climbing, part of it breaks. That’s the first plant. The second plant involves the part of the plan in which Marta needs to avoid being seen by the surveillance camera and she fails. The third plant is when she’s seen by Nana Thrombey’s elderly mother, who thinks she’s Ransom.

We Cross the First Threshold when Blanc asks Marta to be by his side when he searches the grounds the next day. That leads us into Act IIA and the Tests, Allies and Enemies portion of the story. It starts with a flashback. The first test Marta has to go through is following through on Thrombey’s plan after witnessing him kill himself. It looks like she might crack under the pressure, but a wonderful acting performance by de Armas shows a look of determination that can’t be broken. We also see the blood on her shoe from the splatter of Thrombey cutting his own throat (another plant). The next test we see is finding out about the video and knowing that she pulled off the road where the camera could still see her. We also hear that the tapes can be destroyed using a magnet, and we see Marta’s quick thinking when she sneaks a magnet near the tape, destroying its usefulness (Payoff). Then she sees the mud that she obviously put footprints in when walking back to the house.  She then contaminates the mud by walking through it in front of Blanc and the police. Finally they walk up to the house and Marta finding the broken piece of the lattice (Payoff), and throwing it away for the dog to fetch.

All of these tests serve not only to propel the story, but they also build Marta’s character. We see that she thinks quickly, has ingenuity and the ability to get out of tight situations. All of these things endear her to the audience as a character and organically allow for us to root for her. We’re not rooting for her just because she’s the hero and we’re supposed to root for her. Johnson took the time in these two stages of the Hero’s Journey to proactively create in her a character that we want to root for. One of the ways he did that was by giving her a unique flaw. She physically cannot lie. Any time she even thinks about lying, she pukes. This is used to great advantage by other characters throughout the film, but she uses it to get ultimate revenge at the end. That type of flaw humanizes Marta in a way that allows the audience to relate to her and to root for her.

This type of character development can be instructive to any aspiring screenwriter.

The Approach shows Ransom arriving to the house for the reading of the Will. We also see the dogs barking at him, which is another Plant. The attorney (Frank Oz) arrives to read the Will and the family has some disagreements over it. Walt is particularly upset at seeing Ransom there when he wasn’t even at the funeral (another Plant). The disagreement turns into a lame fist fight before Walt’s son Jacob says what he heard in a fight the night of the party when Thrombey told Ransom he was out of the will. Then the dog drops the broken part of the lattice and Blanc discovers that the lattice leads to Thrombey’s room. Now he knows someone snuck into Thrombey’s room undetected (Payoff).

That, combined with the Supreme Ordeal changes the direction of the story when the Will is read stating that Marta is the sole beneficiary of Harlan’s entire estate, including the mansion, $60 million in cash and sole ownership in his publishing company. All hell breaks loose at that point, and Marta is no longer the kind, sweet nurse that the family is prepared to take care of. She’s now a little bitch that is stealing their fortune and we move into Act IIB.

The Reward shows Marta being rescued by Ransom and he takes her to a restaurant and relative safety. He confesses to her that he knows his grandfather didn’t commit suicide and that he knows lying makes her puke, and he fed her a whole plate of baked beans and sausage. He then tells her to look him in the eye and tell him everything. She does, and he assures her that he won’t tell anyone, but he still wants his cut of the inheritance for helping her avoid any more trouble.

Meanwhile back at the mansion, the family tries to find out from the lawyer if there’s anything that can be done to change the Will. Joni Googles the Slayer Rule in which a person can lose an inheritance if they’re found to be responsible for the death of the benefactor. Now suddenly, everyone is interested in cooperating with Blanc to help him solve the case.

This changes the direction of the story again and we move into Act III and The Road Back. Marta gets a threatening note through the mail showing the seal of the medical examiner’s office and her nursing license stating they know what she did but with no other blackmail message. Seemingly with Ransom’s help, Marta tries to cover her tracks after the medical examiner building is mysteriously destroyed in a fire by going to an address emailed to her to try and get the only paper copy of the toxicology report that would show Thrombey’s overdose. They outrun the police and get to the address where Marta finds Fran on a chair and dying of a Morphine overdose. Rather than leaving Fran to die, which would help her own cause, she calls 911 and tries to resuscitate her, further endearing her to the audience.

The Resurrection shows Marta and Blanc in an emergency room waiting area and she confesses everything to him. He says he knew she was involved from the first moment he met her when he saw the red speck of blood on her shoe (Payoff). They go back to the house, they find where Fran hid the toxicology report and it shows that Thrombey’s blood was clean. At that point, Blanc realizes that Ransom switched the vials during the funeral (Payoff) and is really responsible for Thrombey’s death, but he will see to it that Thrombey’s death will be ruled a suicide. He goes through the whole series of events that fills the center of the donut. They trick Ransom into confessing to murdering Fran, and he’s lead out of the house in handcuffs.

The Return with the Elixir shows Marta won. Ransom is arrested. She has the house and stands on the front balcony as the stunned family looks up at her, sipping coffee in Thrombey’s old My House My Rules My Coffee mug” (final Payoff).

Knives Out is a film that resonated with audiences. It had a relatively modest $26.8 million opening, but it parlayed strong word-of-mouth into a long run in the theaters and ended up with an impressive $164.7 million at the domestic box office, and it nearly equaled that overseas. The reason this movie resonated so well with audiences was that it had a compelling script that you had to pay attention to. It didn’t dumb anything down for the audience and treated them with respect. You had to pay attention to this movie in order to follow along with the plot. It only had a few locations. It didn’t rely on dazzling special effects. There was no love story, no sex and no sexual innuendo. It was a good, old fashioned whodunit that was cleverly written and well-made.

This is a film that screenwriters of all levels can learn from.

There is a reason 1917 is crushing it at the Box Office. Yes, it’s one of the most intense films I’ve seen in a long time. It almost never lets up. Even scenes in which the action and the tension seem to lessen in order for the audience to catch their collective breath, there is still an underlying feeling of tension that danger is never far away. Perhaps it’s around the next corner. Perhaps it’s on the other side of a closed door. Perhaps it’s waiting in the very room they’re in. Just as in a real war setting, you never know when that fatal bullet will strike, when the death blow will be dealt. But what is really propelling the popularity of this film is that it tells a compelling story with which the audience can engage.

With this film, Director and co-screenwriter Sam Mendes is cementing himself as one of the great story tellers of his generation. Indeed, everything about 1917 is superb. The acting is at once subtle and dynamic. Director of Photography Roger Deakins is at his light painting best. Mendes own direction runs at a pace that feels impossible to keep up, but does so in ways that are riveting and emotional. It was also impressively shot in a way that made the whole film feel like one continuous shot, similarly to Birdman. The screenplay, co written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, shows way more than it tells, which is exactly what you want from a screenplay. It might not be hyperbolic to feel that this film is something close to a masterpiece.

One thing I also noticed while watching the film was how strong of a Hero’s Journey it had and how archetypal the storytelling was. It would have been easy for Mendes to have turned this into a simple and forgettable action movie like 2014’s Fury, but instead we got a carefully crafted, thematically strong story with an anti-war message that was subtle and subdued, and didn’t disparage the warriors.

The emotion stayed just under the surface. It was always ready to explode, but the men, like the men of that generation, kept it stifled, for fear of showing weakness. They should have been robots, but somehow this subtle showing of emotion, this overt stifling of emotion, created a much more gut wrenching emotional situation. There are two moments in the film where characters briefly allow their emotions to get the better of them, and then immediately stifle them. This stifling of emotion makes the audience feel even more sympathy for these characters because they’re surrounded by death and heartbreak, but they must appear outwardly strong, not only in the face of the enemy, but in the faces of their own.

And that speaks to the duality and depth of this film. The main characters are on a mission to prevent an attack from happening. This would normally be antipathy to a war story, but the goal of the characters in this story is not to defeat the enemy, but to prevent a scenario that would lead to their own ultimate defeat. That means having patience and prudence and the strength to show restraint. A WWI film from the 50’s called Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick, showed the consequences of seemingly showing cowardice in front of the enemy, and talking yourself into attacking against overwhelming odds. The anti-war message in Paths of Glory showed the folly of war through the pompous arrogance of the generals and how their rash decisions cause their subordinates to suffer. Ultimately in Paths of Glory, characters were punished for failing to attempt that impossible assault. In 1917, the main goal of the main characters was to prevent that impossible assault from happening in the first place, as the generals are trying to prevent one of their own subordinates from rushing blindly into a rash assault.

That component on the story creates an anti-war theme that’s caught within the subtext of the premise rather than being preached to us throughout the narrative. The premise is that English army intelligence has discovered that a battalion of troops is walking into a trap, and two young soldiers need to cross the front lines in order to get that information to them to save them from a slaughter. Oh, by the way, one of the two soldiers also has a brother in that battalion.

One thing that can’t be overstated is the strength of the screenplay. Anyone who has followed this blog with any amount of regularity knows that I am an advocate of the 4-act structure in a screenplay, and the screenplay for 1917 has that. Unfortunately doing an act-by-act breakdown will reveal spoilers, and this is a film where I particularly don’t want to do that. Aside from the structure, one of the strengths of the screenplay is that important things happen throughout the story and those events all heighten the drama. Knowing about them ahead is time would lessen your enjoyment of the film, so perhaps this script breakdown will come sometime in the future.

Another thing that you know if you follow this blog is that I am a disciple of The Hero’s Journey. Again, I don’t want to do a full on Hero’s Journey breakdown because I don’t want to give out any spoilers since the movie just came out, but suffice it to say, 1917 has a complete and compelling Hero’s Journey. One thing I can say about it is that it’s not a traditional Hero’s Journey. All of the stages are there, but some of them happen in an nontraditional order. For example, the Meeting of the Mentor stage actually happens throughout the story, as different Mentors guide our hero along his journey. Some are traditional mentors and others are more unique in the lessons they teach him, but the journey has several mentors right up to the very end that teach the hero as well as the audience about the world of the story.

That leads me to another point. This is essentially a road movie. Yet another thing that you will know if you follow this blog is that I am not a fan of road movies. I feel they tend to be episodic and the episodes rarely build the drama. Rather, they’re often vignettes that don’t build on each other and you can change the order of then around and it would have no affect on the story. These films often lack the spine or through-line that builds a narrative. In 1917, however, the road that the main characters go on is the through-line. Each stop they make leads to the next one, and each stop has something happen in it that pushes the narrative forward, and each stop has an affect on something that happens later or happened earlier in the story.

Another point that needs to be expanded on is the paucity of dialogue, especially in the second half of the film. There is some small talk between the soldiers as traveling friends will take part in. There are examples of witty banter and there is some exposition through dialogue, mostly in the first act. But once we get to Act IIB, there’s almost no dialogue with the exception of a couple of key scenes. The story telling is almost entirely visual at that point, and it couldn’t be more riveting or intense. 

What’s more, the screenplay works in tandem with Roger Deakins’ superb cinematography to tell a compelling story. As I said earlier, no one paints with light like Deakins, and there is a scene with night flares and shadows where we come in and out of darkness. In this scene, however, darkness means safety and light means danger. If you can be seen in the light, you can be shot. The darkness offers cover and it’s one of the few times in cinematic history that I can remember rooting for darkness. 

Overall, what makes a film like 1917 so refreshing and such a breath of fresh air is the story telling. It’s a war movie without an overt amount of special effects. It doesn’t have a ton of traditional action sequences, so when an action sequence does come around it feel that much more intense. Plus, the action scenes build in intensity as the film presses on. This is a textbook example of terrific storytelling and any aspiring screenwriter should study it in order to hone their own craft.

Man, Joker is an intense movie. Everything about Director Todd Phillips’ origin story for the iconic villain is intense, from the incredible performance by Joaquin Phoenix to the excellent story, which feels more like a Scorsese mash-up than a DC popcorn movie. It’s interesting. I can see several variations on how this could have been pitched. When I first started seeing trailers for it, I thought perhaps someone pitched a psychopath movie, and the executives at Warner Bros decided to replace whoever was going to be the main character with the Joker in order tap into the built in DC/comic book audience and give it some crossover appeal that would portend a better chance at success at the box office. Another more plausible scenario for a possible pitch was someone pitching a remake of The King of Comedy, but that same executive stating accurately that no one gives a shit about The King of Comedy, but substituting the Joker for Rupert Pupkin would deliver that built in DC/comic book audience and that built in Scorsese/cinemaphile audience that would portend some crossover appeal and perhaps open up the possibility of it being Oscar-bait.

Well, whoever came up with that idea is a flat-out genius because that’s what we got.

We got The King of Comedy meets Taxi Driver with just a splash of Batman. When it comes to comic book/super-hero movies, Joker is much more similar to Logan that it is to really any other films of that budding genre. It has no resemblance whatsoever to the cookie-cutter, quarter pounder with cheese films that Marvel has been serving up for the past decade. It bears even less resemblance to the tripe that Warner Bros and DC have been putting out in a vain attempt to tap into that Marvel market. No one has super powers in this movie. No one is fighting for truth, justice and the American way. This is a movie about a small, mentally unstable man who finally gets sick of being stepped on, and through either reality or fantasy, realizes that his only true joy is in creating anarchy.

In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin played sublimely by Robert De Niro, is obsessed with the Johnny Carson-like TV host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), and he’s built a fantasy that he’ll one day appear on his show and become friends with him. Rupert dreams of being a standup comic even though he’s never performed in front of an audience in his life, and he eventually kidnaps Jerry as a means of getting on to his show. Directed by Martin Scorsese, it never reaches the kind of darkness that Taxi Driver achieved, but it takes a satirical and poignant look at the desire for fame as well as fame’s price.

Taxi Driver, on the other hand, and also directed by Scorsese and also starring De Niro, takes a probing look at the underbelly of New York City in the 1970’s and the cesspool of depravity that it had become. It also takes a probing look at how lonely people like Travis Bickle (De Niro) can get, even when they’re surrounded by millions of people, and how that loneliness can manifest itself in unhealthy and self-destructive ways.

In Joker, Phillips took both of these ideas and mashed them together. Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) isn’t as obsessed with Johnny Carson-like TV host Murray Franklin (De Niro) as Rupert Pupkin was with Jerry Langford, and he’s not interested in becoming a vigilante in order to save a young prostitute like Travis Bickle. He’s just a lonely, disturbed man who is getting no help in this world. The super-rich like Thomas Wayne care nothing for his plight, and the government is too ineffectual in every aspect of its existence to be able to make a difference in Arthur’s life. Combine that with a mentally and physically disabled mother that he has to take care of, and you have the recipe for a man who is about to snap.

The screenplay for Joker is impressive.

There was a lot to like about this movie, but I want to take a moment to discuss the script, penned by Phillips and Scott Silver. For the most part, this was a supremely well-written screenplay. It actually hit many of the same beats as The King of Comedy, but the story was structured in a different way. There were actually four acts in this script as we slowly watch Arthur Fleck devolve into the Joker. The first act shows Arthur’s Ordinary World of struggling to keep his own mental health together while also struggling to hold on to his job as a clown, and also struggling to care for his ailing mother. In the second act he’s been fired from his job, and then commits his first murder. Actually, murders. He’s starting to realize that he doesn’t just have to roll over and that he has the power to fight back. He starts out the third act by believing that he’s learned the truth about something, but then finding out the complete opposite and he comes to the devastating conclusion that his whole life has been a lie and that he’s never been happy for one second of it. The fourth act and climax of the film shows that he can find happiness, but it’s only in creating anarchy, and the more disorderly and deadly a situation becomes, the happier and more satisfied he is. This is an exceptional script as the character arc and the dramatic arc of the plot move together hand in hand. It also has long stretches with little to no dialogue, demonstrating that Phillips and Silver were able to show rather than to tell.

Joaquin Phoenix is one of the great actors of this generation.

I would also be remiss if I did not mention the performance of Joaquin Phoenix. He’s always had a dark edge to him, whether he’s playing Theodore in Her or Commodus in Gladiator or Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, Phoenix excels at playing characters with inner demons that they’re trying to suppress, either consciously or subconsciously. As Arthur Fleck, Phoenix plays a man who fully understands that he has demons and discovers that he feel better when he lets them out. He spends the first three quarters of the movie suppressing them, and it’s as though he’s living in a prison of his own making with walls built of the medication that he takes. It’s only after he allows himself to be free that we see him truly happy. Of course, this is as a murderous, anarchistic psychopath, but hey, he’s happy.

The sheer intensity that Phoenix brings to the role is palpable. It doesn’t matter if he’s laughing for no reason, dancing down stairs to music that only he hears, or killing would-be attackers in the subway, Joaquin Phoenix delivers in Joker in a way that is certain to get him noticed come awards season.

There is one last point I’d like to make and that is my personal opinion about the direction that Warner Bros should take the DC universe. Warners and DC should forget about competing with Marvel. Marvel has that audience wrapped up. That audience is faithful, loyal and utterly devoted. Marvel movies are polished, generic and vanilla so that they appeal to the lowest common denominator and they cast the widest possible net. There isn’t anything wrong with that. Marvel movies make boat loads of money every time out and will likely continue to do so into the future.

But Warner Bros has always been at their best when they’ve been subversive. When Walt Disney was producing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy cartoons, Warner Bros was producing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Disney cartoons were fun, wholesome, family fair and Warner Bros cartoons were violent, edgy and rebellious. Warner Bros was the original home of the Gangster Movie with stars like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney providing early tent polls for the studio. Warner Bros has always been the edgy and gritty studio that makes hard boiled movies that are as tough as five-dollar steaks. Joker is a very fine example of that attitude and style of film making, and I believe that Warner Bros should go all-in on it. They should consider moving their cinematic comic book universe into an area that Marvel couldn’t go into even if they wanted to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be casting as wide of a net, but it would be a whole lot better than what they’ve been doing up to this point. It also might attract real film makers who are interested in deeper stories and deeper examinations and explorations of the psyches of their characters. I’d be willing to bet that they’d find an audience that, while perhaps not as large as the Marvel audience, would be no less loyal.

Few movies in the Marvel canon have been as anticipated as Captain Marvel, and few Marvel movies have been as divisive upon release. Marvel films are generally popcorn movies with little in the way of overt social commentary, which is usually just fine. Their sole purpose it to entertain you, and most of the time that’s all they should be expected to do. However, this was the first film in the Marvel universe with a female protagonist and it seems like everyone has an opinion on how that’s affecting the general public’s attitudes towards the film. I’m not particularly concerned about all that noise, and I’m just going to tell you my attitude towards the film.

I want to begin with the caveat that, while I generally like Marvel films, I’m not a giant fan of them. There area couple that for me have earned A-grades (The Avengers: Infinity War, Iron Man), and a couple that have earned very low grades (The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 2). But the vast majority of Marvel films fall somewhere in the B-minus to B-plus range. They’re entertaining. They’re beautiful visually and generally have outstanding production design. They are quite often humorous. But they tend to be wide and shallow money grabs, which is what they have to be in order to appeal to the massive audiences that they attract.

In his online Master Class, Aaron Sorkin makes an interesting analogy. He mentions how the least offensive, most popular form of beef is the McDonald’s hamburger. We can debate the merits of that statement on its own, but his point was that McDonald’s sells a lot of hamburgers. They’ve cast a wide net and more people eat McDonald’s hamburgers in a day than almost anyone else combined sells in a year.

Marvel is essentially the McDonald’s of cinema.

And I say that more as an observation than as a critique. It is not a good or a bad thing. It is what it is. Just like at a McDonald’s, there’s something for everyone in a Marvel film. You’re going to like it. It will fill you up. You may even leave satisfied. But it’s not going to offer you anything that’s particularly memorable or profound, and almost all of them are the same.

Which brings us to the latest offering from Marvel, Captain Marvel. With all of the noise I’d been hearing about this film, I was expecting to see a movie that tackled gender inequality head on. I expected to see a movie that took a serious and critical look at preconceived notions in our society of gender roles. I expected to see a film that kicked off the bounds of cinematic gender stereotypes and moved forward into a brave new world of equality. While the film scratched the surface of those issues, it did little to take a critical look at them beyond much more than a cursory glance.

Captain Marvel was little more than a typical Marvel film.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes I love a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and nobody does better fries. Wash it all down with an ice cold Coke and you’ve got a true American classic. And that’s what we got with Captain Marvel. We got fast paced action scenes, beautiful art direction, a cool 90’s-era soundtrack, and just enough character introspection and pathos to keep us engaged. They tried to ride the wave of the hero trying to remember her past, a-la the Bourne series, but it never reached the level of engagement where I truly cared about who Carol Danvers (Larson) was or where she came from.

This is the key element to my critique. This movie is well on it’s way to making a bazillion dollars, so obviously a giant grain of salt needs to be taken with this. Again, Marvel is selling Big Macs, not prime rib. But Marvel has also given us characters like T’Challa from Black Panther who are deep characters with internal conflict who have to decide to look back or to move forward. T’Challa was especially effective because he spends most of the story holding his late father in high esteem before discovering that his father was a flawed person who made critical errors in judgement, leaving T’Challa to have to reconcile this before he could move forward.

The problem for Carol, as she comes to realize, is that she has always fallen down. When she was little, as a girl living in a boy’s  world, she couldn’t keep up. As a woman living in a man’s world, she had the same problem until (spoiler alert… I guess), she realized that each time she fell, she was able to get back up. I’m not sure what happened after she got up any of those times, because all we saw after she got up was a determined girl looking into the camera. We never saw her try again and succeed. We never saw her get a hit off the boy pitcher who knocked her down with a high and tight fastball. We never saw her win a go-cart race after she crashed. We never saw her complete the obstacle course during basic training. We never saw her overcome the discouraging words of her own father who told her she didn’t belong in the places she was trying to go.

Anyone can get up after they’ve fallen. Granted, not everyone does, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it. Getting up after you’ve been pushed down is a much greater accomplishment. Getting up, even as someone who is seemingly stronger than you is holding you down, is a greater accomplishment still. That’s how you get an audience to care about your character. That’s how you get her to be universally liked and appreciated. That is where my main frustration comes from this film. I didn’t care. The climax of this film should have been filled with emotion and it wasn’t. A movie like this should have allowed us to feel something, and it didn’t, so I left less satisfied than I cold have been. It seems as though Marvel was hoping that simply the novelty of a female superhero would be enough to make us care, and judging by the box office results, it was for most people. Perhaps it was the soft sexism of low expectations, because I think this film could have and should have done better.

I thought we were going to see a film that would inspire.

I said earlier that this was a typical Marvel film. What makes that statement so is that Captain Marvel, like many other Marvel films, is all flash and little substance. It wouldn’t have taken much to show Carol actually overcoming the people in her past who told her she couldn’t. Simply getting back up is not enough. We needed to see that she didn’t need superpowers to win the day. She (and girls and women everywhere) always had the power within them to overcome forces that have held them back. We’ve seen it throughout history, and we’re seeing it to this very day. Instead, Marvel stuck to their formula and gave us another Quarter Pounder with Cheese when they could (should?) have given us something a little more gourmet.

But let me say again. This is an entertaining movie, and if that’s what you’re looking for, then you should see it. If you haven’t seen it yet, however judging by the box office numbers, you probably have, then go in to it with the idea that you’re going to see a popcorn movie and not a social statement. Most of the time I’d be ok with that. Not every movie needs to do that. However, the opportunity was there for Captain Marvel to make that statement through its storytelling in a way that could have used subtext and would have been thoughtful. They could have at least given us an Umami Burger, but they stuck with what has worked for them, and it is continuing to work for them. However, eventually it is going to get stale. Hopefully they’ll get to a point where they’ll be comfortable taking more chances.