Last week Marvel dropped the second Captain Marvel trailer, which I thought was great, especially the Super Saiyan scene at the end. Rumors kept popping up that the new Avengers trailer would also drop, but I thought those were baseless until the trailer actually came out on Friday. It was a pretty momentous week for MCU fans.
Of course, since one of those trailers is for a female-led movie, the sexist trolls emerged and brandished their "hurr durr she can't emote" manifesto, which was expected and annoying, but I tried to figure out whether there were more to the story. When I saw the trailer, Brie Larson definitely looked somewhat...spaced. Confused, dazed, grim...and that didn't strike me as out-of-place in any way because she's playing an amnesiac Super Saiyan 9001 in the middle of a 3-way war where one of those sides has zero clue as to what the hell is going on. Had Brie been jumping around laughing and smiling, that would've struck me as strange. We're also not even getting into the fact that the actress in question once won an Oscar, the award given to the best actors/actresses in the world. Saying Brie Larson can't emote is like watching Michael Jordan miss a few shots at some point for whatever reason and concluding that he can't play basketball. It's mind-boggling. But through all of this, I think there is one legitimate criticism - the trailer is incredibly vague. And that's the point of a trailer, but I think this trailer's level of vague is tuned to someone like me who knows who Carol Danvers is and her general backstory. When I saw her punch an old lady in the face, I thought it was visually hilarious, but my brain concluded "that lady is a Skrull" so quickly that I didn't even think twice about the scene. When she declared the Kree a race of "noble warrior heroes," I could tell that the point was she was so brainwashed she couldn't tell how lame that sounded. When I saw her in her Air Force uniform, I didn't need any further explanation because Carol being an Air Force pilot is a pretty well-known component of her backstory for people who know who she is. But if someone who has no idea who Carol is - and there are probably many such people, since Captain Marvel isn't nearly as well-known as, say, Captain America is - the trailer would come across as a bunch of no-context scenes that don't really tell much of anything. Compare this to the first Guardians of the Galaxy trailer, which showed Star-Lord introducing himself and the response being a confused "who?" Marvel knew that very few people who saw that trailer would know anything about any of the characters. I don't think they made the same calculation this time around. At any rate, I really, really want this movie to succeed. I hope Marvel knows what they're doing. Though, to be fair, they've known what they've been doing for awhile now. Remember how Tony Stark told the rest of the Avengers about "the endgame" when they confronted him about Ultron in Age of Ultron? Yeah, he was describing the premise of a movie that's coming out 5 months from now. |
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