I've been working on this post since right after I watched Captain Marvel. I was planning on a review of the movie followed by my thoughts on the controversy surrounding the movie. But now I think I would mostly like to give my thoughts to the war of political correctness and 3rd wave feminism that seems to be running amok from Hollywood pretty often these days.

Now on to the meat of what I want to write about. The events surrounding Captain Marvel. I believe we are seeing a massive social experiment here. I think Disney was attempting to make a movie that intentionally played down the ideas they presented in the trailers and every time they talked about it and wanted to see if they could create an environment where they managed to get a lot of the conservative viewers to skip the movie in the theatre and or bad mouth a movie that was not all that bad. And the scary part is that it seems to have worked. After I’ve spent time watching interviews, speeches, trailers, reviews (both written and video) I’m seeing a really disturbing pattern. The extremely Left leaning Disney and Stars (Brie Larson in particular) have managed to make the conservative (read politically Right) dance to the tune they were playing and make themselves seem a bit foolish.

I’ll need to explain this with a bit of build-up.

The first movie I remember seeing the new argument “You don’t like the movie because it features a woman” was “Mad Max: Fury Road” I remember because most of what was said about the movie came after people had seen it. The prevalent opinion at the time seemed to be a luke-warm “Meh”. The studio and press immediately jumped up and started ranting about how this was hatred for making a Mad Max movie starring a woman. I remember this being odd because most of the reviews I read at the time seemed to be about the fact that the movie just wasn’t as good as people had been expecting. I don’t recall anyone mentioning having an issue with a female protagonist. It was weird but I figured the studio had spent a lot on the movie and just reacted because they were angry it hadn’t preformed as well as they had expected.

Then you have “Ghost Busters”. Suddenly I’m seeing everyone in the press focused on the fact that the remake was all female leads. And all I could think was “So what? If it’s a good movie why does it matter?” Then I watched the movie...wow...just wow. I enjoyed Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon, they were delightfully over the top, THEY were funny. Kristen Wing and Leslie Jones were stereotypes, Chris Hemsworth was a parody of something (but I’m not sure what exactly, maybe the male version of the dumb blond?). The movie wasn’t all that good and all anyone could talk about was the fact that men hated seeing women in lead roles. I know that I’m in the minority of people that enjoyed McKinnon’s performance in “Ghost Busters” but I liked her quirky take on her character, and I almost always enjoy McCarthy. But anything bad about the movie was put down to being men having problems with women leads...seriously?

Then the insanity around the new Star Wars movies. Any and all complaints about the movie were said to be because men hated a "strong female lead". I don't even know what to say here, Rey has had two movies, and next to zero development for the character. She is positioned to be a strong character, if any time had been put into fleshing the character out to feel a little real it would have been awesome. Instead you have an all powerful character that had to do nothing to gain her powers or gain control of the power. She is just super powerful and gains control with zero training and practice. Even if she had only a quick flash of force ability in the first movie and had just shown up in the second movie with all of her powers it would have been easy to blow off as "she trained off screen". But they showed her "training" and it doesn't help to explain how she is so powerful.

Now we have Captain Marvel and you have the same thing. Again. Except, they went out of their way to display Captain Marvel as an all powerful hero with zero training. Just full control of her powers. They gave speeches and showed trailers about how awesome she is because she is a "woman" a "HERo". And then you see the movie. There is some of that in the movie, but not the way it was presented. I would have liked to see more struggle for her to obtain her powers. I would have liked to see the flaws in Carol Danvers (she freaking gets Captain America and the Hulk killed in the comics in the Civil War story). I would have liked to fall in love with the character. But I didn't, I enjoyed the movie but I didn't love it or the character introduced there.

I think about the other movies I've seen with strong female leads. Wonder Woman, I loved her. I wanted her to win. I wanted to see Diana kick some serious butt. I'm hearing nothing but good things about Alita: Battle Angel. I can't wait to watch it because everyone loves the character. I love Ripley from the Alien movies. I love Alice from Resident Evil. I love Sarah Connor from Terminator. I LOVE Asoka...see where I'm going with this. A strong female lead is a joy to watch. A joy to cheer on. But what we've been getting lately from Disney and Marvel...not strong characters, just female leads for the sake of female leads without developing the character, are not strong female leads.

And this brings me to my point. None of the fans that have issues with Star Wars or Captain Marvel don't want to see strong female leading characters, or gay, or transgender, or pick the minority group. Just make the character real. Make me want to like the character. But it seems like Disney went out of their way to make Captain Marvel appear to be the opposite of a likable character before the movie was even out. And I think they got what they wanted. Many of the conservative fans rejected the movie out of had without giving it a chance. And Disney proved that with a little social engineering they could make people react the way they wanted. How long before they repeat this with a movie that is truly good? How long before they sabotage a good movie just to attempt to forcefully silence any differing points of view? It would be so easy, and if they play their cards right everyone on the more conservative side will avoid or speak out against a movie that has nothing wrong with it. Then, using that as a jumping off point, they start pushing to "end the hate speech". They show the movie and say "See we don't actually do any of the things they accused us of doing". They would just have to stand around and smile while people are told they aren't allow to criticize movies, books, or TV shows. And if they are allowed to voice their criticisms they might be liable for interfering with a company's revenue stream. You would have to be able to prove the thing you called out as actually being in the movie, most likely without being allowed to show an actual clip from the movie in question (you know because copyright).

This may come across as fear-mongering, but that's not what I intend. I simply want to demonstrate that it would be scary easy for a company the size of Disney to do this. I hope we can all take a moment and step back from these kinds of reactions in the future and make sure we give movies like this a chance before we start knocking them. Maybe they will be bland, maybe they won't, but either way it is up to the commentators and reviewers to keep things as honest and grounded in reality as possible. We must avoid reactions too early and make sure our opinions are based on the final design of the movie and not an early draft, that our reactions are aimed at what gets shown in theaters.