Unless you’ve been avoiding the internet for the past few weeks you’ll know there’s been a huge backlash against Captain Marvel. The movie hit headlines across the globe for a campaign which set out to ruin its scores on audience review sites.
To this day the movie has only been able to claw back to an audience rating of 55% on Rotten Tomatoes following over 50k negative reviews from first time users.
A brief search for either the movies title or Brie Larson on YouTube will bring results featuring hundreds of hate videos levelled at the perceive inclusivity that Marvel is trying to promote.
But why are so many people up in arms about the movie and particularly its lead actress, Brie Larson?
It all stems from comments the actress made last year regarding the movie A Wrinkle in Time. That movie arrived to particularly mixed reviews and Larson took issue with how those reviews were portrayed. Speaking at the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Los Angeles Larson was quoted as saying:
“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”
Elaborating on her comments to the press later that evening Larson said “Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I am not. What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie, and review your movie.”
The connection between those comments and Captain Marvel comes much later. As the press tour for the Marvel release was beginning to ramp up Larson spoke out about wanting press interviews to be more inclusive. Discussing her experiences of press junkets and interviews the actress said “About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male. So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive. After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.”
In trying to create a safe space for press of all background Larson has instead made herself an unnecessary hate figure. At now stage has the actress commented to say that Captain Marvel wasn’t made for white men or that they weren’t welcome to see the movie.
Comments levelled at the actress, the studio and the crew of the movie from those stating they are encouraging racist, sexist behaviour as entirely misguided and misjudged.
We should, in fact, be celebrating her attempts to create opportunities for people of all backgrounds to be included. After all don’t we all deserve the opportunity to live out our dreams?
Regardless of whether you enjoy the movie or not we implore you to judge it based on your enjoyment and not based on internet propaganda.
You can read our review of Captain Marvel here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OuXWwa0okMSet in the 1990s, Marvel Studios’ “Captain Marvel” is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that follows the journey of Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes. While a galactic war between two alien races reaches Earth, Danvers finds herself and a small cadre of allies at the center of the maelstrom.
Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, a U.S. Air Force pilot whose an Air Force whose DNA fuses with that of an alien, and she’s thrust into the middle of an intergalactic conflict. The cast also includes Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Jude Law as Mar-Vell, Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson, Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser, Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer, Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, and Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Algenis Perez Soto and McKenna Grace in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a script they wrote with Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch, Meg LeFauve, Nicole Perlman and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Captain Marvel is in cinemas now.
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