That’s the inherent struggle within Disney and Star Wars; innovation can lead to good – sometimes great – ideas, but the cost is potentially alienating those who prefer things to stay constant or those too afraid to try new things.
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It’s funny, though, that this would be the detail that the studio would censor in Jon Favreau’s film, because it’s symbolic of the problem in the release as a whole. Every painstakingly recreated scene feels like a crucial piece of it was sliced out to suit a modus operandi of making a version of The Lion King that might feasibly occur in the real Africa.
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But like Wonder Woman and even Black Panther, it’s important to weigh the cultural role of the movie differently than its artistic role. Is Captain Marvel merely a series of boxes being checked, as if an H.R. rep were ensuring that everyone received equal consideration for the box-office domination job? Or is there more going on in this origin story?
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It doesn't sound fresh, and I don’t think it’s just because it's a sequel. If the most memorable part of Incredibles 2 is Jack-Jack's fight against a raccoon, there's something wrong. The first film asked really good real-world micro questions in the superhero genre: What if I don't want to be saved? What if my superhero husband is having an affair? It forced the extraordinary to be ordinary, which is the exact opposite of the basis of superhero origin stories.
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Visually, A Wrinkle in Time can be pretty exciting – just like how Disney managed to inject a kaleidoscope of colours and eye candy for Alice in Wonderland… but does it work here? I’m not sure it does; the colourful overtones don’t match L’Engle’s weirdly dark book.
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The first act of the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie features a sequence where a team of horses, hooked up to a one-ton vault, end up towing an entire building through the streets of an island township. In the midst of this chaos is Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), waving his arms like a mad octopus, in the throes of the shtick that Depp has offered on movie screens for 14 years. None of it is remotely plausible, and it goes on much longer than it has any right to.
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