Gay Gasping through Captain Marvel
by Ian Carlos Crawford
The trailers for Captain Marvel barely do the movie justice — and to be honest, it makes for a way more enjoyable movie-going experience. There were so many surprises in the movie that it felt incredibly fresh and new.
Captain Marvel does the thing Black Panther did so well — it presents us with a fairly straight forward superhero origin story that’s infinitely more interesting than the last few because tight writing, directing, and not about another straight white. Captain Marvel never once feels tired even in the age of supposed superhero malaise. Carol Danvers stands proudly amongst other incredibly genuine big-screen superheroes like Captain America, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther.
To say I spent most of the movie tearing up and gay gasping would be…well, it would be a pretty truthful thing to say. The movie is an absolute gem and shows us how at the top of their game Marvel continues to be.
So, without further ado, all the moments I gay gasped while watching Captain Marvel…
- The moment Stan Lee was shown across the MARVEL title card, instead of our other MCU heroes
- The first Skrull shapeshifting scene — Jennifer Lawrence was SHOOK
- The first appearance of Annette Bening on screen, in a god damn Starforce uniform (where’s her action figure, you cowards)
- Carol breaking free and fucking shit up on the Skrull ship
- That crash landing right into a Blockbuster Video/my 90s kid heart
- Seeing our old friend Phil Coulson, lookin’ young and fresh and a little bit CGI-ed, appear on screen in an MCU movie for the first time since Avengers
- That Stan Lee cameo of him PRACTICING HIS LINES FOR HIS CAMEO IN MALLRATS
- When Carol fought that Skrull posing as an elderly woman in a freakin’ train car
- Kelly Sue DeConnick, who helped shaped the Carol Danvers we know and love today, getting a cameo giving Carol the stink eye as she exits the train.
- When Carol drove away on the shitty dude’s stolen motorcycle as Elastica’s “Connection” played
- When we learned Nick Fury was a cat person
- Coulson letting Fury and Carol go — FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC YA KNOW?!
- Monica Rambeau’s first scene in the MCU as a very precious and very outspoken little girl, who we know WILL LATER BECOME THE ICONIC PHOTON/CAPTAIN MARVEL/SPECTRUM
- Garbage’s iconic “Only Happy When It Rains” playing as Carol drove down a desert road on her stolen motorcycle
- Learning that Annette Bening’s character was actually Mar-Vell
Monica helping Carol pick her new costume colors - Talos hugging his precious Skrull child and I realized the whole Skrull/Kree story was an immigrant allegory
- Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” playing during Carol’s last encounter with The Supreme Intelligence
- As soon as “Just A Girl” by No Doubt started playing as Carol faced off against all her former Starforce pals
- Goose eating the Tesseract
- Goose eating Kree soldiers (a hungry icon)
- Carol smashing her way through the Kree ships, at full power — scaring off Ronan the Accuser
- The moment Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg told Carol to fight him without using her powers, and she just blasted him into the side of a rock because she didn’t have shit to prove to him!
- Learning it was freakin’ Goose who scratched out Nick Fury’s eye!
- Seeing the oh so handsome and oh so sad Steve Rogers in the mid-credits scene — GIVE US ENDGAME NOW, my tear ducts are ready
- Goose, an icon, casually puking up the Tesseract on Nick Fury’s desk at the very end of the movie
About the author:
Ian Carlos Crawford grew up in southern New Jersey and, like most people from NJ, he graduated from Rutgers University. He then graduated from New School with an MFA in nonfiction writing. His writing has appeared on sites like Geeks Out, BuzzFeed, NewNowNext, and other random corners of the internet. He currently co-hosts a podcast about his favorite thing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called Slayerfest 98 and is shopping around his fiction manuscript (you can view the book trailer here). Follow him on Twitter @ianxcarlos
