Avenging Angel

She's the super-powerful Avenger who was Nick Fury's last call during Infinity War's genocide. Now it's time for CAPTAIN MARVEL to shine in an origin story that's the MCU's first female-led instalment. Total Film meets Brie Larson and the team to unpack what makes Carol Danvers tick, how she's going to fix the snap and her importance in a #TimesUp world.

- Jane Crowther

Have you ever seen a little girl run so fast she falls down?” asked Carol Danvers in Vol. 8, issue 1 of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s 2014 run of Captain Marvel comics. “There’s this instant, a fraction of a second, before the world catches hold of her again… a moment when she’s outrun every doubt and fear she’s ever had about herself, and she flies. In that one moment, every little girl flies.”

It’s a speech that seems to sum up the DNA of Marvel’s cinematic clap back to DC’s successful Wonder Woman movie adaptation; the story of US Air Force ace Danvers, who’s genetically modified by aliens and bridges two worlds as a human-Kree hybrid. A super-strong superhero who outclasses her Avenger predecessors (“She will now be the most powerful character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” according to MCU maven Kevin Feige), can soar skyward shooting photon blasts, looks like the answer to Thanos’ world decimation… and yet is also flawed, self-doubting, emotionally vulnerable, relatable. An extraordinary woman who fears failure and doesn’t always get it right. Clearly a tricky balance to bring to screen. So how is Marvel ensuring that fallibility becomes box-office flight and not a stumble?

In a suite in LA’s London Hotel a few weeks before Christmas, TF suggests this fall/fly moment is the very sweet spot that co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are trying to capture – and which Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, must portray for the 21st MCU instalment to really work. That suspended moment of beauty, the thrill, the novelty of it, the imperfect perfection that can only come from living by Danvers’ mantra of “higher, further, faster” and crucially, creatively taking risks.