Why Does Brie Larson Look Bored as Captain Marvel? Maybe Because She’s Playing a Space Nazi
If you’ve seen the trailer for Marvel’s upcoming Captain Marvel movie, you might have noticed something odd about Brie Larson. Specifically that she looks bored as hell the whole time.
People have been speculating as to why this may be, but Brie Larson is a great actress and so I’m convinced it must be a choice she made. Anyone who’s seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World knows she has other facial expressions.
I think the reason Brie Larson has such a blank expression is because she didn’t realize she signed up to play a super Nazi.
Captain Marvel is about two warring alien races who bring their fight to Earth: the shapeshifting Skrulls and the blue-skinned warrior Kree. Captain Marvel, who is half-Kree, half-human in the comics, tells Nick Fury the Skrulls are evil and the Kree are heroes. But we the audience know that isn’t true. For a start, the only Kree we’ve seen in the Marvel movies, Ronan the Accuser, is a real dick who worked with Thanos.
The Skrulls were first introduced in 1961’s Fantastic Four #3 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and were a broad reflection of the Russian panic of the day, something that will be familiar to anyone who is following the current Russian panic that’s basically exactly the same. Anyone could be a communist, they live among us; by the same token, the Skrulls’ shape-shifting ability let them infiltrate humanity.
The Kree first appear in Fantastic Four #65 when Ronan the Accuser comes to Earth and convicts the Fantastic Four of crimes against the Kree Empire. The more we learn about the Kree, the worse they become. The basically travel the universe performing unethical medical experiments like the ones that created the Inhumans to ensure their own species’ survival. They also have a caste system based on skin color.
The original Captain Marvel, Mar-Vell (played by Jude Law in the movie), was a renegade Kree initially sent to Earth as a spy who turned against his people. To really drive home the point that the Kree are meant to be Nazis, the cover to Captain Marvel #1 in 1968 read “Out of The Holocaust… A Hero!”
Larson’s Carol Danvers looks to be taking up some of Mar-Vell’s story in the movie, siding with Earth against both the Kree and the Skrulls. She’s an amnesiac who doesn’t realize she’s human, or maybe half-human, and has been indoctrinated into the Kree’s military empire. The reason for her lack of expression is, most likely, that in at least the first two acts of this movie she’s an unknowing Nazi super-soldier, and mindless devotion was probably considered a virtue in her programming. In other words, it’s a character choice, and a good one.
