Cap­tain Marvel’s Air Force problem

Twen­ty min­utes into Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The First Avenger, Dr Abra­ham Esk­ine (Stan­ley Tuc­ci), the sci­en­tist respon­si­ble for the super serum pro­gramme which forges the film’s hero, gives the young Steve Rogers a few words of advice. ​“What­ev­er hap­pens tomor­row, you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are. Not a per­fect sol­dier, but a good man.”

That ethos has come to define Cap’s char­ac­ter dur­ing his time at the fore­front of MCU, and, save for a cer­tain line spo­ken by Tony Stark in The Avengers, is as close as the fran­chise has come to demon­strat­ing its stance on the line between heroes and sol­diers. Sure, they fight, but that’s not what defines them – deep down, they’re sup­posed to be so much more. Maybe that’s why it feels so jar­ring that the mar­ket­ing cam­paign for Cap­tain Mar­vel has been so brazen in its ado­ra­tion of the Unit­ed States Air Force.

At the film’s Hol­ly­wood pre­mière, the USAF’s exhi­bi­tion squadron per­formed a fly­over to whoops and cheers from onlook­ers. In Jan­u­ary, Mar­vel released a behind-the-scenes fea­turette cen­tred around the film’s star, Brie Lar­son, vis­it­ing Nel­lis Air Force Base, hang­ing out with pilots and tak­ing part in a sim­u­lat­ed dog­fight. And then there’s the Air Force com­mer­cial, aimed at young women, which is being shown before Cap­tain Mar­vel screen­ings across America.

Giv­en pro­tag­o­nist Car­ol Dan­vers’ mil­i­tary back­ground in the comics, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that the Air Force should be so invest­ed in the film’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing they prac­ti­cal­ly made it them­selves. The USAF offered the use of their bases, fight­ers and pilots to the film’s pro­duc­tion in a man­ner which imme­di­ate­ly calls to mind the US Navy’s close rela­tion­ship with Top Gun back in 1986.

For that film, the Navy donat­ed sev­er­al of their F‑14s, the air­craft car­ri­er USS Enter­prise and the use of Naval Air Sta­tion Fal­lon in Neva­da. In exchange they received final say on the script – and enjoyed the huge suc­cess of a film so overt­ly pro-Navy that recruit­ment went up 500 per cent in the wake of its release. Pre­sum­ably the Air Force believe they could see sim­i­lar returns with a film which is itself unabashed in its rev­er­ence of Top Gun (Car­ol Dan­vers’ cat isn’t called Goose for nothing).

But is the MCU real­ly the place for this? For a fran­chise so over­laden with big-bud­get action sequences, cos­mic armies and kick­ass super­heroes, Marvel’s uni­verse has always pushed a some­what anti-mil­i­tary mes­sage. Tony Stark spends a good chunk of screen­time in Iron Man 2 refus­ing to hand over his tech­nol­o­gy to the US gov­ern­ment; Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier is prac­ti­cal­ly a two-hour trea­tise on the dan­gers of exces­sive mil­i­tary pow­er; and Civ­il War, makes a strong (if con­testable) case against the util­i­sa­tion of super­heroes by armies and governments.

More than this, though, the MCU rel­ish­es in the cel­e­bra­tion of its rene­gades and rebels. Peter Quill, Scott Lang and Bruce Ban­ner are its heroes, not Thad­deus ​“Thun­der­bolt” Ross or Sen­a­tor Stern. Even War Machine – the franchise’s most overt­ly pro-mil­i­tary hero – defies orders and goes AWOL in Infin­i­ty War. For the fran­chise to fawn over the mil­i­tary ser­vice of its lat­est and most pow­er­ful hero is a step in an unfor­tu­nate direction.

Cap­tain Marvel’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Air Force isn’t just a cause for con­cern with­in the con­text of the MCU’s sto­ries, though. It also harms the oth­er prong of the film’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign – its empow­er­ing, fem­i­nist mes­sage. This theme is as sim­ple as it is impor­tant: the future is female, both for Marvel’s heroes and Hollywood’s lead­ing stars.

It’s a mes­sage that Brie Lar­son has excelled at demon­strat­ing in the run-up to the film’s release: see her gid­dy excite­ment at tak­ing pho­tos with young, cos­tumed fans, or her take-no-shit atti­tude towards her more repug­nant crit­ics. But then, sud­den­ly, she takes part in a spe­cial pro­mo­tion­al Q&A for air­men. Then she cheers on the Thun­der­birds. Then she cel­e­brates fight­er pilots on social media. And sud­den­ly the whole thing starts to taste a lit­tle sour.

In 2019, should we real­ly be get­ting behind a hero borne of one of the world’s most preda­to­ry armed forces? Do we real­ly want our block­busters to be cre­at­ed hand-in-hand with a branch of gov­ern­ment whose mis­deeds are frankly too com­plex and myr­i­ad to get into here? Do we real­ly want fight­er jets at Hol­ly­wood premieres?

It all comes back to The Avengers and that one line, spo­ken by Tony Stark to Steve Rogers, which draws a red line between the mil­i­tary and the mighty: ​“We are not soldiers.”