The female hero is evolving rapidly, or maybe she just can’t be pigeonholed anymore. Whatever the case, it took long enough. Action movies with female leads, especially in the superhero subgenre, have certainly been few and far between compared with the slew of male-fronted films. Despite that, movies like Kill Bill, Foxy Brown, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider paved the way for major female-fronted action franchises to take over the box office in the last decade, including The Hunger Games, Divergent, Star Wars, and, of course, Wonder Woman.
This weekend Marvel finally debuted its first solo female superhero movie, Captain Marvel—and with that came countless comparisons to DC’s Wonder Woman. But other than their genre and box office successes, the films—and their heroes—are nothing alike. In fact, as far as heroes go, Captain Marvel is the first of her kind.
Their differences are most notable in, where else, their superpowers. Wonder Woman’s defining message is that there's strength in being feminine, and hers is tangible. We see it radiating off her glowing skin. We see the way her strapless breastplate and short skirt accentuate her curves and muscles. She’s an Amazon, a towering marvel of a woman. Wonder Woman's calling card is that she's unlike any male hero. She was literally created in the 1940s to be the antithesis of a male hero, an answer to masculinity—something that was not only revolutionary in its era but controversial.
Captain Marvel, as we’ve come to know her in the MCU, is not that. To start, her backstory is more modern: The character in her current iteration was created by Kelly Sue DeConnick in 2012. Carol Danvers is an Earth-born fighter pilot in the U.S. military. She’s one of us, she’s achievable. She shares our stories, our struggles in the real world. She's bogged down by the chains of patriarchy, forced to find her own internal feminine strength to get back up each time she’s knocked down. She’s tomboyish—her off-duty wardrobe consists of Nine Inch Nails T-shirts, leather jackets, flannels, and baseball caps—and unlike Wonder Woman, her super-suit neither hugs her hips nor exposes her skin. But it’s not traditionally masculine, either. In some ways, Captain Marvel eludes gender, from her function-first suit to her nearly gender-neutral character development.
Both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are monumental characters, and their differences are what make each of them so special and lovable. But while feminine power exudes from Wonder Woman in every action scene, her idyllic form dancing through war-torn fields and obliterating men, Captain Marvel’s is in the subtext. Take the famed No Man’s Land scene in Wonder Woman; Diana stands out in lurid color against a sea of gray male soldiers, towering over them, her long locks twirling with her sword. Captain Marvel’s strength is in her story rather than the visual aids. There's a subtle nod to girl power in a fight scene set to No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl.” In another scene, a montage of misogynists tell Carol she’s too emotional to be a pilot, not strong enough to be an athlete. We watch a pilot prod, “It’s called a cockpit for a reason.”
The most feminine part of Captain Marvel is her ability to overcome in the face of misogyny. It’s endurance—a feminine strength that may not be inherent but is certainly learned, or forced upon women in the real world. I love this about Captain Marvel, along with her inability to be pinned as any type of female hero that came before her. Because while Wonder Woman is powerfully female, many action franchises’ leading women are almost conventionally male. Rey in The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens is reminiscent of the golden boys of saviors past, a Harry Potter reboot. Ellen Ripley of Alien also contains conventionally masculine power, a morally sound badass with brawny muscles.
However these heroes find their power, it’s important to see women in all kinds of roles. It's truly outstanding to see these female heroes morph over the last few years: The point is there is no blueprint for a female hero. She can be as feminine as Wonder Woman or Lara Croft, as traditionally male as Ripley. Or she can fall somewhere else on the spectrum, like Captain Marvel, Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, and the women of Annihilation.
As for Captain Marvel, her power comes from her persistence. It’s no wonder so many women see themselves in her.
