By K. Tran
Some beings are born as heroes. Some beings work to become a hero. And some beings are given a path to become a hero. Carol Danvers, the woman to become the hero known as Captain Marvel, encompasses all of these features in becoming a hero. In the movie, we see glimpses of Danvers’s childhood. It reveals that she has a thrill of an adventure with all things athletic and backbreaking but mainly we see her passion in high motion vehicles like race cars and eventually a fighter plane. The most significant thing is the fact that during all of her trials and struggles from her early childhood to young adulthood, we see her stand back up when she falls. When she trips during baseball or when she wrecks her race car or when she falls off a rope from military training, we see that she is not intimidated to fail. Reselience is an essential feauture in heroes because it shows that you are unstopppable even when you are put down by your enemies, which projects a characters strength and adaptability.
The significant symbolism in Danvers’s transition from driving race cars as a child to flying an army fighter jet as a young adult to operating a rocketship now, and finally to self-flight through her powers illustrates how she is becoming stronger and inspirational over time because not everyone can accomplish what she can do. However, the fact that she is able to do it will show others that they can try to achieve their own goals as well. This transition also shows how dedicated she is when she puts in the effort to improve herself. As her deceiving mentor always says, “Bring the best out of yourself. Control your emotions.” And clearly we see she is able to do this throughout the arc of her life.
The scene where Captain Marvel is confronted with the fact that Dr. Lawson is a rogue Kree, who is trying to put an end to the galactic war by having the Skull refugees escape the galaxy with the lightyears engine, is a call to Captain Marvel’s inner goodness. When the secret engine crashed landed near a lake and Dr. Lawson was murdered, Danvers had the option to leave, but instead “sacrificed” her own life by shooting the engine, blowing it up. This is how Danvers gets her powers, but she loses her memory of who she was and becomes a weapon for the Kree.
However, she never loses sight of herself when she learns the truth of what the Kree did to the Skull’s people. Her humanity brought out the best version of herself to prevent the Kree from continuing to slaughter the innocent. She pushed through her pains to save the refugees from execution, and she corrected her wrongs by helping the refugees she saved to find a new home. All of these events in putting herself out to danger first before anyone else displays her selfless character to help others regardless of whether or not she knows them–or if they were her former enemies. This also shows that she is not mindless obeying orders; she has a moral conscious to tell from what is right or wrong.
These traits–resilience, self-sacrifice, compassion, self-independence, moral–are all that Danvers has. This is what makes her the hero that she is. Save us in endgame Captain Marvel.
