Captain Marvel's Best Needle Drop Almost Didn't Make It Into The Movie
Marvel's Cinematic Universe rarely makes a period piece, but when it does, it goes all out. One of the best examples might be "Captain Marvel," the MCU's first film starring a female superhero. It serves as the origin story for Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), and it just so happens to take place in 1995. That means that, when amnesiac Carol — or "Vers," as she's called by the Kree Starforce — returns to Earth after years on the planet Hala, her first stop is a Blockbuster. She doesn't stop by so much as she crash lands through the roof, but still: the metaphor is a pretty tangible one.
"Captain Marvel" is chock full of such allusions to the '90s. Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck sprinkled them throughout the film in ways big and small, from landlines and dial-up to a handful of perfectly placed needle drops. Carol's journey is bolstered by the sounds of R.E.M. and TLC's greatest hits — but the film's greatest pull might be "Just A Girl," which kicks in just as Carol discovers her true inner power and faces off against Starforce.
There's probably no song more fitting for the occasion as No Doubt's mid-'90s feminist anthem, but it became a love-it-or-hate-it choice among audiences as a result. Some felt it was the perfect choice; others found it too on the nose. Even Boden admitted it was "the most obvious choice," to the point where she and Fleck resisted putting it in the movie at all.
'We just gotta go for it'
Boden and Fleck have been delightfully candid about their process in the "Captain Marvel" director's commentary, especially where the "Just a Girl" needle drop was concerned. "We'd gone through so many different songs that we experimented with for this sequence," Fleck said of Carol's showdown with villain Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and her ex-teammates. He and Boden cycled through every relevant era, "going back to the '60s, '70s, '80s." Given that "Captain Marvel" is set in the '90s, however, they kept coming back to "Just a Girl."
"We thought, 'Hey, we'd been avoiding this song,'" Fleck continued.
"Not because we don't love it," Boden added. "We think it's an amazing song ... It's like we kind of circled around it many times and then finally arrived at it, and we're like, 'You know what? This is just ... We just gotta go for it.'"
"It's an anthem," said Fleck. "I mean, it's so thematically relevant and maybe that's partly why we were avoiding it for so long. But it's an anthem, and then when we finally put it in there, screened it for ourselves and an audience, it just ... sang."
Just a girl ... with superhuman strength
It turns out that "Just a Girl" had the perfect kind of vibe that the scene in question needed. "In this sequence, we really get to play around and have fun," Boden told Inverse. "[Carol is] fighting her old friends and her own teammates. She doesn't want to murder any of them; she is so powerful and she's able to kind of discover her powers for the first time with this song playing in the background. It provided this really nice balance of playfulness."
The playfulness of the tune really does seem to inform Carol's newfound swagger. As she trades quips with her old squad and tests the limits of her strength, it all feels effortless and fun; it's a fitting parallel to her first sparring match with Yon-Rogg towards the beginning of the film. Where Carol was once struggling to hold back her emotions, she's now learned to embrace them — and she's all the stronger for it. Paired with Stefani's sardonic lyrics, this scene feels like a tactile summary of the feminist message in "Captain Marvel."
"She is one of the most powerful characters we've ever seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe," Boden continued, "and yet at the core of this character there is her humanity, her messiness, her grit, her flaws." Those are the things that actually give Carol her power, according to the director. She may be just a girl to some, but they'll underestimate her at their peril.